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No more pumpkins? A Halloween horror story
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In a complex, highly organized society where females have the responsibility of gathering food and tending the young, millions have gone missing. Droves of workers leave their homes in search of sustenance and, mysteriously, never return. With no food and no one to care for the infants, whole colonies disintegrate. What happened to these workers? Was foul play involved? Did they simply lose their way?
It sounds like the plot of the next M. Night Shyamalan film, but this mystery is far more frightening and very real. The food-gatherers in question are honeybees and mass declines in their populations could mean catastrophe for the American food supply.
About one third of the crops we eat—broccoli, apples, blueberries, carrots, almonds and, yes, pumpkins to name just a few—rely on bee pollination; that’s more than $15 billion of the American agricultural economy. And since 2006, bees have been vanishing at an unnerving rate. The phenomenon referred to as Colony Collapse Disorder continues to ravage bee populations throughout the south with little explanation; theories by leading etymologists have been posited, but a concrete cause has yet to be determined. The latest hypothesis is that use of certain pesticides, either directly or over time, may be a contributing factor to CCD.
As part of the ongoing effort to unravel the mystery, the Natural Resources Defense Council has filed a Freedom of Information Act suit against the Environmental Protection Agency for data on a potent insecticide commonly known as Gaucho. The EPA approved use of the chemical with the caveat that they would conduct an in-depth study on its effect on bees. Data from such a study has yet to be produced and, as more and more apiaries are ravaged, the NRDC decided to act. “Our suit is admittedly on an aggressive time scale, but this really is a crisis,” Josh Mogerman, spokesman for the NRDC told me over the phone. “Business as usual isn’t appropriate when we’re talking about the American food supply."
The stuff has already been banned in France and several related suits are underway in Germany. The NRDC suit requests correspondences between the EPA and regulators in Europe. This information has yet to surface.
This might be a highly effective pesticide that is very dangerous to bees and nothing more, or it might be that some of the fears around this pesticide are legitimate and need to be explored further,” Mogerman tells me.
At the moment, Illinois is unaffected by CCD, but massive drops in bee populations nationwide have everyone concerned; Mogerman recently spoke with a beekeeper downstate who lost over $12,000 in bees last year. Our state relies heavily on bee pollination for major cash crops, including pumpkins. A Halloween without jack-o-lanterns? Truly frightening.
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