Discussion Post 2

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Hive Talkin’: The Buzz around Town about Bees Teresa Scollon For years, scientists and journalists have been calling on the public to acknowledge the crisis of declining bee populations. The issue has been described and argued about in many books, television programs, and articles. In this essay, Teresa Scollon makes an important move: She localizes the issue and argues about the response from her hometown. Scollon is the author of To Embroider the Ground with Prayer, a poetry collection focusing on rural life in Michigan.

Consider the honeybee: Apis mellifera. Shipped from Europe to Jamestown in 1622, it spread and thrived and multiplied, often in feral colonies. It is as familiar to us as Pooh Bear, another import, who loved his honey, too. The honeybee is sometimes the symbol of the stinging insects we fear, lumped together with all the bugs that sport similar stripes. Or it appears as the whole- some symbol of nature, winged and cute, hovering on the labels of sweet drinks and waxy balms.

Its intricate social arrangements fascinate us. As Thomas Seeley writes in Honeybee Democ- racy, “It is a bee that is beautifully social. We can see this beauty in their nests of golden combs, those exquisite arrays of hexagonal cells sculpted of thinnest beeswax. We can see it further in their harmonious societies, wherein tens of thousands of worker bees, through enlightened self-interest, cooperate to serve a colony’s common good.”

In 1944, Karl von Frisch at the University of Munich discovered that honeybees com- municate directions to food sources by dancing, specifically in a move called the “waggle.” He won the Nobel Prize. Thomas Seeley, quoted above, spent decades studying the honey- bees’ collective decision-making processes, and goes so far as to wistfully surmise that if only humans would take a few cues from bees, we might be better off.

The honeybee, of course, makes honey from the nectar and pollen it collects from flow- ers. And by virtue of its appetites and its fuzz, the bee, like other pollinators, is the necessary accomplice to the reproductive lives of plants.

In other words, the bee completes the circuit, jumps the gap, closes the loop that figures importantly into the food chain. Without bees and other pollinators, one-third of the foods we eat would no longer be available to us. An unknown quantity of food necessary to other forms of life would no longer be available. We’d be in big trouble.

But wait—we are in big trouble. Because the bees are.

North America is home to some 4,000 species of native bees, 420 of them in Michigan, but we aren’t so good at tracking their number or even recognizing their presence, as most of them live as solitaries (bumblebees the social exception). Honeybees, whose pollination

“Hive Talkin’: The Buzz around Town about Bees,” by Teresa Scollon. Reprinted with permission of the author.

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241Teresa Scollon Hive Talkin’: The Buzz around Town about Bees

services have become much more economically significant than their honey products, are animals we raise, rent out and keep track of. We can say for sure that honeybee colonies have drastically declined, and because native bees are subject to the same perils, we deduce that native bees are likely suffering as well.

WHAT’S GOING ON? While bees have always been vulnerable to long winters, disease, pests, drought and storms, they’ve been able to bounce back. Normal annual loss of bee colonies ran at about 10 percent. But the winter/spring of 2006/2007 saw a dramatic change in the resilience of domestic bee populations. Bee colony losses in that year reached 30 percent, and have hovered around that figure ever since. Some beekeepers lost more than 80 percent in 2006. USDA statistics count wintertime die-offs, but now beekeepers were seeing die-offs all year round. The phrase “Colony Collapse Disorder” was coined in 2006 to describe a mysterious phenomenon in which adult bees simply and suddenly disappeared. Beekeepers would open a hive to find only the queen and brood (developing) bees.

A resulting period of intense research points to a complex set of pressures on both domes- tic and wild bees that includes “disease, a parasite known as the varroa mite, pesticides, extreme weather and poor nutrition tied to a loss of forage plants,” according to an article in the May 14 New York Times. USDA documents add “sublethal effects of pesticides,” gut microbes and lack of genetic variation to the list.

Harvard School of Public Health studies in 2012 and 2014 determined a link between post-winter colony collapse and the increased use of a family of systemic pesticides called neo- nicotinoids, or neonics for short. These chemicals are used as sprays for plants or marinades for seeds. The plants take the chemicals up into their vascular systems, and any creature that feeds on the leaves, pollen or nectar ingests the poison. While a neonic dose may not kill an individual bee, the aggregate effect on a hive can be deadly. The neonics impair the bees’ neu- rological functions, perhaps including the ability to navigate back to a hive.

Nutritional deficiencies are due to increasing conversion of bee-friendly fields to mono- cropping of soybeans or corn, which provide little bee sustenance. The hyper-manicuring of lawns in commercial developments and sprawling suburbs destroys wild habitat and forage. Gone are the strips of wildflowers and so-called “weeds” that supported native insects. Finally the drift and increasing use of herbicides kills off wild vegetation, starving bees and forcing them to feed on pesticide-treated crops.

DOWN-HOME RESPONSE Several concerned organizations, including Michigan State University, are collaborating in the Integrated Crop Pollination Project, trying to better understand the role of bees in cropping systems. Nikki Rothwell, PhD, coordinator of the Northwest Michigan Horticultural Research Center, notes that growers and beekeepers are working together with honeybee health in mind.

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Some municipalities have allowed urban beekeepers to set up shop, and several states have established grant and other supportive programs for beginning beekeepers. With more small backyard hives, says Rothwell, we are adding more bees to an area, which may contribute to increased genetic diversity of honeybees.

In December 2012, Traverse City joined in, amending zoning rules to allow beekeeping within certain constraints. The amendment was proposed and championed by a group of interested citizens, Slabtown resident Kima Kraimer chief among them. According to Kraimer, supporting the local cultivation of honeybees supports this area’s priorities and way of life.

For a region increasingly eating—and banking on—locally grown food, food products and the tourists they bring, a local supply of pollinators is crucial. The typical city lot has plenty of room for hives and bee-friendly plantings. And, says Kraimer, for a city and region so dependent on agriculture, it was simply incongruent to have an ordinance against bees. She felt it was important to get Traverse City up to speed with the rest of the world in regards to urban beekeeping.

The ordinance in question is Chapter 610: Animals. And while the description of prohib- ited animals that cause “annoyance or disturbance in a neighborhood, by making sounds com- mon to its species” might bring to mind a human neighbor or two, the ordinance’s intended focus is pesky bees, crowing roosters and the like. The original ban on bees and other livestock dates to 1966 in an effort to attract city tourists to the area and shed Traverse City’s self-image as a rural backwater. But as TC residents are discovering, there are some good things about rural backwaters, including better access to food production and healthy ecosystems. And now the pendulum is swinging back.

A 2009 amendment allows for keeping chickens, and the 2012 amendment allowing bees was written in a similar format, according to Missy Luick, planning and engineering assistant for the city. Compared to other municipalities, she says, the Traverse City ordinance is rela- tively simple but strict, allowing only two colonies per parcel. The amendment did not pass unanimously at either the planning or the commission level and discussion unearthed fears of litigation and bees on the move. The inclusion of city notification of a beekeeper’s neighbors appeared to pacify nervous commissioners.

By way of contrast, an Ypsilanti ordinance begins with language that acknowledges a larger purpose: “Whereas, honey bees are beneficial to mankind and to Michigan in particular … ” and quiets possible fears with “Whereas, gentle strains of honey bees can be maintained within populated areas in reasonable densities to fill an ecological niche … without causing a nui- sance if the honey bees are properly located, carefully managed and maintained.”

Whatever its language, with the Traverse City ordinance in place, six parties applied for the beekeeping permit in 2013, and four in 2014. Education about bees has picked up. Cherryland Garden Club and ISLAND offer workshops, and Oryana Natural Foods spent the month of June educating the public about bees and pollinators with information and novel displays. They pulled black cloth over produce that requires pollination to show that without bees and other friends, we simply wouldn’t have many of our favorite and most nutritious foods.

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243Teresa Scollon Hive Talkin’: The Buzz around Town about Bees

Says Sandi McArthur, Oryana’s education and outreach coordinator, “All these factors are coming down on this tiny bee, which is responsible for the amazing bounty that we enjoy every day. As humans we need to see the fragile relationships, the connections between our- selves and the natural world, so we can live more synchronistically and in balance. We need to look at what we are doing and change those practices that we know are harmful and support practices that are supportive of all life. We know what we need to do; now we just need to follow through and do it.”

That connection, ultimately, is not only a smart move, but a deeply fulfilling one, as Kraimer, who kept bees until their collapse this winter, attests. “Taking on beekeeping isn’t just a task or project,” she says. “It’s a deep, fulfilling connection to ecology. When you’re actually working with hives, that’s magic. You’re tapping into a deep, mysterious ecological process, and being reminded, as a human, of our role in that.”

Kraimer hopes that even residents who don’t keep bees will keep asking themselves about their role and responsibility relative to ecological systems. What we are doing in our own yards will have an impact, for better or worse, on the ecosystem. The more we are aware of that, the better we can redirect our impact to reduce pollution and the demise of species. “Bees are dying,” she says. “And thinking that we are somehow apart from that is not correct.” In fact, she says, most of us already have bees making honey in our yards—we just don’t know it’s happening.

If our yards are part of an ecosystem, the online boast of a Ticker respondent who keeps a “bug-free” yard just doesn’t make sense. Why have a yard at all? Why not sling up a hammock in a concrete box? And what does that guy/gal plan to eat for the rest of his/her over-scrubbed days? And what, exactly, should we do about our human propensities for alienation, hyper- vigilance, taking an impulse too far? The best strategy seems to lie in paying attention to con- nections and how human beings are part of a larger ecological system in which every creature, beautiful or not, plays a crucial part. Our crucial part is, at the very least, to pay attention and to change those activities and practices that we already know do harm.

Funny how talk of bees soon lights on traits we wish, perhaps, to cultivate in ourselves: harmony, cooperation, industry, beauty, service. And the perils bees face—the intersecting effects of chemicals, land use, climate change—are perils we face as well. Maybe we are getting the hang of investigating multi-faceted issues. Maybe the primal pull to see ourselves as part of something bigger will be irresistible and productive. Maybe bees, in one more service to humans, will teach us to step into our role of understanding and supporting the web of life.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke would agree. For him, the physical world was the entry into the invisible, or spiritual, world. “It is crucial,” he wrote in 1925, “not only that we not corrupt and degrade what constitutes the here and now, but … [that it] be comprehended by us in a most fervent understanding and transformed.

“Transformed? Yes, for our task is to imprint this provisional, perishable earth into our- selves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again ‘invisibly’ inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”

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WRITING STRATEGIES

1. What is the essay’s main claim (or thesis)?

2. How would you describe Scollon’s writer’s voice? Do you think her voice changes, even slightly, throughout the essay? Use particular passages to support your response.

3. What passages most clearly convey the public resonance of Scollon’s essay?

4. Where does the essay effectively use one of the following support strategies: example, allusion, personal testimony, scenario, statistic, authority, facts, appeal to logic, emotion, character, need or value?

5. While Scollon’s argument focuses on bees, it suggests something more. Explain what the essay suggests (or argues indirectly) about people. Identify key passages in Scollon’s essay to support your point.

EXPLORING IDEAS

1. What makes Scollon’s essay an argument and not just a report on bees?

2. What does Scollon mean by “there are some good things about rural backwaters”? How might Traverse City residents have changed their thinking about this?

3. In what way does Scollon think our human propensities can affect bees?

4. What are the reasons why bees could be struggling to survive?

IDEAS FOR WRITING

1. In what other way is your yard part of an ecosystem, and how is that important?

2. In what less obvious way are humans connected to some other wild animal?

If responding to one of these ideas, go to the Analysis section of this chapter to begin develop- ing ideas for your essay.

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