Top 10 bee-related stories from 2021
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Top 10 Bee-Related Stories from 2021
It never ceases to amaze me how much bee-related news there is over the course of a year. Pulling together as much of it as I can into the Bee Report for you to read every week is really a pleasure and a joy. But there are always some stories that stand out because of their importance, impact, beauty or wow factor (or some mix of all of those things). So here I present to you the Bee Report’s Top 10 bee-related stories of 2021; stories that I think you absolutely should know about from this past year. Read them again or for the first time. And thank you for being such great fans of the Bee Report!
1. How an ethanol plant is dangerously polluting a U.S. village – with insecticides
(The Guardian) For the residents of Mead, Nebraska, the first sign of something amiss was the stench, the smell of something rotting. People reported eye and throat irritation and nosebleeds. Then colonies of bees started dying, birds and butterflies appeared disoriented and pet dogs grew ill, staggering about with dilated pupils.
2. Insecticides can reduce bee fertility, causing lasting harm across generations
(National Geographic) New research shows that one of the most widely used agricultural chemicals, a neonic called imidacloprid, does not just harm blue orchard bees immediately, but has negative effects that can be seen across generations. As described in the study, descendants of wild-caught bees exposed to small amounts of imidacloprid as larvae – from tainted pollen and nectar given to them by their mothers – produced 20% fewer offspring than blue orchard bees not exposed to the insecticide. Some of the bees were exposed more than once throughout life, and each exposure additionally reduced their fertility. “The effects are additive – you can’t just take one exposure at face value.”
3. Honey bees are accumulating airborne microplastics on their bodies
(National Geographic) As honey bees make their way through the world, they are ideally suited to pick up bits and pieces of it along the way. Bees are covered with hairs that have evolved to hold tiny particles that the bee collects intentionally or simply encounters in its daily travels. These hairs become electrostatically charged in flight, which helps attract the particles. Pollen is the most obvious substance that gets caught up in these hairs, but so do plant debris, wax, and even bits of other bees. Now, another material has been added to that list: plastics.
4. The race to save Bell Bowl Prairie
(WTTW) Conservationists are in a race against the clock to save a five-acre patch of rare Illinois prairie, known as Bell Bowl Prairie, from being bulldozed as part of a 280-acre expansion of the Chicago Rockford International Airport’s cargo operation. On Aug. 8, 2021, the rusty patched bumble bee was seen at Bell Bowl. The Illinois Department of Natural Resources recommended “any work related to construction that disturbs the ground or may remove flowering plants be done between Nov. 1 and April 1 to prevent impacts to foraging (rusty patched) bees”. Environmentalists have until Nov. 1 to convince either the airport’s board of commissioners or Illinois elected officials to tweak the site plan for the cargo facility in order to spare the prairie, which has gone undeveloped for thousands of years.
Bell Bowl Prairie reprieve, Rockford Airport temporarily pauses construction
(WTTW) In a dramatic 11th-hour development, an agreement has been reached to temporarily halt construction activity that would destroy the 8,000-year-old Bell Bowl Prairie remnant, located on Rockford Airport property and targeted for demolition as part of a $50 million expansion of the airfield’s cargo operations. The Natural Land Institute, long-time stewards of Bell Bowl, announced that a deal had been reached through U.S. District Court with the Greater Rockford Airport Authority, its board of commissioners and executive director Michael Dunn. Conservationists are cautiously pleased with the short-term victory but said the fight to save Bell Bowl is far from over, pointing to the airport’s press release, which states: “We anticipate the resumption of the project in the spring of 2022.” The rusty patched bumble bee was observed in Bell Bowl Prairie this past summer.
5. Using commercial bumble bees as pollinators is putting wild bees at risk
(Civil Eats) In January, a coalition of scientists from various academic and conservation organizations sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture asking the agency to take action on an unexpected threat to local ecosystems: bumble bees. The authors urged the agency’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to start tracking movement of commercial bees throughout the United States. Doing so is critically important, they wrote, because commercial bumble bees have been implicated in spreading pathogens to a variety of wild bee populations and driving the decline of several native bumble bee species, as well as threatening the pollination networks that keep us fed. “As diseases have been shown to move . . . between bumble bees and honey bees . . . the potential for bumble bees to serve as disease vectors threatens a wide array of pollinating insects,” the letter concludes. “Agriculture that relies on pollination is at risk throughout North America because of unregulated trade and movement of bees.”
6. When bees get a taste for dead things: Meat-eating ‘vulture bees’ sport acidic guts
(Phys.org, University of California - Riverside) Typically, bees don’t eat meat. However, a species of stingless bee in the tropics has evolved the ability to do so, presumably due to intense competition for nectar. Given their radical change in food choice, a team of UCR scientists wondered whether the vulture bees’ gut bacteria differed from those of a typical vegetarian bee. They differed quite dramatically, according to a study the team published recently.
7. Bees fall from the sky when the lights go out
(Twitter, Hamish Symington @HamishSymington) “Here’s another video of bees falling out of the sky when the lights go out. I’m surprised it’s an on/off choice for them – no graceful trying to glide to land or anything like that, they literally just stop flying and plummet. Surely that’s more dangerous than keeping flying?”
8. Pollinators could win when the infrastructure bill passes
(Civil Eats) The infrastructure bill authorizes the U.S. Department of Transportation to make $2 million in total grants available each year over the next five years for states and other eligible entities to “carry out activities that benefit pollinators” along the roads and highways they oversee. This would include planting native flowers, adopting pollinator-friendly land management practices, and removing non-native vegetation.
9. ‘Mad-looking’ installation suits pollinators’ tastes
(The Guardian) The plant-based piece in the U.K. used an algorithm to make a design irresistible to bees, butterflies, moths and wasps. “It means that I’ve ended up with this mad-looking design. There are strange juxtapositions of shapes and patterns and colours that no gardener would think of planting. It is designed to be of greatest benefit to pollinators, suiting their tastes rather than ours.”
10. My garden of a thousand bees
(PBS) Taking refuge from the coronavirus pandemic, wildlife filmmaker Martin Dohrn set out to record all the bees he could find in his tiny urban garden in Bristol, England, filming them with one-of-a-kind lenses he forged on his kitchen table. Filming more than 60 species of bees, from Britain’s largest bumble bees to scissor bees, which are the size of a mosquito, Dohrn observes how differences in behavior set different species apart from each other. Eventually, he gets so close to the bees, he can identify individuals just by looking at them. This episode of Nature premiered on Wednesday, Oct. 20.
Conservation
Solar parks could be used to boost bumble bee numbers, study suggests
(The Guardian) If solar park owners were encouraged to use the land to sow wildflowers alongside the solar panels, they could become valuable habitats for pollinators, research from Lancaster University has found. Managing them in this way would boost bumble bee numbers beyond the borders of the parks, to about 1km (0.6 miles) away, benefiting farmers who rely on bees to pollinate their crops. One simulation run by the study group found four times as many bees in a solar park managed as a wildflower meadow than in one based on turf grass.
Why giant hornets rub their abdomens on bee hives before attack
(Entomology Today) New research examines glands on the underside of Vespa soror wasps and the chemical signals they emit, which appear linked to behavior in which the wasps rub their bodies against honey bee hives to recruit nest mates for a group attack.
The monarch is falling victim to a real-life butterfly effect
(Vox) Scientists originally suspected the cause of declining monarch populations overwintering in Mexico was illegal logging in local forests. But as they later discovered, the decline has a lot more to do with what’s happening thousands of miles away in the U.S. Over the last few decades, industrial farms have decimated grasslands rich in milkweed, the only plants that monarch caterpillars can eat. Less food in the U.S. means fewer butterflies thousands of miles away in Mexico.
Tropical forests grow back quickly on abandoned land, study finds
(Yale Environment 360) In recent decades, cattle grazing has accounted for around two-thirds of deforestation in Brazil, with ranchers clearing forest to create pastures. Halting climate change demands not only stopping deforestation, but reversing it, for instance, by turning pastures back into woodlands. A new study of secondary forests in Central and South America and West Africa offers some hope, finding that forests are able to regrow quickly on abandoned lands.
Economics
What killed millions of honey bees at this Everett farm?
(Everett Herald) Mounds of black-and-yellow stripes littered the ground last summer at Getchell Ranch, a small organic farm on Ebey Island, along the Snohomish River in Washington state. All those legs and wings and mandibles and stingers, usually buzzing with activity, lay motionless. State investigators and entomologists suspect pesticides that can be bought over the counter were the cause of death. Likely, they surmised, the bees foraged nectar and pollen from flowering plants ladened with the toxic chemicals, or drank from a contaminated water source. But they couldn’t figure out where the pesticides came from.
Policy/Law
EPA sued over failure to close pesticide-coated seed loophole
(Common Dreams, Center for Food Safety) Center for Food Safety and Pesticide Action Network of North America sued the Environmental Protection Agency over the agency’s failure to regulate pesticide-coated seeds, harming bees and other pollinators. These crop seeds are coated with systemic insecticides known as neonicotinoids, the most widely used insecticides, and have devastating environmental effects. CFS filed a rulemaking petition back in 2017 that would close the loophole, but EPA has still never addressed it.
Science
Airborne DNA used to detect insect species in breakthrough for ecologists
(The Guardian) Insect DNA has been gathered from the air and for the first time used to detect 85 insect species, according to scientists from Lund University in Sweden. Bees, moths, flies, beetles, wasps and ants have been identified in a study which raises hopes that airborne environmental DNA could become a useful tool in monitoring insect abundance and declines in biodiversity. The results have yet to be peer-reviewed.
Using citizen-science data to investigate unseasonal flowering in Joshua trees
(ScienceDaily, Florida Museum of Natural History) In November 2019, visitors to Joshua Tree National Park in California encountered a strange sight. Joshua trees and closely related Mojave yuccas, which normally remain reproductively dormant until late spring, were in full bloom at the tail end of autumn. Joshua trees rely on a single species of nocturnal moth to pollinate their flowers, and the survival of each species is almost entirely dependent on moths and flowers being active at the same time. In a new study, researchers used citizen-science data to determine the cause of the anomalous bloom and predict when similar events might occur.
Breaking barriers in entomology: The Better Common Names Project
(American Entomologist) ESA’s Better Common Names Project is an effort to identify and change common names of insects and related arthropods that are offensive, derogatory, exclusionary, and/or dehumanizing. One of the end goals is to make entomology and sectors of the public that interact with entomology more inclusive, respectful, and effective.
Society/Culture
Entering the sacred realm of the bees with honey bee therapy
(Los Angles Times) Marvin Jordana laid a hand on the beehive in his Eagle Rock backyard and said a silent prayer. After a few moments, he spoke: “I ask for their permission to enter the hive, because this is their body. With so much respect and humility, I ask them.” Four people dressed in full bee suits, closed-toed shoes and thick rubber gloves looked on reverentially, ignoring the dozens of bees buzzing lazily around their heads. So begins the journey into the sacred realm of the bees, a two-hour workshop led by Jordana. He calls the session “Honey Bee Therapy” because everyone enters a trance-like state, transfixed by the beauty of something they once feared.
‘I could be a bee in a hive’: the real-life Beekeeper of Aleppo on life in Yorkshire
(The Guardian) In 2013, Syrian beekeeper Ryad Alsous drank his last cup of mint tea on the balcony of his flat in Damascus. His block had been bombed twice, and explosions in the eastern part of the city were happening daily. He was about to leave the city where he had spent his whole life and move to Britain. A few years after arriving in the U.K. with his wife and five children, Alsous set up the Buzz Project, a charity that helps refugees take up beekeeping. The Buzz Project is a biodiversity initiative, Alsous says. His aim is to help people like him, who have been exiled from their country, to feel at home in an unfamiliar land. “It is through [understanding] biodiversity that we can make that connection between humans and bees, between humans and their environment, to make successful people.”
One More Thing…
National Geographic’s favorite science photos of 2021…
