In terms of agricultural sales the humble honey bee and the honey they produce are not a major contributor.
But the honey bee is gaining lots of attention these days because they are facing issues in terms of survival.
Since the late 1990s, beekeepers around the world have observed the mysterious and sudden disappearance of bees, and report unusually high rates of decline in honeybee colonies.
The issues facing bees appear multi-faceted.
To begin with there is colony collapse disorder (CCD) which is a phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear and leave behind a queen, plenty of food and a few nurse bees to care for the remaining immature bees and the queen.
“While such disappearances have occurred throughout the history of apiculture, and were known by various names (disappearing disease, spring dwindle, May disease, autumn collapse, and fall dwindle disease), the syndrome was renamed colony collapse disorder in late 2006 in conjunction with a drastic rise in the number of disappearances of western honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies in North America,” details Wikipedia. “European beekeepers observed similar phenomena in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, Switzerland and Germany, albeit to a lesser degree, and the Northern Ireland Assembly received reports of a decline greater than 50 per cent.”
Neonicotinoid pesticides have been suggested by a number of sources as contributing to CCD, and as the most widely used class of insecticides in the world, have faced increasing restrictions because of the risk they pose to bees.
The concern regarding the loss of bees is pretty straight forward, they are a key pollinator.
“Bees make more than honey – they are key to food production because they pollinate crops. Bumblebees, other wild bees, and insects like butterflies, wasps, and flies all provide valuable pollination services. A third of the food that we eat depends on pollinating insects: vegetables like zucchini, fruits like apricot, nuts like almonds, spices like coriander, edible oils like canola, and many more,” notes www.sos-bees.org
But there is also the production of honey, a food seen as being about as pure and natural as you can get.
Or, is it?
That is suddenly a question that is being asked.
Last fall, the U.S. Organic Consumers Association and Beyond Pesticides filed a lawsuit against Sue Bee Honey of Sioux City, Iowa, because its honey tested positive for traces of glyphosate.
It is unlikely the test results are isolated ones, and that certainly raises some questions regarding chemical residues and just where they may turn up.
Consumers are already on alert since March of 2015, when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a division of the World Health Organization, said glyphosate is probably carcinogenic to humans, although sunlight falls into the same category.
It is however, just one more question the farm sector needs to work on answering in regards to the crucial honey bee and consumer perceptions regarding food safety.
