BEES, the wild kind as well as their domesticated cousins are an integral part of food production. As much as they antagonise us, we desperately need to protect them. We need to think twice before we squash them one by one or smoke out entire hives in our backyards.
January and February have been jam packed with grand scale celebrations. Thank goodness it’s March; we are exhausted. It’s time for some dolce far niente (pleasant idleness), as the Italians call it.
Our mini paper umbrella-clad drinks are glistening gently in the last rays of sunshine by the pool, the children are giggling at a safe distance chasing each other barefoot on the lawn and we let ourselves be lulled into leisurely small talk in the company of good friends. Life is slowing down, life is good.
Bzzz, bzzzz! We get yanked out of our late afternoon reverie, we swat at the airborne intruder like ninjas in an ambush, we order the youngsters off the treacherous green, conversations end abruptly, relaxing times are over instantly.
The enemy is tiny, it is the danger signalling black and yellow striped kind, it zeroes in on our sweet refreshments like a drone. It perfidiously lands on a flower, which may, at any moment, be stepped on by an unaware little foot.
A shoe will do, a shirt, a towel or a poisonous spray. We hunt the bug, we squash the bug, we will defend our family, we will prevail.
Or so we think. But think again!
If the buzzing trespasser that so unbecomingly ruined our well-deserved rest happened to be of the genus Hylaeus, we might as well have shot an elephant or clubbed to death a baby seal. Because the pollinator more commonly known as the bumblebee, the gooey mess sticking to the sole of the shoe we so skillfully used as a weapon, has recently been labelled an endangered species.
The wild bee, as well as the farmed variety known as the honeybee, are among the most prolific pollinators on the planet. Their work is vital in the maintenance of flowering plants, crops, and our entire ecosystem. In fact, about a third of the food we eat depends on bee pollination one way or another. The United Nations has recently estimated insect pollination worldwide to have a value of about US$150 billion(RM588 billion). Industrialised and technologically advanced farming could never catch up with the pollinating effort of bumblebees.
Quite the opposite of technology-supported farming is happening in China these days. Maybe the most dramatic example can be found in the pear orchards of the Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, where wild bees have been largely eradicated by excessive use of pesticides and the fast disappearance of natural habitat.
Farmers are forced to pollinate their trees by hand, wearing pots of pollen around their necks and painting every flower individually with a large feathery brush. What might yield some results for this high-value crop is a totally futile exercise on a worldwide scale.
If these wild, buzzing insects were to become extinct, a considerable amount of our worldwide food supply would vanish within a few years. Without bees, an impressive amount of bird species would also go extinct, within even fewer years, due to lack of food.
With indiscriminate use of pesticides and genetically modified crops, with uncontrolled smoking out of wild beehives, global warming as well as the destruction of habitat such as flowering meadows and rainforest, the bees will disappear soon.
And when the bees go, so do we.
Fanny Bucheli-Rotter is a long-term expatriate, a restless traveller, an observer of the human condition, and unapologetically insubordinate. She can be reached via fannybucheli.rotter@gmail.com