To bee or not to be

The world is going to end in 2012, apparently — hopefully just before the start of the Olympic Games. Armageddon may come about as a consequence of those monkeys firing up the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where they have Al Qaeda operatives attempting to create black holes which will swallow the earth whole, or reduce it to the size of an extremely dense tennis ball.
Imagine seven billion of us trying to stand on a tennis ball. You just hope personal hygiene standards won’t be sacrificed. Or perhaps it will be giant solar flares frazzling the earth, or a sudden reversal of the earth’s magnetic field which will see us cooked like cheap burgers in a microwave oven. How do we know this? Apparently the Mayans predicted it. They’ll look pretty stupid if they were wrong, the Mayans. Nostradamus predicted it too and so, of course, did the Bible.
My mother-in-law is a born-again Christian who belongs to an obscure sect which believes the world will end in October 2017 (meaning we have to endure two more Olympic Games, plus the accompanying paralympics). On that date she and a few other people are going to be taken up to heaven for a bloody good party — slap-up meal, dance band, personal address by Christ, goody bag — while the rest of us are consumed by fire. One way or another we are destined to perish very soon. There’s a film out soon called 2012 which will explain it all, if you’re interested.
I wonder where this yearning for catastrophe comes from? It seems to exist inside most of us; perhaps it is a Darwinian trait, a by-product of self-consciousness. Obviously, only people with lime jelly for a brain, or those who have become the captives of some psychotic cult, seriously believe the stuff about 2012 (or 2017). But normal, apparently sane people seem to wish for catastrophe too: they are determined that calamity will befall us all, and are furious when they are gainsaid. In a very minor way we saw this recently with the British National Party’s (BNP) appearance on Question Time, when perfectly sensible people feared that as soon as the public cast eyes upon the political colossus that is Nick Griffin, the BNP would sweep all before it, a kristallnacht in Knightsbridge every night of the week and the imposition of a 1,000-year reich.
More to the point, though, you hear it every time a “climate-change” evangelist opens his or her mouth — and I wonder if ecological disaster is an upmarket version of the 2012 scenario, a catastrophe the chattering class of every Western country have eagerly bought into, a politically-correct Armageddon which requires us to be endlessly self-flagellating. My own view of climate change — or global warming as it used to be called, before the evangelists changed tack when they realised everything wasn’t getting warmer — is absolutely open. I am a little sceptical of man-made climate change because, for me, the raw statistics do not quite add up, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. And I also reckon that most of the stuff urged upon us in order to address climate change makes sense for other environmental reasons anyway. But this is not good enough; this makes me a climate-change denier and that’s not on.
Because one is no longer allowed even to question climate change: it is a fact, and there’s an end to it. This seems to me a little unscientific and reminds me of my mother-in-law insisting that the world is going to end and that this is an unquestionable fact. She is possessed of a knowledge which is denied to the rest of us, just as the “fact” of climate change is a “fact” to be held sacred and never to be challenged. And all the while you feel that these people actually want the earth to be heating up, the polar bears to die and the floods to engulf so that we will all burn, starve or drown. If somehow it could be proved tomorrow that climate change was a huge con, these people wouldn’t be relieved — they’d feel robbed of something intrinsic to themselves.
So what about bees? You will undoubtedly have read many articles over the last year or so telling you that the bees are dying out and that, as a consequence of this, we will die out too. Bees, we are told, are crucial to the pollination of the world’s foodstuffs, so if they die there will be no more food. And they are dying. Is this true? Let’s look at the bee holocaust myth first. There is, we are told, a global pollination crisis caused by a dramatic reduction in the number of bees. We are further told that bees are “largely” responsible for the pollination of world food crops — “largely” is usually between 70 and 80 per cent.
There is a film out at the moment called The Vanishing of the Bees — like the stuff done by Al Gore about climate change. There’s a non-fiction book called A World Without Bees by Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum and one of our most notable novelists, the Canadian, Douglas Coupland, has written a dystopian fantasy about a beeless world.
The European Union has demanded urgent bee action and Britain’s own MPs have not been lax, either. One MP has on his website the famous quote from Einstein: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left”. And here’s the spooky thing: the bees started disappearing last year — four years, then, takes you up to... aaaagggh! We’re going to die! Here’s another spooky thing — in fact we could call it “spooky action from a distance”. Einstein never said that stuff about bees; somebody else made it up and it has somehow got itself attributed to him over the years. This is a lesson; it is how Armageddon works, through Chinese whispers and pseudo-science. And everyone is taken in, not least the politicians.
There was an article in the academic imprint Current Biology a couple of weeks ago, summarised and made intelligible for the lay reader in New Scientist last week. It’s by two pollination experts, Lawrence D. Harder from the department of biology at the University of Calgary and Marcelo Aizen from Buenos Aires. They set about pinning down a couple of myths. First, it is not true that there has been a mysterious worldwide collapse in honey bee populations. In fact managed hives (which contain the bees which do the vast majority of our pollinating) have increased by a remarkable 45 per cent over the last five years. This is largely down to more managed hives in South America, Africa and Asia — it is perfectly true that there has been a reduction in the US and western Europe, but these are merely short-term blips. The bee disaster scenario is dependent upon data which is far too regional to take seriously and “not representative of global trends”. The truth is that there are more bees in the world than ever.
Second, as Harder and Aizen put it: “It is a myth that humanity would starve without bees”. While some 70 per cent of our most productive crops are animal-pollinated (by bees, hoverflies and the like), very few indeed rely on animal pollination completely. Furthermore, most staple foods — wheat, rice and corn — do not depend on animal pollination at all. They are wind-pollinated, or self-pollinating. If all the bees in the world dropped dead tomorrow afternoon, it would reduce our food production by only between four and six per cent.
Their paper does not yet seem to have been picked up by the mainstream press, still less the campaigners, the politicians or the distributors of the film The Vanishing of the Bees.
Nobody likes an Armageddon whipped from beneath their feet like that. You hold onto it, tight, and hope that it’s true.