(continued on page 12)

Some years ago, I began to wonder if the insects I en-counter in day-to-day life, and help by doing all I can to get them outside, are able to survive once they are freed. One time, I could not get a bee, stuck in the deepest angle of my windshield, to exit my car until I was miles from home and had stopped for gas. Cut off from its social circle and forag-ing grounds, was being out in nature good enough? I won-dered, and wrote a prose poem about it.

I have since found out, from watching the recently-re-leased U. S. version of the acclaimed documentary, Vanish-ing of the Bees, that the bee would not survive 24 hours away from her colony. As I hinted in the poem I wrote, an acci-dental trip in a car is a microcosmic metaphor for much, much bigger tragedies — tragedies that increase exponen-tially and globally as human innovations impact the animal kingdom. The alarming disappearance of honeybee colo-nies in the U.S. in the last three years, and worldwide for about a decade longer, is important feedback for very basic reasons—which is why the directors of Vanishing of the Bees, Maryam Henein and George Langworthy, subtitled their film: “A Documentary for Anyone Who Likes to Eat.”

The abrupt absence of honeybees from their hives was named Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), when U. S. sci-entists formed a task force to study the phenomenon in ear-ly 2007. Since a third of everything we eat requires insect pollination, staggering colony losses are generating under-standable fear about a world without fruits and vegetables: the rainbow of foods that is so essential in terms of health, variety and flavor. Imagine a diet without watermelon, broccoli, blueberries, cherries, onions, apples, and almonds. In the film, Dennis van Englesdorp, of Penn State’s Depart-ment of Entomology, explains that without the work done by honeybees, we would “be eating gruel, a diet of only wheat, oats, corn and rice.”

Honeybees are social bees that produce honey. They have been domesticated for millennia so their honey and wax could be gathered. Other types of bees can pollinate crops and orchards, as long as there is an adequate habitat for them to find food during the seasons when the crops are not in flower. This includes some native bees that do not live in colonies and do not produce honey. While honeybees have been transported to pollinate crops since ancient times — even the Egyptians took them on boats on the Nile — the trend toward enormous farms planted in only one crop (monocultures) has made honeybee transport and pollina-tion work into a necessary big business. Native pollinators have nowhere to forage when these huge farms are not in bloom, and so their populations have dwindled. Mean-while, there are numerous stressors on commercial beekeep-ers and commercial honeybees as they zig-zag across the continent from one pollination season to another.

The chemical and genetic modifications of plants and bees common in large-scale farming are proving, through CCD, to be innovations taken too far. Michael Pollan, au-thor of In Defense of Food: an Eater’s Manifesto, and The

Omnivore’s Dilemma, who makes several appearances in Vanishing of the Bees, defines unsustainable as: “Internal contradictions that will lead to breakdown.”

The two directors of Vanishing of the Bees began in dif-ferent professions that eventually intersected. Langworthy has been in the business for 20 years, directing documenta-ries and an environmental piece (as well as working in music with bands such as Devo and The White Stripes), while Maryam was previously a journalist. She explains, “I got into researching for documentaries. I produced a piece for Robert Greenwald and the Sierra Club related to the envi-ronment and the Exxon Valdez spill.” She also worked on films about the seedy side of Los Angeles. She wanted to do a film of timely importance and substance and Vanishing of the Bees is her way of giving back.

In an interview George explains. “A friend of mine told me about the bees. We found out very early on — April 2007. I was very drawn to the story and very troubled. Maryam interjects, “George likes mysteries. A symptom of CCD is that bees just abandon their hives. It didn’t make any sense, because they abandon the brood—which are their young—and the queen. We thought it was such an important story that we left our jobs. In 2008, we got a big grant. The film came out in the U.K. in October of 2009.” They go on to explain that while all this was happening, “the bees literally started appearing in our lives.”

The two have seamlessly integrated the visuals and the story line to convey a sense that human innovations can co-exist harmoniously with the natural world until they lose balance and become exploitative. Occasionally, the film’s images depict garish realities such as industrial underhand-edness and tampering with bee biology. For example, it shows the stacks of metal kegs of imported, diluted honey “blends” that routinely make it through customs and upset the pure honey market, as well as the artificial insemination of queen bees. And, though huge monoculture farms are shot gracefully, they also depict views of nature that are freakishly homogenous, and overextended to excess.

Bees have been important to human civilization since its dawn. And yet, they are dying, or more often, fleeing, as though they are disappearing off of the face of the earth. Like the bees that see the world through multifaceted eyes, the documentary takes viewers on a journey into many pos-sible causes of CCD. In this respectful look at the experi-ence of both large scale commercial beekeeping operations, and small scale holistic beekeeping practices, a narrowing down takes place until the seeming culprit is exposed. This method of constructing the film allows the other possible causes to be seen as accomplices that have led to the condi-tions that have turned large scale farming against the very bees it relies on. One example of the road that led to catas-trophe is making viewers aware that pesticides began as re- purposed agents designed for chemical warfare in Germany in World War I. Says Maryam: “I see the bees abandoning

The Silent Message of the Bees by Nancy Gross

““They are messengers.

They encourage us to come

together for the greater good.” ” —Maryam Henein

“The bee is more honored

than other animals, not because she labors, but

because she labors for others”

PHOTO CREDIT: Adam Makarenko, Courtesy Vanishing of the Bees Movie

—Saint John Chrysostom

THE WHOLE PERSON CALENDAR / SEPTEMBER 2010

nent, competition in the marketplace that allows for honey blends to be imported at ridiculously low prices and bought by large food companies—these all put commercial bee-keepers on a stressful path from flowering to infected flow-ering, and their bees even more so. If beekeepers could make a living selling their honey, they wouldn’t have to turn to migrant pollination as a way to survive. But the demand for honey is offset by what the beekeepers call “funny hon-ey,” which contains lactose or beet sugar or corn syrup, and the demand for migrant pollinators to work the monocul-ture farms is high. Big, monoculture farms cannot survive without migrant pollination because all the other flowers found in a typical landscape that would sustain the bees when the monoculture is not flowering are cut down and ploughed under to make the enormous farms possible.

David Hackenberg and David Mendes are commercial beekeepers the film acquaints us with as they try to under-stand what it means when a formerly healthy hive contains no bees, or only a queen and a handful of very young bees. They partake in the journey to learn about and advocate for a healthier situation for bees, beekeepers and buyers of food. The film is sympathetic to commercial beekeepers, if not to all of their practices. Some have enterprises going back five generations; others began their endeavors 45 to 20 years ago. The beekeepers’ livelihoods are threatened by CCD in ways that are as disorienting as what the bees are going through. These beekeepers and their bees are vital to food production as it now exists.

A more ideal sensibility about how to interact with the earth is displayed through the stories of holistic beekeepers, such as Günther Hauk, beekeeper with 16 hives, author of Toward Saving the Honeybee and creator of a honeybee sanc-tuary, and Simon Buxton, beekeeper with 3 hives and au-thor of The Shamanic Way of the Bee. They provide a long-term solution, if people will turn back to smaller farms and protection of native habitats. Simon says, “The privilege of being a beekeeper is not to generate as much honey as pos-sible. We keep bees so we can contribute to pollination…..The future of beekeeping is not in one person with 60,000

hives, rather it is 60,000 people with one hive.”A short-term solution to the crisis is for people to pro-

test the use of systemic pesticides until their use is discon-tinued. As we turn from a country that once had small to medium diverse farms, bordered by meadows and wood-lands containing native plants, to a country whose primary foods are grown in big monoculture farms where native plants have all been ploughed under; the bees travel great distances on semi trucks from one flowering fruit, nut, or vegetable “factory” to another. Beekeepers watch over the health of bees as they feed, produce honey, and zig zag across the nation, some more humanely attuned to these small striped “employees” than others, and some more like profit-driven mad scientists trying to turn nature to their advan-tage any way they can. A certain amount of loss of bees is the norm in commercial beekeeping. But Colony Collapse Disorder, in which up to 70,000 colonies have become empty boxes at one time, is likened by one beekeeper to “a bee holocaust.”

Claire Kremen, Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences Policy and Management at UC Berkeley was not involved in the making of Vanishing of the Bees, but The Whole Person Calendar contacted her to inquire about her related research. She explained, “I work on the contribution that native, not honey bees (i.e. the other 20,000 or so bee species on the planet) make to crop pollination, and how our farming practices are damaging this valuable resource. The native bees provide insurance against the risk of honey-

their hives as a direct parallel to us abandoning mother earth. Bees are a female society.”

She also sees the bees abandoning their hives as an in-dicator of a paradigm shift that is going on in the world, a symbol of the need to embrace the feminine. The film educates viewers that 95% of the bees in any hive are fe-males that do different tasks for the hive in the course of their lives. They gather honey, build cone, protect the hive, and raise the young. The male drones only mate with the queen. Marguerite Rigoglioso, PhD, author of Cult of Di-vine Birth in Ancient Greece, says the ancients perceived the bees as prophetic. In the film, she mentions bees are associ-ated with the sacred feminine, the goddess: “The bees are saying we need to open our consciousness again to the idea that there is both a masculine aspect of deity and a feminine aspect of deity, and these two need to come into balance again by honoring the body of the earth as mother.”

The film also looks at the probable conclusion that it is systemic pesticides—in particular those named “Gau-cho” and “Poncho” produced by Bayer CropScience—in-troduced into irrigation or the seeds of plants in order to discourage pests throughout the course of the plant’s life that cause cumulative damage to bee colonies over time. The Federal Department of Agriculture only requires that the companies that wish to sell the pesticides show data from studies in which adult bees are exposed to the chemi-cals short term. These systemic pesticides are now being studied by researchers for the ways they interfere with bees’ digestion, weaken their immune systems and subtly harm their brains and navigation systems. The chemicals end up in the pollen the bees feed their young, developing bees. As many other stressors, chemicals and pathogens impact bees adversely, but are not delivering the death blow to colonies, the systemic pesticides stand out as one especially vicious head on a many-headed monster that might have begun as a relatively benign, if ill-conceived, industry.

Monoculture farms, genetically modified organisms, feeding bees sugar water during long treks across the conti-

(Vanishing Bees continued from page 9)

“LIFE is a mosaic of

pleasure and pain - grief is

an interval between two

moments of joy. Peace is the

interlude between two

wars. You have no rose without

a thorn; the diligent picker will avoid the

pricks and gather the

flower. There is no bee without

the sting; cleverness consists in

gathering the honey

nevertheless.”

bee collapse, and are also in trouble due to land use change and agricultural intensification.” Her findings corroborate much of what is exposed in Vanishing of the Bees. “In the history of agriculture, farmers didn’t use to manage for pol-linators. Farms were much more diverse and situated in much more diverse landscapes. “When we plant pollinator-dependent mono-cultures, all at once you need a lot of pol-linators. An almond tree puts out 100,000 blossoms and will not set fruit without pollination. So there is a huge de-mand for pollination in a short amount of time, about a two-week period,” she explained.

When small, diverse organic farms are planted within a highly diverse landscape, wild bees can often do the service of pollination without the help of the honeybee. Addition-ally, honeybees in stationary farm or backyard hives can pol-linate nearby crops and find other sources of food, while remaining healthy and providing nutritionally sound honey. In the ten years Claire has been conducting research on the decline of native bees, the decline of the honeybee came into being. This is clearly a lose-lose situation. Claire also re-marked that studies are showing that feeding only from one kind of plant, such as almond trees, for several weeks, ex-poses visiting honeybees to certain toxic aspects of the flow-ers that would be mitigated by a more varied bee diet.

We’ve often heard certain foods called “empty calories.” I now think they should be called “criminal calories.” After seeing this film, I doubt I can ever eat another “honey-

The men of experiment are

like the ant; they only

collect and use. But the

bee . . . gathers its

materials from the flowers of

the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its

own.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Eric Tourneret, Courtesy Vanishing of the Bees Movie

—Leonardo da Vinci

—Sri Sathya Sai Baba(continued on page 46)

THE WHOLE PERSON CALENDAR / SEPTEMBER 2010

(Vanishing Bees continued from page 13)

sweetened” corn-based breakfast cereal from one of our large manufacturers, knowing that the honey blends used as sweeteners and the cereal bases are produced in such ways as to rob the earth of nutrient producing space and conditions. Empty in the bowl and emptying the na-tion’s heartland. Microcosms and macrocosms yet again. As the bees’ diets are restricted and sometimes filled in with sugar water, so might be the direction our diet is headed. The film states that some of the big companies would like to turn American agribusiness toward only grains and soybeans, leaving us dependent on other countries for fruits and vegetables. But in tense times, won’t other countries feed their own inhabitants first?

Let’s not trade cherries for cherry-flavored syrup. One of the many thoughtful quotes in the film is this one from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Whatever affects one directly, affects all in-directly. This is the interrelated structure of reality.” The film also cites a Cree Indian proverb: “Only when the last tree has died and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.”

In the last half of the movie, Vanishing of the Bees provides an important lesson from France, a country known for its workers going on strike. Perhaps that is why the French took action and had the systemic pesticides banned when the bees were going on strike, abandoning their hives in the same way bees in America are doing. In regions where the systemic products have not been applied, the bees have bounced back within a year. Please see the film and take this first step to heart, or, I should say, take the work of this documentary to belly, because our stomachs will rumble for the best of nature’s bounty if we don’t work at saving the bees. And without action, there are probably other dominoes setting up to fall as well.

Nancy Gross lives in Ojai where she raised two daughters, working at boutique hotels and earning a Bachelors degree from UCSB. She has freelanced for the Ojai Valley News and other regional pub-lications. Her own new magazine, The Ojai Bubble, appeared in late May. Contact Nancy at theojaibubble@yahoo.com.

For more information about the documentary, The Vanishing Bees; how you can host screenings in your area, pair up with local environmental groups and get more involved in spreading the word, please visit info@vanishingbees.com

The Lost Bee

A bee struggles in the angle where windshield and dash meet. Maybe that configuration of glass draws its multifaceted eyes. I try to help it find freedom with a corner of my checkbook, but fear I will smash it. A long way down the road we stop, and the bee flies out. Gas fumes shimmer in the air; my outline wobbles in the door window. The bee will probably never find its way back to familiar places, will never find its own native hive (an entire world preoccupied with its recumbent mother queen.) Like a seed case stuck to a sock, are these just the ways we bumbling humans stir up nature’s soup? Burst-ing from God-knows-what seeds ourselves?

-Nancy Gross

Links to articles or sites on Bees

New York Times Friday, August 13, 2010www.nytimes.com/info/bees/

Burt’s Bees Colony Collapse Disorderwww.nytimes.com/info/bees/

Haagen Das Bee Reportwww.helpthehoneybees.com/

The Buzz About Bees Websitewww.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bees/buzz.html

Study links bee decline to cell phones CNNwww.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/06/30/bee.decline.mo-bile.phones/index.html

PHOTO CREDIT: George Langworthy, Courtesy Vanishing of the Bees Movie

THE WHOLE PERSON CALENDAR / SEPTEMBER 2010