They buzz. They have very interesting knees. They (along with birds) teach us a lesson about that natural cycle that everyone learns when they reach that certain…. “age.” These clichés all reference one special insect: the bee. Bees have been intertwined with humanity since ancient times. The ancient Egyptians were the first beekeepers, dating back to the year 4 BC. Today farmers like Mike Hampton not only keep bees for their honey, but also for their pollinating abilities. Michael Hampton is also the director of the Food Initiative for the Middle Tennessee Region. The Food Initiative is part of the Tennessee Department, and is a non-profit organization who’s goal is to connect people in Tennessee to Tennessee farms and farmers markets so that people can live a fresher, healthier lifestyle. Hampton and these farmers all heavily rely on bees to pollinate their crops.

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     Now, however, there is trouble buzzing for these insect friends. Bees are dying at an alarming rate. Beekeepers in the US lost 44% of their hives between 2015-2016, with 28.1% of those losses occurring during the summer. This is disturbing, as losses during the winter are expected due to cold weather but summer losses should be very minimal because that is the time that the bees should be at their healthiest. The state of Tennessee lost 37.5% of its managed colonies in 2016. According to a UN report from 2015, 37% of bee populations are declining and 9% are facing extinction. These numbers are very disturbing for beekeepers and for farmers in general. Hampton has seen the decline in the bee population and is fearful of the consequences that the decline could have. “… this is truly a crisis. We can’t have fresh, nutritional, and plentiful [food] without the pollination of bees. Bees are a necessity for human life,” said Hampton.

Bee pollination is vital for food production. Bees pick up pollen when they land on flowers in search of nectar. When they land on another flower, the pollen falls off and fertilizes the other flower, allowing the plant to reproduce. Bees can pollinate more than 75% of flowering plants and crops, and over 90 commercial crops in North America need honey bee pollination. They are one of the top pollinators in the US and the work that they do contributes billions of dollars to the US economy according to a White House report. Experts say that if the decline continues, then the US could be looking at crop shortages and increased costs of production for farmers.

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     Farmers and others concerned about the decline in bee populations have started keeping bees to help pollinate their crops. Hampton, like many others, has run into problems keeping the hives alive. “Within the last couple of years, probably mainly this year though, we have had trouble keeping a hive alive, which in the past used to not be a problem. However, the Queen bees are being deprived of nutrients since there are not as many things to pollinate, and are a slowly dying. It’s hard to reintroduce a new Queen to the hive, so eventually they die. I reintroduce a Queen to the hive to community of bees because the worker bees are reliant on Queen and without her, the hive has trouble maintaining itself. Its like if you got rid of the leader of a country and let the people rule themselves, people need leaders. Bees need their Queen.”

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     Hampton’s farm has also had a hard time finding wild bees to reintroduce into his hives. “It’s really heart-breaking. It’s hard to see a new hive just slowly die. Even then, we are having trouble finding a natural swarm of bees to build up a hive. Usually, we try to collect a natural swarm of bees and put them into a hive so they can thrive. It’s been pretty easy to find a swarm in the past, however, I’d say within the last five years, we have to go out of our way to locate a small swarm.”

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     Mitchell Mote, the Rutherford County extension agent for the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture, has a list of causes for the decline. “I think it boils down to growth and progress, I suppose. Unmanaged bees deal with lost habitats. The land has been taken out of nature, if you will, and developed whether it is homes or businesses. They no longer have that diverse plant population that supported that population of pollinators that it once did simply because it doesn't have the plants to support them,” said Mote.

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     The growing human population poses a huge problem for bees. People build houses, build factories and businesses, and even clear more land for agriculture so we can feed the growing number of people. All this takes natural land away from bees and cuts down on their food supply. Also different nectars from different flowers have different nutrients that bees need to survive, and, as in the case of Hampton, hives are starving.

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     This is detrimental to crops as well. Mote was also concerned about what the lack of plant diversity did to the plants. “Now you have distances between populations, and the pollinators, being bees, can only fly so far. So now you have pockets of habitats that are separated by distances from one another, well then you’re fixing to run into problems with inbreeding within a population, because you are not able to bring in outside genetics because the bees don't travel that far,” said Mote.

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     It doesn't help that the crops both industrial agriculture and regular farmers produce are becoming increasingly more poisonous to bees. New GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms) crops are able to withstand weed killer, so farmers and companies that grow crops on a mass scale freely use weed killers to keep weeds out of their fields. If that wasn’t bad enough, weeds build up a tolerance to basic weed killers, such as glyphsate (the key ingredient in Round-Up, the World Health Organization labelled it possibly carcinogenic to humans), so farmers and companies use increasingly more powerful weed killers such as 2, 4-D (an ingredient in Agent Orange). Also, growers are spraying their crops for insects. With advances in GMO crops, some plants already come with insecticides bred into their DNA, making the plants poisonous to the bees as well. These toxins are definitely poisonous to bees and play a part in the population’s decline. “Do pesticides have an impact on it [the bee population decline]? Well, insecticides are designed to kill insects and bees are insects, a lot of pollinators are insects, so, yeah, I believe it probably did kill some. I don’t think there is any question about that,” said Mote.

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     One menace that Mote believes is worse than anything facing bees today is the Varroa mites. The Varroa mite is a parasite that attaches to the body of the bee and sucks away fat. Bees need that stored energy for their everyday, long flights. The mites pass along viruses like the deformed wing virus (DWV). Bees then bring the parasite back to the hive where the mites spread among the inhabitants of the hive including the larvae. This leads to deformed organs and body parts for the future worker bees. “I think bee keepers will tell you that one of the biggest problems that they see with bees is that the mites, the Varroa mites, cause problems with maintaining good populations and cause bee deaths,” said Mote.

The decline in bee populations hurt everyone, but it especially effects your average farmer. “We grow a lot of crops and we need the bees to pollinate the flowers of the fruit. Without these bees, it’s really hard to keep the plants alive and continuously providing food. We used to sell honey, however we can’t produce enough honey because we don’t have enough bees. We just want to keep our bee population in the area alive, so we are not taking the honey,” said Hampton.

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     Protecting the bee is paramount to agriculture. Bees are one of the biggest pollinators in nature and without that pollination, crop production will sharply decrease and plant populations will struggle to diversify their genetics. The US government is stepping in to help the bee population in by increasing bee habitats, funding future scientist who want to study bees, and establishing a seed bank for plants that are beneficial to bees. For bees to survive, they need good land management and more ecological farming practices to avoid the pitfalls discussed by Mote. Without bees, growers of all kinds, from industrial to the local farmer such as Mike Hampton will be in serious trouble.