A few weeks ago I heard about a wildlife disaster on a
rather small, small in the sense that it only dealt with one county in South
Carolina scale, but with big implications.
I first heard about the event in early September. A news
broadcast flashed across my Facebook feed, with a title describing a mass
killing of honeybees in South Carolina. Though I couldn’t read the post at the
time, I made a mental note to go back and search. When I did several days later,
I found an article written by Adam Blinder of The New York Times, titled “Aimed
at Zika Mosquitos, Spray Kills Millions of Honeybees.” You can find a link to
this particular article here:
Before I can go into detail about the issues presented in
this case I want to first give you a synopsis of what happened.
The media has done a fantastic job highlighting the threat
that is the Zika virus, a new pathogen spread through the bites of infected
mosquitos. The most alarming aspect of this virus is that it can cause severe
developmental effects in unborn children. The most notable of these is a
condition called microcephaly. According to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC): “Microcephaly is a condition
where a baby’s head is much smaller than expected. During pregnancy, a baby’s
head grows because the baby’s brain grows. Microcephaly can occur because a
baby’s brain has not developed properly during pregnancy or has stopped growing
after birth, which results in a smaller head size.”
If you are interested in learning more, I suggest following this link to
their page on the disorder: http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/microcephaly.html
Understandably so, many
municipalities across the United States are on high alert, keeping tabs on the
spread of this disease. In many of the active cases in the United States, those
who are infected seemed to have contracted the virus while overseas. However,
Florida has recently discovered that local mosquito populations have tested
positive for the virus (Belluck, Alvarez, & McNeil Jr (2016). Needless to
say, this has caused fears to reach even greater heights. To combat the spread
of these new locally grown mosquitoes, many municipalities have rolled out
aggressive spraying plans in an attempt to stop the disease before it gets out
of hand. This is where our story begins.
The news began to hit that the
town of Summerville in South Carolina had an environmental crisis on its hands.
The article by Mr. Blinder followed the plight of a local beekeeper named Juanita
Stanley. Ms. Stanly’s apiary, a place where bees and beehives are kept, was a
disaster area. All around her were the bodies of her dead bees. She estimated
that the death toll of the spraying event had been two million honeybees… and
that was just from her business (Blinder, 2016).
To put that in perspective, an
average worker bee produced about 0.8 gram of honey on a daily basis (“Bee
Trivia”). The average lifespan of a worker bee is about 40 days (“Life in the
Hive). That’s 32 grams of honey in one bee’s life time. Multiply that by two
million bees and you have a whopping 64,000,000 grams of honey or 141,096
pounds of honey. At about $6 a pound (depending on the month) (“Unit Honey
Prices by Month-Retail”) that’s roughly $846,576 in lost revenue for just this
one commercial operation. The article goes on to state that many other
commercial operations, as well as hobbyists, suffered tremendously from this
one incident.
The spray operation was organized
by officials in Dorchester County. The weapon of choice for this campaign was
Naled, an organophosphate insecticide (but more on that later). The article
suggested that this was the first time the county had used aerial spraying,
stating that it is usually done from trucks (Blinder, 2016). As in true
government fashion, when they began to learn what was happening they released a
statement to the press in which they said they had “underestimated” how many
beekeeping operations were going on in the 15 square mile spray zone (Blinder,
2016). They also mentioned that they had used social media and local press
outlets to spread the word about the spraying. Obviously, some didn’t get the
message.
The most troubling point of
this article, and a point which I will focus on in later instalments of this post,
came from an interview with Dr. Dennis van Englesdorp. Dr. van Englesdorp his is
a bee researcher at the University of Maryland. Dr. van Englesdorp points out
that events such as this often happen when we are under stress and forget to
use the best practices available to us. He warned that, “If you are killing honeybees,
you’re killing a lot of other non-honeybee pollinators, too, and those
populations could take a long time to recover (Blinder, 2016).”
Next time, what is Naled anyway?
Cited Sources:
(2016, July) Facts about Microcephaly. Retrieved from
the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/microcephaly.html
Bee Trivia. Retrieved from The Canadian Honey
Council: http://www.honeycouncil.ca/bee_trivia.php
Belluck, P., Alvarez, L., & McNeil, D. (2016)
4 Zika Cases in Florida Were Likely Spread by Local Mosquitoes, C.D.C says. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/30/health/zika-virus-florida-case.html?_r=0
Blinder, A. (2016) Aimed at Zika Mosquitoes,
Spray Kills Millions of Honeybees. The
New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/02/us/south-carolina-pesticide-kills-bees.html?_r=1
Life in the Hive. Retrieved from the British
Beekeepers Association: http://www.bbka.org.uk/learn/general_information/life_in_the_hive
Unit Honey Prices by Month-Retail. Retrieved from
the National Honey Board: http://www.honey.com/honey-industry/honey-industry-statistics/unit-honey-prices-by-month-retail/
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