Update: May 23, 2007

BUZZ WORDS

By Pam Eastlick for THE DEEP on line

Welcome to The Deep science and technology column where we cover topics from the deep sea to deep space and beyond.

	You may have seen some stories in the news lately about the mysterious disappearance of large numbers of honeybees.  And of course, the thought may have crossed your mind “I’m not Winnie-the-Pooh.  Why should I care if there are fewer bugs in the world?”  The answer is, you should care if the honeybees disappear only if you like to eat.

Although most of us think of the common honeybee only in terms of honey, in fact, honeybees are the world’s best known pollinators of plants.  Animals don’t have any trouble ‘pollinating’ each other because we can move around, but it’s a lot harder for plants to accomplish sexual reproduction because they can’t just haul up their roots and go visit the closest veggie bar.

Plants are clever, however and have evolved many mechanisms for impressing the girls (and boys).  Some plants dispense with the problem altogether by having both male and female parts on the same plant.  This is a little dangerous though, as you don’t get a whole lot of diversity in your gene pool using this method.

Some plants are wind-pollinated; some by water but most plants learned a long time ago that the best way for boy plant stuff to meet girl plant stuff is to have Earth’s mobile inhabitants carry it around for you.  And most plants also figured out a long time ago that the best way to get the animals to do that for you is to feed them in the process.  Over 80% of the world’s plant pollination is accomplished by animals.

Mammals and birds (mostly birds) do some of it (think hummingbirds and honeyeaters) but the majority of the world’s plants are pollinated by insects; which probably explains, in part, why the bugs are everywhere.  An independent alien observer wouldn’t tell the Galactic Council that humans are the dominant creatures of Earth.  Without question, Gwzlqrp would name the insects.

Although many of the world’s grain crops are pollinated by the wind, virtually all crops that bear largish flowers are pollinated by insects.  Every third bite of food you eat is on your plate because an insect pollinated the plant that grew it; and honeybees are the largest pollinators of food crops.  Virtually all the vegetables and fruits you put on your table are there only because of honeybees.

But you say, “I’m a typical islander and I don’t eat many vegetables.  As long as I’ve got rice and a good steak or port chops; I’m fine”.  Well, you’ll probably get to keep your rice since it’s a grain crop, but I wouldn’t count too heavily on the steak and pork chops.  Cows eat grass, true, but the major feed for beef cows in the States is alfalfa, which is pollinated by (you guessed it!) honeybees.  And the same goes for most of the food fed to hogs.  Honeybees are really important to your personal food supply!
So . . . what’s happening to them?  What terrible disease is decimating them and how do we stop it?  The answer is, we don’t know.  Honeybees are susceptible to mite infestation, fungal infections and a whole host of other diseases and when the beekeepers open their hives they find evidence of all of them.  What they don’t find is worker bees or their little fuzzy corpses.  The queen is still there and the babies are still there and they’re healthy despite the presence of all those disease organisms but the worker bees are GONE.  And no one has figured out yet where they’re going.

The disappearances have been blamed on everything from insecticides to mites to fungus to cell phones but the plain truth is no one knows what’s happening.  Beekeepers all over the United States and Europe have reported that 30-70% of their honeybees have simply vanished.  Their absence is already beginning to affect food crops in the US and you may see the effects on your own table by fall.
So how does honeybee disappearance affect the plants here on Guam and in the CNMI?  The answer is; for the most part, it doesn’t.  NONE of the native plants in these islands are pollinated by honeybees.  And how can I say that with such confidence?  Well, just think about your last trip to the mainland US or the Philippines or Hong Kong.  Think how long it took you to get there.  Then imagine that you’re flying not at 600 mph, but 1 mph and figure out how long it would take at that speed.  If you’re a honeybee with an average life span measured in months, you don’t make the trip at all and there were no honeybees in these islands prior to the Spanish invasion.

Wind pollination works well in the open prairie where the winds come whistling down the plains, but it doesn’t work at all in a rain forest, even if it’s typhoon-pruned.  Although there’s still much work that needs to be done on the native plants, most local insect pollination of local species is probably done by ants. 

But there were other significant pollinators here and the operative word is ‘were’.  Many of Guam’s missing birds were significant pollinators here and so were the fruit bats.  One of Guam’s premier limestone forest (called that because the forest grows on limestone, not because the trees are made of rocks!) trees is in steep decline.  Elaeocarpus yoga (the yoga tree (pronounced joe-ga) is native only to the Marianas and Palau and at least on Guam there are few to no new seedlings; you can only find mature trees.  Local scientists think that whatever pollinated yoga has disappeared from Guam’s forests whether it be bird or bat.  No pollinators, no new plants.

Like it or not, we are all interconnected.  If the honeybees disappear for whatever reason, us humans are going to be affected.  If the fruit bats and brindled white-eyes disappear, we’re going to be affected and quite possibly in strange and unexpected ways.  Pick up one end of the universe and you’ll find that it’s connected to everything else.  Step lightly; your tread affects us all.