拯救蜜蜂

    我们需要蜜蜂。你喜欢苹果吗？那杏仁呢？洋葱呢？蓝莓、樱桃以及所有开花的水果，它们要结出果实，花朵都需要授粉。而要说到授粉，没有什么能比得上蜜蜂。据美国农业部（The U.S. Department of Agriculture）估计，人们的食物有四分之一是拜蜜蜂高超的授粉技能所赐。

    我们需要蜜蜂，然而蜜蜂却正在一批一批地死去。这个现象大约始于2005年，当时首次被命名为“蜂群崩溃综合症”。我们在命名时并不清楚这个现象出现的原因。医治蜂群崩溃综合症极为复杂，这种毛病似乎同蜜蜂所服务的行业一样盘根错节。纽约市蜂农协会（New York City Beekeepers）联合创始人安德鲁•科特数年前向笔者表示：“探究蜂群崩溃错乱症的原因就如同试图探究贫困的根源一样困难。”

    我们需要蜜蜂，因为如果没有他们，我们就享用不了自己喜爱的美食。而现在，由于蜜蜂数量减少，我们喜爱的食品的价格会上涨。对于蜜蜂迅速死亡的原因，我们只有点模糊的概念，而所有可能的原因——营养不良、农药、巡游的生活方式造成压力过大——都直指蜜蜂处在中心地位的这个系统。蜂巢同农业一样，是一个复杂且组织严密的系统，如果有几只蜜蜂病倒，整个体系就可能分崩离析。正如在美国宾州经营一家工业授粉服务公司的戴夫•哈肯伯格所说：“如果开始缩短蜜蜂的寿命，哪怕就缩短几天，幼蜂们不得不提前去采蜜，结果整个事情都会被搞砸。”

    哈肯伯格对蜜蜂的飞行路径格外注意，从不让这些小家伙接近玉米作物。因为“如果上面有什么污染物，蜜蜂绝对会把它们带回蜂巢。”玉米等农作物使用一种叫做“新烟碱”的化学物作为杀虫剂（这种化学物类似尼古丁，会影响神经系统）。新烟碱是目前全球使用最广泛的杀虫剂之一。上个月，来自美国养蜂人联盟、塞拉俱乐部（the Sierra Club）、环境健康中心（the Center for Environmental Health）以及食品安全中心（the Center for Food Safety）的代表联合起诉美国环保署（the Environmental Protection Agency），认为后者没有经过慎重的评估就批准新烟碱用于杀虫剂，结果导致蜜蜂死亡。上周，欧盟就禁用新烟碱杀虫剂提案进行了表决，但由于英国和德国等国弃权，提案未能通过。位于德国的化工巨头拜耳作物科学公司（Bayer CropScience）是全球最大的新烟碱类杀虫剂制造商。

    丹•卡明斯是一位加州的农场主，种植杏仁，同时还养蜂。他表示，一些养蜂人损失了高达70%的蜜蜂。卡明斯目前正和蜜蜂研究人员合作，尝试识别出蜜蜂带回蜂巢的所有致病菌。卡明斯称：“整个行业已经排除了所有的单一原因。通过长期研究，我们发现事情越来越古怪。它似乎和所谓的营养有关。蜜蜂的活动范围越大，采食的作物越多，生命力就越顽强。”卡明斯目前正试图找出究竟该为蜜蜂补充哪些营养。“相比于以往，蜜蜂现在的食谱范围真是小的可怜。”

    卡明斯有一块被栅栏围起来，没有种庄稼的地。他希望能在上面种些美国本土作物，例如狼灌。他说：“这样蜜蜂就能飞到狼灌上完成授粉了，真是太妙了。”而且，这种作物是寄生蜂的天堂。寄生蜂这个名字虽然不好听，但它能捕食螨虫，而后者会导致蜂群发病死亡。卡明斯计划修一道篱笆把杀虫剂拒之门外，也不让甜三叶草和风信子等作物污染了蜜蜂的美食。当然，篱笆看起来挺傻的，但为了心爱的蜜蜂，值了。（财富中文网）

    译者：项航

    We need bees. You like apples? Almonds? Onions? How about blueberries or cherries or, heck, any flowering fruit out there -- to get the fruit you need the flower pollinated; and to pollinate, nothing beats a honeybee. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that a quarter of our diet depends on honeybees' pollination prowess.

    We need bees, and bees are dying en masse, have been since about 2005, when a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) was first given a name. We named the result without knowing its cause. Curing CCD has proven extremely complex, the ailment seems as knotty as interconnected as the industry the bees serve. As Andrew Coté, co-founder of New York City Beekeepers, told me years ago, "Asking to explain what causes CCD is like asking what causes poverty."

    So we need bees because, without them, we wouldn't have all these foods we love; and right now, with fewer of them, the foods we love are going to cost more. We have only some vague notions of what it is that could be killing them off so quickly, and all possible causes -- bad nutrition, pesticides, an itinerant lifestyle that's full of unnatural stresses -- point to the very system of which they are a central part. Hives, like the agriculture industry, are such complex, tightly organized systems that if a few bees fall unwell the whole structure might fall apart. As Dave Hackenburg, who runs an industrial pollination services company in Pennsylvania, says, "If you start shortening lives of bees, just by a few days, young bees have to go to the field earlier, and the whole thing gets messed up."

    Hackenburg is careful about where he sends his bees and won't let them near corn crops because "if there's contaminants, they're bringing it home." Corn, and plenty of other crops, use pesticides with chemicals known as neonicotinoids (they affect neurons, and are similar to nicotine). Neonicotinoids are one of the most widely used classes of pesticide in the world. Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency was sued by a coalition of beekeepers, as well as representatives from the Sierra Club, the Center for Environmental Health, and the Center for Food Safety, for failing to protect bees by approving neonicotinoids without proper review. A proposed ban on the insecticides went before the European Union last week but was postponed because England and Germany, among other nations, abstained from voting. Bayer CropScience, the giant German-based company, is among the largest producers of neonicotinoid-based pesticides in the world.

    Dan Cummings, a California almond farmer who also keeps bees, says some keepers are losing up to 70% of their population. Cummings is working with honeybee researchers to try and identify all the pathogens bees bring back into the hive. "We as an industry have eliminated all single-cause agents, so we've learned a lot, but it's become more mysterious. It seems," he continues, "to be highly correlated with nutrition. The bees that have better forage, a more diverse diet, are more resilient." Cummings is now working on just what that supplemental diet should be. "The bees' diet today is poorer than it's ever been," he says.

    Along his own fence lines, in areas that aren't farmed, he favors native plants like coyote bush. "Honeybees go out and make wonderful pollen out of coyote bush," Cummings says. Plus, the plant serves as home to parasitic wasps, which sound nasty but prey on mites, which infest and can kill off bee colonies. He's planning hedge barriers to keep sprays from drifting, sweetclovers and bluebells that get mixed into the bee diet. Sure, the hedgerows are attractive, he says, but they're there for the bees.