Honey, it ain't so black and white Kate 6:22 PM

Bees and honey are the perfect example of why I find food politics so fascinating. This is a story that encompasses globalisation, genetics, agricultural monopolies and monocultures, disease, food, the effect of introduced species, and pollination. 

Many people know about the decline of bees in the US, and I suspect this knowledge will be more widespread with the film 'The Vanishing of the Bees', narrated by Ellen Page of 'Juno' fame. "A study across 15 different states of the USA by the Apiary Inspectors of America found that from September 2006 to March 2007, almost a third of all honey bee colonies had collapsed.' (Ref). It's not just in the US either. Similar collapses have occurred in Canada, South America, Asia and Europe. Colony Collapse Disorder is eerie in its effect, if you'll allow me that anthropomorphism. The bees who are able to fly, that is, all those but the Queen, pupae and immature bees, fly away and are thought to die singly, and are never found.(Ref)

The causes of CCD have so far only been guessed at, however. A few years ago, a bee virus, named Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV), was discovered in honeybees in the US. This virus is thought to have come from Australian bees. Shipping bees to the US is a billion dollar industry for Australia. 'Who the hell would need so much honey?' you ask.  Ah, but they aren't shipped for honey, but to pollinate Californian Almonds, which, just quietly, supply 80 % of the world's almond supply.

After the almonds season is over, these colonies are shipped around the US, spreading any disease or parasite they carry to other bees around the country. It is thought this forced migration might play havoc with the bees systems, making them more vulnerable to IAPV. For a long time the IAP Virus was thought to be the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder. Recent conjecture is that it may be a combination of IAPV and Varroa mite that brings about this collapse.

"It appears likely that our major bee health problems have to do with a coinfection of bees by multiple parasites, notably viruses and Nosema (a gut fungus)," says Randy Oliver, an independent expert who runs the website ScientificBeekeeping.com and who was a principle investigator in a field trial testing RNA interference against bee viruses.  (Microbe magazine),

To get briefly technical, the process of RNAi or RNA interference has a large part to play in defence against micro-organisms, and also in gene expression. It can be used by scientists to modify certain genetic expressions, like susceptibility to micro-organisms. This is a very simplistic explanation, and I am no scientist. For more on this, have a look at Microbe magazine or have a look at this video on RNA interference (or, you know, Wiki it).

Maryam Henein, the director of The Vanishing of the Bees blogged recently about a company called Beeologics, which has cleverly developed a little RNAi based product that sort of innoculates bees against IAPV. Wow! Wouldn't it be awesome if this was a silver bullet against all those bee deaths in the US? Yes it would, and that's what Monsanto, that giant, genetics-fiddling, monoculture creating, seed-owning, cause of farmer suicides in the third world, would like you to believe. Because Monsanto now owns Beeologics. Feck. What a neat little piece of science gone sinister. (Author notes a certain bias here against Monsanto. For more info on Monsanto, food politics, and farmer suicides, have a read of Raj Patel's 'Stuffed and Starved'.)

The other tricky thing is that IAPV is not the sole cause of bee deaths. There are many other factors, including pesticides that are more and more cleverly entwined with the plants themselves, called neonicotinoids (and who creates these? Um, hello? Monsanto? Could you stand up please? Bayer, who also displayed interest in the sale of Beeologics also produces neonicotinoids. See more on this). 

Neonicotinoids affect the bees' nervous systems over the long term, disorientating them. Bees are incredible little navigators, with aeronautics now taking tips from the way they fly. They're a bit screwed if neonicotinoids bugger that lovely little function up! And here's a fact almost poetic in it's horrendous irony...GM foods are almost all treated using neonicotinoids (ref). Wow, but doesn't Monsanto own, like, a bazillion of the world's GM crops? Yup.

In Australia
We are lucky enough here not to have Varroa mite. However we do use neonicotinoids. 37 of them in fact, including Clothiandin, one of the neonicotinoids thought to have caused CCD in the US (ref). We also have some of the healthiest bee populations. 

When the US APHIS (Animal Plant Health Inspection Service)  halted Australian bees from being imported into the US recently, they quoted Slow Paralysis Virus as the reason. When the CSIRO put forward reports that showed no SPV in Australian bees, the APHIS changed its tune and said the reason was fears that exotic pests and viruses would spread into honeybees from the Apis Cerana, an invasive bee species found initially in Cairns in Northern Queensland. 

To me, this seems to be a mature response for a very fragile industry, considering that it seems to be co-infections of viruses, mites, and micro-organisms that has ravaged the bee population. However, it surely will only be effective if action is taken in conjunction with EPA regulations on neonicotinoids in the US, and similar restrictions in Australia.
One Australian Queen bee exporter even claims that it is a political push from bee-breeders in Hawaii and California, however (Harman, 2011). Oh, world of food politics. You are so complex. 

Take a look at the Vanishing of the Bees trailer below. You can pay per view on their website.

The Vanishing of the Bees

References - for your...reference

1. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC134446/
2. http://www.microbemagazine.org/index.php/10-2010-current-topics/2897-rna-interference-looks-promising-against-bee-colony-collapse-disorder
3. http://maryamhenein.tumblr.com/post/16471484566/the-buzz-behind-the-monsanto-beeolgics-acquisition
4. http://www.beeologics.com/breaking_news.asp
5. http://www.sciencemag.org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/content/317/5843/1304.full?sid=e733c954-46f3-46ca-b787-848e0a4bfe04
6. http://theabk.com.au/article/neonicotinoids-australia
7. http://www.pestcontrol-uk.org/news/2011/the-sad-strange-fate-of-the-honey-bee
8. Australian Bees Locked Out, Harman, Bee Culture, Vol 139, Iss 2, P 71
9. 
   

Please let me know what you think of my article! I hope to write more of these brief little research pieces in the future. Let me know if there's a topic you'd like me to explore!
Yours in food sovereignty.

TedTalks: Birke Baehr an 11 year old boy gives the skinny on industrialised food Kate 12:47 AM

This little boy has it all figured out already about food. It's interesting that some of the things he found out about food really shocked him, but that adults are still struggling to know and care enough to change.

GM "Frankenfoods" - monsters or misunderstood? Kate 11:12 PM

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) got a lot of press in the late 90s and early 2000s, but it's rarer to see them in the media now. I remember a time when my mum wouldn't let us eat foods with high soy content, and would check with fried food outlets if they used rapeseed or canola oil before she ordered anything for fear of ingesting Genetically Modified foods. I thought she was nuts. Hot chips are hot chips right?
Nope.

What is a GM Food? Genetically Modified foods are those which have had alterations made to their genetic material in order to make them more economically viable (meaning they have in-built insect repellants, extra 'flavour', increased resistance to disease, increased tollerance for climate differentiations etc). Think back to the 1999 Simpsons episode about 'Tomacco', a tomato-tobacco genetic cross and you'll understand the fears that were and still are (quite legitimately - a tomato with nicotine content actually has been created by Rob Bauer!) held about GM foods.

(I am not the author of this great image.
this person is)

Opinions, opinions
There are many opposing views held about GM foods, even between scientific researchers - in fact it's an issue which seems to polarise them! It's difficult for consumers to tell what's going on, who's making claims and which claims are 'true' - the companies like MonSanto, Du Pont, Bayer etcetera etcetera making the GM products? The economists and sociologists who believe third world countries who are given GM foods in the form of aid are being used as guinea pigs? The scientists who say that GM crops are no more invasive than the unmodified crop? The media who uses the rhetoric of science-fiction like 'Frankenfoods' to portray GM foods? Or those who say that GM foods will be the only way of keeping up with food demands especially in poverty-stricken areas and farmland areas affected by climate change?

Consumer knowledge, regulation and flipping Salmon
Possibly, in the words of Mulder, 'The truth is out there,' but in the meantime, it's up to the consumer to make up their own minds. In Australia all GM foods must pass pre-market approval and be labelled under the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code, and currently it's only crops like soy, canola, potatoes, wheat, rice etc that have been allowed into Australia. (How do you label a potato as a GM food by the way? They don't have stickers on them like apples do!) But in the US right now, the Food & Drug Administration is considering the approval of a GM farmed Salmon with a growth hormone spliced from another species of Salmon. This would be the first GM animal to be available on the market, and it raises even more questions of environmental sustainability: what happens if the farmed fish escape and breed in the wild? Would their added growth hormone give them a competitive advantage over Wild Salmon? How well-tested is the GM Salmon for human consumption over long periods of time? Why is the Food and Drug Administration (which tends to suggest that a genetic 'enhancement' is a 'drug') the only regulatory body for this technology which has been around for more than a decade? You can read an article on GM Salmon here and make up your own mind!

Want to know what Genetically Modified Foods are approved for use in Australia? See a list from the Australia/NZ Food Standards Government website here