I want to take advantage of the UN summit on biodiversity, which will be held from December 5 to 17, to offer you three chronicles on the subject. In this first, I talk to you about the biodiversity of bees.
When some young city dwellers mix up biodiversity and pollinators, the honey bee (Apis mellifera) is never far away. However, it is not because we have a hive on our roof that we save “the bees”.
Contributing to saving the honey bee does not mean saving “the bees”. With some 20,000 species on the planet, the biodiversity of bees is much wider. Species of bees, there are large, small, solitary, social, parasitic, peaceful, aggressive and even devoid of sting. In Canada alone, there are nearly 800 species.
If this diversity seems invisible, it is because the honey bee that we house even on the roofs of our houses and buildings steals the show. York University biologist Laurence Packer vividly says that the honey bee is to bee diversity what the chicken is to avian diversity. Indeed, rare are the ornithologists who would point their binoculars at a chicken coop even if chickens now occupy all the space in the gigantic world of the feathered people.
A diverse world
The honey bee monopolizes all the light to the detriment of the thousands of wild and native bees of the Americas. If I oppose her to the native species here, it is because she is an immigrant to America. It evolved in Africa before reaching Europe, from where it will set out to conquer the planet. Introduced in America in the XVIIe century, it will begin its own conquest of the New World. As it was unknown to indigenous peoples, some nations called it the white man’s fly. In fact, each time they saw these atypical flies prowling in the flowers, they knew that the colonists and their share of potential conflicts and wars were not far away.
The honey bee is a fantastic species, but hymenoptera enthusiasts and specialists like Alain Péricard, author of the formidable book The bee and the hiveand bee scholar Anicet Desrochers, of Miels d’Anicet in Ferme-Neuve, will tell you that the world of bees is much more diverse and spectacular.
For example, there are 250 species of bumblebee in the world, 41 of which are found in Canada.
In front of my house I have an old caragana whose bumblebees love the flowers. The arrival of these hairy bees on my little tree is a summer spectacle that I never tire of. Their presence moves me and I teach my children to see them as paintings that nature has taken more than 100 million years to perfect.
These large bees that mostly inhabit cooler or colder regions of the planet have other skills that honey bees do not have. Their hairiness and their ability to produce heat make them specialists in morning pollination. Many plants also give off morning fragrances to attract bumblebees, which bustle about in the cool while the honey bees stay at home.
unionized workers
All growers who rent hives for pollination also know that honey bees are workers who seem to be protected by a collective agreement. When the weather is a bit cold, windy, or rainy, the honey workers bring up their union convention and stay home while the hardier bumblebees continue to bustle in the flowers.
Also, even though the rockstar who gives us honey is crowned with all the attention, qualities and skills, as a pollinator, it has limits. If you are lucky enough to walk into a greenhouse where tomatoes are grown, you will see little cardboard houses hanging here and there that serve as habitats for the bumblebees that provide pollination.
These plumper bees have a particular advantage in the work entrusted to them. Their large size allows them to generate enough vibrations to knock the pollen grains of tomato flowers out of hiding. In the nightshade family, to which the tomato, potato and aubergine belong, among others, the pollen is sequestered in cells open to the outside through tiny pores. To free it from these storage places called poricidal anthers, a strong current of air must be injected into it. This is where the size of the bumblebee gives it some superiority.
Prior to this agricultural revolution originating in Belgium, greenhouse tomato production required manually shaking the flowers or using electrical vibrations to do the work that bumblebees do efficiently without asking for pay.
Each species of bee is important and deserves as much to perpetuate itself in the biosphere as the honey bee, however important it may be for our economic activities. Unfortunately, the sacred alliance between flowering plants and these pollinators is threatened by pathogens, invasive predators, intensive monoculture, habitat loss, but also neonicotinoids.
These neurotoxins, which now represent 40% of the pesticides used by field crops, are 5,000 to 10,000 times more toxic than DDT, which has nevertheless been banned in the vast majority of countries since the 1970s. subject, pollinators will be threatened and humans will continue to suffer. Bees can forage and pollinate more than 80% of wild species and 75% of cultivated plant species, including 90% of fruit trees. Nearly 35% of humanity’s food production depends on the discreet and efficient work of these insects.
The day the bees disappear, humanity will probably still be here, but its food diversity will be greatly eroded. All over the planet, flowering plants are victims of the desecration of this sacred alliance that has linked them to bees since the dawn of time. Because of who ? Because of the biped who thinks that when a species does not serve its immediate interests, it is harmful or useless.