Colony Collapse Disorder

By Becky Chitro

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is a tragedy happening among the bee population in which there is a drastic decline in adult male bees is found in a given hive. What makes this particularly concerning is that there is no bodies found in the hive, yet the queen bee and other immature male bees are still present. This makes determining the cause of death in the bees extremely difficult to track and determine. One researcher, vanEngelsdorp suggests: “When bees are infected, it may cause them to commit altruistic suicide so they don’t infect their nest mates” (Watanabe). It is easy to overlook bees, that is unless the sting you, but they are an invaluable part of our ecosystem and contribute to the pollination of our food sources.

For example, the almond industries in California alone depend on bees because it takes 1.4 million colonies of bees to sustain the business. The U.S. has already seen the population stagger from 5 million to 2.5 million colonies since the 1940s and has been importing more and more bees since. Yet we cannot solely rely on imports because it is not a sustainable system and does not pin point why this is happening to our bees. Scientists have been able to reason out some potential causes, which include a pathogen a gut fungi called Nosema, but unfortunately cannot render this to be the direct cause. This suggests that there could be a combination of pathogens contributing to the collapse of colonies. Another potential cause could be parasites, but again there has been no direct correlation to Varroa mites and bee deaths. In fact, it has been shown that the colonies with the mites are healthier, which is assumed to be due to a higher resistance to averse infections. The next best guesses are management and environmental stressors, which describe a competition among the imported and indigenous bees for adequate nutrition, and uncontaminated water, while also having to avoid exposure to toxic pesticides.

So now you might be thinking: ‘without a definitive cause, how can we prevent more bees from dying?” A great question. While it seems that there is no way to be absolutely effective in preventing CCD, we can take some steps to reduce our affect on their chances of survival. One way is to reduce the amount of pesticides, especially during mid-day hours since bees are most active at the time. We can also plant nutritional food sources for bees so they have less competition among their species for nectar, which include: red clover, foxglove, bee balm, and joe-pye weed.

You might also want to support your local bee farmer! If you buy corporate honey, you might actually be encouraging unethical honey harvesting, which could be one a potential cause affecting bee colonies. Small farmers are exhibit a more involved process and devote more time and effort into making sure their bees are meeting their requirements in order to produce a certain amount of honey. If you need inspiration check out this simple, and delicious recipe for homemade salad dressing:

 Honey-Mustard Vinaigrette

• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoon white-wine vinegar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons Dijon mustard, (coarse or smooth)
• 1/2 teaspoon honey
• 1/8 teaspoon salt
• Freshly ground pepper, to taste
• 1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil, or canola oil

Eating Well. “Honey-Mustard Vinaigrette.” The EatingWell Diabetes Cookbook. 2005. <http://www.eatingwell.com/recipes/honey_mustard_vinaigrette.html&gt;

United States Department of Agriculture. “Honey Bees and Colony Collapse Disorder.” October 16, 2014. <http://www.ars.usda.gov/News/docs.htm?docid=15572&gt;

 

Watanabe, Myrna. “What’s New With Honeybees?” BioScience, Vol. 59, No. 11 (December 2009), p. 1010.

Homo Sapien or Rattus Exulan?

By Richard Witting

The Island of Rapa Nui has long captured the interest and imagination of both the public and the scientific community. For the average person, the familiar big stone heads are awe-inspiring and iconic, and the island seems unimaginably remote. Scientists have puzzled over these heads: they are symbols of an ancient and now extinct culture, a culture that through some form of brilliant, primitive engineering feat was able to erect these massive monuments. Yet despite these impressive… erections… the ancient Rapa Nuians could not sustain their population’s needs and their society collapsed.  Or so the story goes… but is it true?

Collapse is hot…

Theories and ideas about the subject of collapse are an especially loved subject for scientists. Perhaps they are drawn to it out of a logical desire to avoid the mistakes that people in the past made that led to these collapses. Perhaps collapse resonates somewhere deep in all our psyche as a sort of meta fear of death; the complete death of our culture. In a paper by Joesphe Tainter titled Collapse, Sustainability, and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed he reviews a selection of contemporary literature on the subject. First among these is the much read, and much despised, book by Jared Diamond titled Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; in which Easter Island is first among his examples. Diamond holds up Easter Island as an example of the imminent destruction that we already suspect is threatening us: that manmade actions will cause a catastrophic collapse of the environment that sustains us—and that human decisions, for better or for worse, define these collapses. He proposes that, like the prehistoric Rapa Nuians,  this will be our undoing unless we act to change the outcome.

But what animal really caused Easter Island’s collapse?

Minus a handful of important traits (speech, upright walking, etc.) it is worth remembering that humans are also animals.  Much of human life is still driven by basic the necessities of food, shelter, and comforts. In pursuit of these needs we have been migrating around the earth for thousands of years, resituating ourselves in response to our world and environment.  When people from Polynesia first found their way to Easter Island, they found a fertile forested island thick with the palms which would sustain them for years, both as a primary food source and the key material for building deep water fishing boats. This forest was also home to 2000 species of now extinct birds — which constitutes a 20% decrease in the the species of birds known on the Earth (Steadman). As the classic narrative goes, the islanders then depleted all the resources of the island in pursuit of their unquenchable desire to build giant stone heads… or at least because the population grew beyond it’s carrying capacity. This led to a collapse of the island’s ecosystem and to the complete depletion of the soil’s fertility. The inhabitants turned to eating anything they could, and finally, to cannibalism.

Enter the rat…

A newer theory to the collapse of the Easter Island ecosystem concerns the introduction of the Polynesian rat, rattus exulans. This species was commonly brought by Polynesian voyagers to islands to serve as a food source. In examples from other islands the devastation of rats is well documented. The way this is done in a situation such as this is that the rats proliferate quickly and use the seeds of the palm tree as a food source. So much so that the palms become unable to repopulate themselves. In this scenario we see that the human decision to bring the rat to the island may have been the cause of the islands decline, not any failure by the people of the island to control their population growth, manage the islands resources or curb their head building enthusiasm.

or not…

While Diamond gives us as a species a huge amount of agency in our own self-destruction, Richardson Gill’s book The Great Maya Drought: Water, Life, and Death points out the vast complex array of forces in our world that are working against us such as drought, disease and ecological forces. Others also have pointed to possible non-human causes in the form of draught do to changing weather patterns may have been the cause of the decline. Gill’s also examines the appeal of collapse study and how it is interpreted. Obviously the current issues we face regarding climate change are real and need to be addressed but it should be done with caution and a close assessment of the implication of the idea. With collapse there is an implication of failure, that someone is to blame. Implied in the classic narrative of the collapse of Easter Island is the notion that the inhabitants were at fault somehow in their practices. For a moment it’s worth setting aside the truth of falsity of that narrative and instead to take a look at how that narrative might be used, by whom and for what.

Additionally this narrative leaves out the living descendants of those ancient people — who survived despite this collapse. Because they aren’t erecting large stone heads does that mean they are not currently a worthy people to know and study? Our concerns for understanding the past to predict the future means that we might overlook the present. How does a pursuit of these answers help those who inhabit the island now? What future do they face?

Flenley, John, and Paul Bahn

2003The Enigmas of Easter Island: Oxford University Press.

Mann, Daniel, et al.

2008Drought, vegetation change, and human history on Rapa Nui (Isla de Pascua, Easter Island). Quaternary Research 69(1):16-28.

Tainter, Joseph A.

2008Collapse, Sustainability, and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed. Reviews in Anthropology 37(4):342-371.

Steadman, David W

1995 Prehistoric extinctions of Pacific island birds: biodiversity meets zooarchaeology. Science 267(5201):1123-1131.

A Vegetarian Makes Chicken

By Emily Shea

I chose to use the topic of “animal” to address more wide-scale, global consequences of human food systems. I know we enjoy putting as much distance between us and other species as possible, but humans are omnivores, and have a place in the food web. To understand how human consumption and the environment intersect, environmental scientist look to solar energy consumption. Plants have the ability to convert small amounts of solar energy into edible chemical energy; herbivores can absorb this energy when they consume plants, however, 90% of the initial solar energy is lost in this process. When other animals eat herbivores, again, only 10% of energy is absorbed. When you look at these estimations, it becomes clear that a purely vegan diet uses considerably less energy then omnivorous diets. Decreased energy use means less land for crops and less overall resources (water, fertilizer, etc.). By these parameters alone, veganism is objectively more efficient.

There are, of course, other considerations. Some means of crop production are less energy-intensive then others, and the organic food movement can be seen as a rejection of foods that have high chemical input. Baroni and others (2006) give an interesting study concerting resource consumption of 5 different diets: conventional, omnivorous, omnivorous organic, vegetarian and vegan. Numerical values were assigned to each food, and input/output parameters were compared. What I found most interesting (and unusual) was that they used three different perspectives or “cultural approaches” were analyzed (individual, histological, egalitarian). When discussing issues as globally concerning as environmental destruction, it is often crucial to examine these studies from a variety of outlooks.

I did, however, have several problems with this study. It was based exclusively on the algorithms of theoretical diets; while being nutritionally sound, these diets may not have been culturally appropriate or even realistic. This study (like most others) also only addresses one branch of sustainability, and did not examine economic or social sustainability. It also did not examine the impact of locally foods? Would this experiment be possible if local/seasonable foods were used as a parameter, considering how unpredictable these sources may be? This study would certainly falls into Allan and Sachs (1991) concept of ignoring and depoliticizing sociocultural side of food production. It is also important to note that in many cultures, meat has meaning that extends far beyond nutrition and energy consumption. Alan (2001), examines the symbolic meaning of meat; an enforced vegan diet would be devoid of these cultural and historic values.

Interestingly, Davis (2002) does a similar algorithmic study, and found that (in terms of animal lives) a vegan diet may not cause the least harm, as agricultural inherently destroys natural habitats in favor of man-made crop fields. When examining harm as “death” rather then resource use, which some individuals may prefer, a least harm diet would consist of both plants and forage-fed large herbivores.

Energy consumption in our food system is certainly not to be ignored, and choosing lower-energy foods has benefits. I think we can all admit that American food culture is overly meat-centric, therefore consuming more energy then is actually needed. With all that I have read about both in and outside class, I was interested in preparing a meal that fit was I considered to be “least harm”. I am typically a pretty strict vegetarian, largely based on the first few points I wrote about energy consumption. Hover, when eating strictly local foods (in the winter… in Vermont), meat substitutes are few and far between. I wanted to design a recipe that followed several rules, in order to make me think more deeply about the plausibility of a local food-only diet: 1) this dish would be satisfying/nutritious enough to be considered a full meal; 2) since meat was used, I wanted to ensure this particular resource was stretch as far as possible; 3) only local ingredients were used, with the exceptions of salt and oil.

My recipe/challenge: Chicken “Noodle” Soup

Local ingredients were gathered from CSA or City market

These are the methods and Ingredients I used; I did not follow a formally written recipe.

Ingredients

3.5 lb chicken (misty knoll)

3 white onions

4 carrots

3 celery roots (seasonal substitute for celery)

7 cloves garlic

1 leek

1 cup whole oat groats (local/seasonal substitute for pasta); precooked and set aside

1 bunch fresh thyme

1 bunch fresh parsley

(nonlocal) olive oil, salt, black pepper

Directions:

Cook the chicken as desired. I chose to roast it “butterflied” over vegetables.

Carve the chicken, and leave the meat part aside. Use any rejected part of the chicken to make a broth by simmering for several hours with desired vegetables and seasonings (I chose carrots, celeriac, garlic, onion, thyme and parsley, salt. I also used 10 cups of water). After the broth comes to a desired flavor, strain and compost solids. Dice all vegetables, and add to a large pot, mixing in olive oil and salt until slightly tender. Add in broth and cook for about 20 minutes until vegetables are soft. Add in cooked chicken and goats, along with chopped parsley. Cook for 5 more minutes, and add salt to taste.

This made roughly 12 servings for me, and cost an estimated $35.00.

Images Used

Trophic levels: http://sparkleberrysprings.com/v-web/b2/images/t/trophic2c.png

other: un-quality iphone pictures I took while cooking.

Works Cited:

Allen, M. W., Wilson, M., Ng, S. H., & Dunne, M. (2000). Values and Beliefs of Vegetarians and Omnivores. The Journal of Social Psychology, 140(4), 405-422. doi: 10.1080/00224540009600481

Baroni, L., Cenci, L., Tettamanti, M., & Berati, M. (2006). Evaluating the environmental impact of various dietary patterns combined with different food production systems. Eur J Clin Nutr, 61(2), 279-286.

Chukwu, A. O., Nwaiwu, J. C., & Nwosu, I. E. (2013). Farmers’ perception on the use of inorganic fertilizer in yam production on Eroded soils of South Eastern Nigeria. International Journal of Agriculture and Biosciences, 2(5), 281-285.

Davis, S. (2003). The Least Harm Principle May Require that Humans Consume a Diet Containing Large Herbivores, Not a Vegan Diet. Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 16(4), 387-394. doi: 10.1023/A:1025638030686

Feenstra, G. W. (1997). Local food systems and sustainable communities. American Journal of Alternative Agriculture, 12(01), 28-36. doi: doi:10.1017/S0889189300007165

Rojstaczer, S., Sterling, S. M., & Moore, N. J. (2001). Human appropriation of photosynthesis products. Science, 294(5551), 2549-2552. doi: 10.1126/science.1064375

Grass and Global Warming (Needs new title)

by Walker Sultzbach