Wanted: More Busy Bees

Beth Daley writes in the May 25, 2009 edition of Boston.com's Green Blog that "Blueberry crop gets some help from visiting bees ... "

But the traveling bees are becoming dramatically more expensive as honeybees continue to disappear. Something called colony collapse disorder has killed an estimated one in three US honeybee colonies since December 2006.

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Editor Carter Jefferson was ahead of the game when wrote a brief review of The Buzz About Bees: Biology of a Superorganism, by Jurgen Tautz (author), H.R. Heilmann (photographer), and D.C. Sandeman (translator) for the October 2008 issue of The Internet Review of Books.

This book makes clear one thing, even for a reader lost in the dense fog of scientific explanation therein: We humans simply can’t live without bees. Bees fertilize 120,000 species of flowering plants, including nearly all of those that give us food; humans and domestic animals can’t live exclusively on self-pollinating grain. Bees keep nearly everything else alive, and they are in big trouble. Despite its cutesy title, The Buzz is not a sequel to Sue Monk Kidd’s bestseller The Secret Life of Bees—it’s pure science. A small volume published in Germany in 2007 and translated only recently, it tells in great detail how bees evolved and how they operate. Only in the last few pages will readers learn what threatens bees’ future—and ours. News about “colony collapse disorder,” the deaths of millions of bees in the US, hit the airwaves for a few days in 2007 and then we heard no more, but scientists were still baffled more than year later, and the deaths continue. For anyone willing to spend the time to study these pages, learning about the ”super-organism” that is a beehive will be fascinating. The photographs are beautiful and informative, and the translation excellent.