Vanishing Bees: Science, Politics, and Honeybee Health

By Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Lee Kleinman

In 2005, beekeepers in the United States began observing a mysterious and disturbing phenomenon: once-healthy colonies of bees were suddenly collapsing, leaving behind empty hives full of honey and pollen. Over the following decade, widespread honeybee deaths—some of which have come to be called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)—have continued to bedevil beekeepers and threaten the agricultural industries that rely on bees for pollination. Scientists continue to debate the causes of CCD, yet there is no clear consensus on how to best solve the problem. 
 
Vanishing Bees takes us inside the debates over widespread honeybee deaths, introducing the various groups with a stake in solving the mystery of CCD, including beekeepers, entomologists, growers, agrichemical companies, and government regulators. Drawing from extensive interviews and first-hand observations, Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Lee Kleinman examine how members of each group have acquired, disseminated, and evaluated knowledge about CCD. In addition, they explore the often-contentious interactions among different groups, detailing how they assert authority, gain trust, and build alliances.
 
As it explores the contours of the CCD crisis, Vanishing Bees considers an equally urgent question: what happens when farmers, scientists, beekeepers, corporations, and federal agencies approach the problem from different vantage points and cannot see eye-to-eye? The answer may have profound consequences for every person who wants to keep fresh food on the table. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9780813574608

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Vanishing Bees

Nature, Society, and Culture

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A sophisticated and wide-ranging sociological literature analyzing nature-society-culture interactions has blossomed in recent decades. This book series provides a platform for showcasing the best of that scholarship: carefully crafted empirical studies of socio-environmental change and the effects such change has on ecosystems, social institutions, historical processes, and cultural practices.

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Stephanie A. Malin, The Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice

Diane Sicotte, From Workshop to Waste Magnet: Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region

Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Lee Kleinman, Vanishing Bees: Science, Politics, and Honeybee Health

Vanishing Bees

Science, Politics, and Honeybee Health

Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Lee Kleinman

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Suryanarayanan, Sainath, author. | Kleinman, Daniel Lee, author.

Title: Vanishing bees : science, politics, and honeybee health / Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Lee Kleinman.

Other titles: Science, politics, and honeybee health | Nature, society, and culture.

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2016] | Series: Nature, society, and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008280 | ISBN 9780813574592 (hardcover : alk. paper) |

ISBN 9780813574585 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813574608 (e-book (epub)) | ISBN 9780813574615 (e-book (web pdf))

Subjects: LCSH: Colony collapse disorder of honeybees—United States. | Die-off (Zoology)—United States. | Insecticides industry—United States.

Classification: LCC SF538.5.C65 S87 2016 | DDC 638/.1—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016008280

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2017 by Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Lee Kleinman

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

Visit our website: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu

For Kasia, Mundo, Felix, and all those others who are moved by the bees

—Sainath Suryanarayanan

For the next generation—Flora, Chris, Aiden, Chloe, Dylan, Kaela, Jenna, Josh, and Julian

—Daniel Lee Kleinman

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Knowing with Their Eyes? Beekeepers’ Understandings of CCD

Chapter 2. Keeping the Research Disciplined: Entomological Understandings of the Controversy over Insecticides

Chapter 3. Bees under the Treadmill of Agriculture: Growers’ Responses to Bee Decline

Chapter 4. The Bottom Line for Bayer: Agrochemical Companies and Bee Care

Chapter 5. Regulating Knowledge: The EPA and Pesticide Standards

Coda: Toward Just Research and Policy on Bee Health

Notes

Reference List

Index

About the Authors

Acknowledgments

This project began roughly seven years ago, and in that time we have accumulated a slew of debts. To begin with, we are especially grateful for the willingness of the large number of scientists, beekeepers, growers, agrochemical company representatives, and government officials who assented to doing interviews with us. Without their help, there would be no book. Moving from data collection to idea formulation, as our project evolved, we have had the opportunity to present our work before a number of audiences. One or both of us gave talks at the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, the Department of Entomology, the Center for the Humanities, the Arboretum, and the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies all at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Beyond our own campus, we presented our work at the Gordon Conference on Science and Technology Policy, Kyung Hee University (Seoul, Korea), the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Munich, Germany), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the University of Notre Dame, the Winter Convention of the Wisconsin Dane County Beekeepers Association, the Entomological Society of America, the Association of American Geographers, and the Center for Twenty-first Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Our ideas are sharper as a result of all of the opportunities we have had to present them, and we are happy to be able to thank those many people who provided us feedback at these many venues. Beyond responding to our presentations, a number of people have read drafts of parts of this book or related work. We are extremely grateful for the detailed feedback and thoughtful engagement we have received from Katarzyna Beilin, Susan Bernstein, Scott Frickel, David Hess, Kelly Moore, Marla Spivak, and various members of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (Munich, Germany). We benefitted too from comments we received from the reviewers of this manuscript, most especially Elizabeth Popp Berman, who prompted us to rethink the structure of our manuscript in crucial ways. Finally, we have been lucky to have had the research and editorial assistance of Flora Berklein, Mark Evans, Gbemisola Famule, Beata Farrey, Kirsten King, Krysta Koralesky, Noah Pearce, and Heather Swan at crucial stages of the project.

All research requires financial support in some form. We have had the good fortune to receive funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (Award numbers 0924346 and 1257175). Daniel Kleinman was provided with financial backing by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2010-330-B00169 and NRF-2013S1A3A2053087) and Sainath Suryanarayanan received crucial support as a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich, Germany. Of course, the views expressed in this book are our own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of our financial supporters.

Introduction

David Hackenberg is a veteran commercial beekeeper who has been trucking his beehives and offering their services as pollinators to growers of a wide variety of crops across the United States since the 1960s. In the spring of 2005, thousands of Hackenberg’s healthy beehives collapsed mysteriously while his honeybees pollinated blueberries in the state of Maine. Bees abandoned their beehives and didn’t return. He’d never seen anything like this (Hackenberg 2010).

By the fall of 2006, as the mysterious collapses persisted and intensified, it became clear to Hackenberg that his experience was not unique. All around the United States, beekeepers—commercial and recreational—were also seeing their beehives collapse. As the chill of the winter of 2006 began to dissipate, news emerged that a number of U.S. beekeeping operations had lost between 30 percent and 90 percent of their beehives, significantly higher than typical losses of around 15 percent associated with factors such as parasitic mites, diseases, pesticides, and poor nutrition. Bee researchers called it colony collapse disorder or CCD (Barrionuevo 2007; vanEngelsdorp et al. 2009). A decade since U.S. beekeepers first saw CCD, beehive losses remain troublingly high (vanEngelsdorp et al. 2011; Steinhauer et al. 2014). Threatening the very sustainability of agricultural and ecological systems in the United States and elsewhere, which have come to heavily rely on honeybees for pollination, accelerated honeybee deaths are increasingly accepted as a new normal among beekeepers, growers, scientists, and others.

The value of the increased agricultural yield and quality achieved in the United States through pollination by honeybees alone was $14.6 billion in 2000 (Morse and Calderone 2000). Farmers rent an estimated 2 million honeybee colonies each year to service over fifty different crops. The quality and/or quantity of crops dependent on honeybee-mediated pollination amount to about a third of what we eat and include almonds, apples, blueberries, cranberries, cherries, asparagus, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, celery, cucumbers, onions, pumpkins, squash, sunflowers, and soybeans (Delaplane and Mayer 2000). The commercial viability of all of these crops is threatened by the possible loss of honeybee pollination.

CCD-affected beehives (or colonies) collapse after the sudden loss of their adult population. The bees boil out of the collapsing hives in droves, leaving behind their queen, her immature offspring (or brood) and frames full of luscious golden honey and pollen (Hackenberg 2010). None of the absconding bees are found dead near their hives. More perplexing to beekeepers and researchers, the abandoned stores of honey, which would normally be robbed by neighboring honeybees or other organisms, remain untouched. University and federal bee researchers report several striking anatomical abnormalities and an unusual number of simultaneous viral and fungal infections in the young bees that remain in the CCD-affected beehives. Despite these observations, most agree that these are secondary factors that do not entirely explain why beehives become susceptible in the first place (vanEngelsdorp et al. 2009). While bee scientists believe that in the case of CCD, Multiplicity rules (Delaplane 2009, 1057), the complex of factors responsible for CCD and how they interact to produce the phenomenon remain uncertain, and the identities of the most involved factors remain mired in controversy (USDA 2013).

Some of the most researched causal factors are honeybee pathogens, parasites, beekeeper-applied in-hive chemicals, agricultural pesticides, and poor-quality nutrition in monocrop settings (USDA 2013). But many researchers and beekeepers agree that none among them is likely sufficient as the sole cause of CCD (Delaplane 2009; USDA 2013). Bee researchers are exploring how these factors might combine and interact to provoke the losses. But researchers and beekeepers, not to mention government regulators and agrochemical companies, have different vantage points from which they come to understand the phenomenon, and struggles are ongoing about what CCD is and what should be done about it.

Walk into a university bee research lab, and you will hear discussions about experimental controls and difficulties in establishing precise measurements. Traverse the acres of cotton fields in Texas with Clint Walker, a veteran migratory commercial beekeeper, and the conversation is quite different. As he scans the landscape, he notes areas that were earlier sprayed with new varieties of systemic¹ insecticides. He hypothesizes about the ways in which monoculture crops thought to restrict bee nutrition might interact with imidacloprid, one of the newer insecticides used to control insects such as aphids that threaten many crops, to cause beehives to collapse several months after exposure. No laboratory for Walker—he doesn’t establish controls or focus on measurement problems or efforts to parse individual causal agents. Instead, years of careful observation lead him to surmise that CCD is the product of cocktails of chemicals, pathogens and nutritional factors interacting over time. The effects of insecticides like imidacloprid, he suspects, are sublethal. They don’t kill bees on contact, and a direct laboratory test that seeks to ascertain the level at which this insecticide kills bees will miss any long-term weakening of bee immune systems that could result from ongoing low-level exposure of bees to the insecticide (Walker 2010).

These differences in culture and knowledge acquisition method between those in the university lab and Walker are just the edge of the controversy over the role played by pesticides in CCD. Tom Moriarty and David Fischer have opinions too, and they each represent powerful institutions in this struggle. Moriarty is chair of the Pollinator Protection Team in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Pesticide Programs. He supports the position that government regulation of insecticides must be based on sound science of the variety done in the university bee lab. Bayer Crop Science’s chief ecotoxicologist David Fischer would certainly agree, and his company could not settle for anything less. The company has an extensive research infrastructure but also an equally well-developed lobbying arm, and they use these two entities to define what counts as legitimate knowledge in the CCD controversy over the newer systemic insecticides they manufacture and to specify the rules about how the knowledge is made.

Each of these people represents a distinct knowledge culture. They have divergent ideas about what knowledge is, how it is acquired, and what is ultimately done with it. Moreover, they have different abilities to define the terms of debate and to shape policy on CCD. In the pages that follow, we tell the story of CCD and accelerated honeybee losses through the eyes and cultures of these and other stakeholders in the CCD controversy over new kinds of insecticides. Drawing on interviews with key players in the CCD controversy, ethnographic data collected in research settings, bee yards, farmers’ fields, and public meetings as well as documents uncovered in several archives over five years, we explore how the distinctive knowledge-making cultures to which these people belong and the interactions between them shape the current debate over CCD and broader trends of honeybee decline. We consider how the divergent orientations of these diverse groups and historically established patterns of power in their relationships simultaneously produce knowledge and ignorance about CCD and honeybee health. These are crucially important issues for beekeepers whose livelihoods are at stake, and they are also important for pollinator-reliant growers, policymakers, agrochemical companies, and academic scientists. But equally, with so much of the food we eat threatened, CCD and increasing honeybee losses are an important issue for consumers—eaters of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and honey.

Methods and Concepts

We have tried to make this book readable by those not deeply enmeshed in the scholarly debates to which our work might contribute, and at the same time we would like it to be of interest to scholars who work at the intersection of the social studies of science and environmental studies. In seeking to balance these two objectives, this is not a concept-heavy book. Instead, we embed our orientation in the narrative structure of our work. This said, for those interested in the literatures that motivate and inspire us and to whom we seek to speak (see Kleinman and Suryanarayanan 2013; Suryanarayanan and Kleinman 2013), we provide a bit of framing in the paragraphs that follow.

Most centrally, our study sits at the intersection of the sociology of ignorance and the social studies of expertise. We begin with ignorance. We use this term as it is increasingly utilized by scholars, not as it is used in common parlance. We do not mean incomprehension or innocence. Instead, we understand ignorance as lack of knowledge. Ignorance is the flipside of knowledge. For everything we know, there is something we do not know (Harding 2000; Gross 2010). Importantly, one’s knowledge of any phenomenon is affected by how and where one looks (Haraway 1991). Of course, this is true in a literal sense. If we were in a room facing one wall and we describe that room, we would do so in a particular way, and we would inevitably not mention the walls outside of our range of vision. It is also true in scientific research. A particular phenomenon might be studied at, for example, an ecological or environmental level or a molecular level. We would learn different things focusing in these divergent ways. In general, by looking in certain ways, one leaves unexamined other ways of understanding. It is impossible to see everything in every fashion all at one time.

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a scholarly literature on ignorance and have introduced such concepts as undone science (Hess 2007; Frickel et al. 2010), knowledge gaps (Frickel and Vincent 2007), and scientific cultures of nonknowledge (Böschen et al. 2010). Undone science refers to the kinds of research that get systematically ignored, left unfunded or incomplete, but is recognized by some people as being worthy of serious consideration. Knowledge gaps are understood as organizationally circumscribed domains of unrealized knowledge (Frickel and Vincent 2011, 12). Böschen et al. (2010) argue that scientific disciplinary fields are characterized by differing approaches to knowledge making and have differing orientations to control and complexity, which in turn lead actors to treat what is not known in different ways.

We build on the insights of this scholarship. Our focus is not on deliberate efforts to generate uncertainty or manufacture doubt (see Proctor 1995; Oreskes and Conway 2011). Instead, our attention focuses on the ways in which the social dynamics of the institutions of academic science affect the production of ignorance, and how these intersect with particular practices of knowledge production in specific government and corporate organizations. We explore how the historically established norms and practices of different stakeholders in the case we study affect the social production of knowledge and ignorance. We are particularly interested in the ways in which methods of data collection, approaches to testing, structures of experimental design, and standards of evidence affect what counts as knowledge and what does not.

In the pages that follow, we show that the rise to prominence of