Thoughts on The Pollinators

I just finished watching "The Pollinators" for the second time and it's motivating me at a very high level. Recently, I began an earnest effort to grow plants around the house and the vast amount of stuff I don't know is borderline scary. Plants are so basic and it seems that, as a country, we have been making a lot of mistakes in the field; it's like an American ideal to be bigger, faster, stronger and that sort of thinking has made us myopic and has had devastating affects.

I took notes on the second viewing and am going to attempt to boil it down. Sooo, bees pollinate flowers and allow for fruit to grow. According to the film, 1/3 of all the food we eat comes from this pollination process.  A major problem in the current food system is called monoculture, where a single kind of plant is predominantly grown, such as corn and soybeans and these plants are self-pollinators meaning that bees are not involved with the process. With the advent of biofuels and the renewable fuel standard the demand for these self-pollinators increased and plant's diversity, especially in the northern plains, decreased. The problem is that with diversity comes resiliency and because of over-tilling and lack of crop-rotating we have destroyed our soil and have what's called accumulated pathogens. 

Combine monoculture with pesticide use and we have a problem where bees are dying off at an unsustainable rate over 30%. A healthy die-off rate is under 10%. Beekeepers have been able split their hives in half and regenerate populations with the addition of new queen bees, but this hard to do. The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 cut down on nerve toxins (carbamate and organophosphates) used in pesticides to help humans, however the replacement chemicals, mostly neonicotinoids, are lipophilic meaning they dissolve in fat, i.e. pollen and wax, so they really can accumulate in the hives and and ultimately kill the bees. 

Another thing that happens is over-pollination, where, after a chilling requirement (winter), a bud with say 5 flowers will produce 5 apples that are all too small. What producers want is to pollinate the first flower to pop out, which is called the king flower and makes the biggest fruit, and not the others. To ensure big fruit some farmers do what's called chemical thinning using either sevin or carbinol, both of which are poison to bees. 

With the current policy, different than Europe's precautionary principle where if you don't fully-understand all the effects you don't do it, the USDA and EPA have allowed for conditional registrations where producers can basically submit a production plan and then report their own findings, which is the equivalent of writing yourself a speeding ticket, not going to happen. Thus the system is flawed.

There is hope though and by measuring native bee populations and managed honey bee populations we can gauge how well we're doing, as they are a great indicator of soil quality. Some key terms producers should be considering are "regenerative farming" and "cover crops".

And for me personally, I want to invest in bees and maybe even create a way for everyone, maybe using block-chain or something, to invest in bees. They're that important.