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He's not a celeb and he's not making news, but if you value the fruit that's more than likely to be gracing your breakfast table this morning, listen up.
Steve Buchmann, adjunct associate professor of entomology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, is rather worried that fruit may soon be difficult to find.
He's slim, middle-aged, with the slightly awkward presentation and hesitant smile of someone who's not used to having other people take an interest in him. We are standing in a surprisingly lush flower garden, almost hidden by shrubs and fences in Toronto's Queen West village.
There's a children's party happening a few metres away, and Dr. Buchmann is explaining how utterly seductive a stand of black-eyed Susans can be, if you happen to be a bee. "And there's one now," he says excitedly, "a male, and I believe it's about to clutch onto that female."
Steve Buchmann can tell you everything that is currently known about Colony Collapse Disorder, killer bees and a plant's promiscuity. (Francisco Medina for The Globe and Mail)
"Oh dear," I think, "and at a children's party and everything."
This apian romance, however, goes unnoticed, except by Dr. Buchmann, who has spent a lifetime noticing bees and, more recently, noticing that there are rather fewer of them than there used to be (bees and other pollinators are responsible for much of the food we eat).
He has lived in only three places in the United States, he says, and all were places where bees are abundant. He's in Toronto to participate in a mixed-media installation project at the "new" gallery called Resonating Bodies - Bumble Domicile, led by composer and installation artist Sarah Peebles.
A photographer, writer and beekeeper himself, Dr. Buchmann is about to deliver a lecture titled The Forgotten Pollinators.
About 30 people will attend - but he is used to soldiering on in the face of marginal public interest.
But that's changing. He's fresh from Washington, where he and other scientists and beekeepers persuaded the U.S. Senate and 30 state governors to declare June 22-28 National Pollinator Week. They met with the House committee on agriculture to urge action on "what we're seeing as a potential pollinator crisis, in terms of Colony Collapse Disorder," the still mysterious affliction that results in beekeepers finding their hives empty, except for the queen and a few ailing workers, while the rest of the hive has gone somewhere else to die - very unbee-like behaviour.
Dr. Buchmann served on a U.S. National Academy of Sciences panel: "We spent 18 months looking at the status of pollinators in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico, and we found evidence for declines not just in honeybees but in other pollinators as well. ... We're seeing drastic declines in at least four species of native bumblebees, things that used to be extremely common."
Honeybees, which are different from bumblebees, are not native to the Americas - they came here with the European settlers (Dr. Buchmann says some first nations tribes referred to them as "white men's flies"). Transporting bees (bumble or otherwise) to agricultural sites needing pollination is big business - a fact that becomes known to most of us only when accidents happen, such as the incident at the end of last month when a flatbed truck carrying about 12 million bees out of New Brunswick overturned on the Trans-Canada Highway. Traffic had to be shut down in both directions until the understandably stressed insects could be rounded up.
There are worse transportation accidents. Dr. Buchmann blames the hothouse tomato industry - which shipped American bees to Europe to rear them factory style - for the drastic decline in native bumblebees.
"They unfortunately mingled with one of the native European bumblebees," he says, "who passed at least two pathogens that we know of to the U.S. bees, which were then shipped back to the industry in Michigan, Pennsylvania and California."
Dr. Buchmann says there are about 100 major agricultural crops in the United States and Canada that depend mostly on bees, to the tune of $1.2-billion a year in this country and about $10-billion (U.S.) south of the border. Just 20 years ago, he says, "the rental fee for placing one honeybee colony in an orchard was $30 (U.S.); today it can be $150 and up to $200 per colony. And we don't have enough bee colonies any more."
He's a fascinating interview, with all the delicious qualities of an obsessive. He can tell you everything that is currently known about Colony Collapse Disorder, referring me to a new book called A Spring Without Bees, which fingers a particular insecticide, IMD, for the loss of about 30 per cent of managed bee colonies. He can tell you all about killer bees ("Africanized" seems the preferred term), responsible for the deaths of four humans and hundreds of dogs, cats and horses in his native Arizona. Should you encounter them, he says, hope not to be wearing black (they see it as a predator's colour), and don't breathe (they track carbon dioxide).
You'll learn that most plants are sexually quite promiscuous - they'll accept almost any pollinator that comes along - but some, like the fig, depend on a particular type of wasp. He can tell you that the way we farm now is ultimately counterproductive - "things are good," he says, "when agriculture happens in small blocks, but that's not how modern agriculture happens in Canada and the U.S. We have blocks of hundreds or thousands of hectares of the same plant - monocultures. Monocultures are not good for bees, and in the last 20 or 30 years, we've made agriculture not pollinator-friendly, with these giant, unbroken seas of similar crops. The most productive crop lands with the highest pollinator diversity are in smaller blocks, with a field of tomatoes, say, next to an oak woodland."
When it comes to crops and putting food on our tables, pollinators, he says, are the canaries in the coal mine. And, as he writes in his book, Letters from the Hive, "the world would be a desolate place without our pollinating friends, devoid of flowers, flowering plants and many of our favourite foods."
