As it happens,  Fruitless Fall was not the first book I encountered about the dying of honey bees due to Colony Collapse Disorder (CDC).   I happened upon A Spring Without Bees several weeks ago.  Fruitless Fall, however proved to be a much more readable and engaging book and I have finished and digested it, whereas I’ve only read the first three or four chapters of A Spring Without Bees.  Even though it has received little attention from the main stream media, the bee-keeping industry is in the midst of a major crisis.   After having for a number of years battled against mites and other pests, bee keepers in 2006 were astounded when large numbers of bee hives began to die off.    Foraging bees would simply fly off, never to return to their hives.    Unlike previous problems with mites or poisoning, there are no dead bee bodies to study.  Only empty hives that should be packed full of bees.

From reading John Irving’s novel The Cider House Rules many years ago,  I was aware of the role that bees play in pollinating most all of our fruit crops.   And the situation for bees and other pollinators is definitely not good.   In this well written and very well organized book,  Jacobsen provides a history of bee keeping around the world,  a very insightful chapter about the life of a bee, from the bee’s perspective,  live on-the-scene reportage of the mysterious bee die off and the apiary scientists working to figure out what has gone wrong.

The answer, it turns out, is stress.    As monocrop commercial mass agriculture has obliterated hectares and hectares of natural habitat,  farmers growing most fruits and many other crops have become dependent on traveling bees, which are trucked from one crop to the next.    The 2007 almond crop in California required pretty much every commercially available bee.    And when the hives were sent on from this mass pollination,  a huge number of them fell to Colony Collapse Disorder and most all bee keepers lost huge portions of their livestock.    No smoking gun or easily correctable fix emerged to explain CCD and informed bee keepers have concluded that the stress of pesticides, hard traveling and diets of corn syrup have pushed the bees to their breaking point.

In an appendix,  Jacobsen reports that organic bees are not susceptible to CCD, and that one bee keeper in particular has had success in keeping bees in self constructed natural hives,  rather than the metal boxes with racks that are the modern commercial hive.    Jacobsen makes clear, however, that this is not a viable solution for commercial bee keepers.    In the end,  Jacobsen sees an agricultural crisis of epic proportions and predicts that the commercial bee keeping industry may well die off.    Jacobsen hopes that readers who become interested in bees through his book may themselves become amateur bee keepers and provides excellent information for anyone looking to start out in this hobby in yet another  appendix.

If, like most people, you never really thought about the role bees and other pollinators play in modern agriculture,  Fruitless Fall is an eye opening book and is Very Highly Recommended.   Buy Now–$25