The Curious Beekeeper
Pollination Beyond the Plate: The Ladies of Industy
Soon after the phrase “colony collapse disorder” appeared in the press, Americans became obsessed with honey bees and the human food supply. We like to discuss how many mouthfuls of food our bees pollinate and how fast we would starve without them. It’s true that much of our diet — shuffled around the globe in boats, trains, and planes — depends on those little buggers. But that’s not the end of the story.
It’s easy to forget that honey bee pollination goes far beyond fruits, vegetables, and herbs. In truth, the pollination demand for non-food crops is enormous. Besides animal feed, it affects multiple industrial, ornamental, medicinal, cosmetic, and fragrance crops. Honey bees have a wing in many things humans enjoy, including the melon flavor in our toothpaste, the fibers in our clothing, and the specialty oils in our machinery.
Industrial or indirect?
When we think of foods resulting from bee pollination, we often list those we eat directly: apples, cherries, avocados, almonds. But sometimes, the route from pollination to plate is indirect, following a circuitous route from honey bee to grocery store. One of these routes travels through animal feed, and another travels through seed production.
It’s not clear whether the “one of every three bites” many folks credit to pollinators includes meat and dairy. Certainly, farm animals eat many bee-pollinated foods, such as alfalfa, clover, and birdsfoot trefoil. But the amount of bee-pollinated feed animals eat is just as variable as the amount people eat, and the proportions have changed as food and feed production have become more mechanized, supplemented, and processed.
Growers raise certain crops expressly for animal feed, but other sources are easy to overlook, especially when they are byproducts. For example, some growers employ honey bees to enhance soybean yields, a practice that’s effective even though soybeans are naturally self-pollinating. Then, after the bean harvest, they feed the rest of the plant to livestock as a supplement. Before you can say Glycine max, a steak appears on the table. Pass the sauce.
Seeds also follow indirect routes to the table. Bees pollinate many seed crops, such as carrots, broccoli, and beets. Although we don’t eat the seeds directly, we relish the products that grow from them. The same applies to oil crops, like canola and flax: Bees pollinate the flowers that produce the seeds that we plant for the oil.
It’s fun to parse the origin of foods and search for honey bees in their past, tucked covertly in a production line we seldom think about …
