Bee keeping for the energy descent future

The co-originator of permaculture is upbeat on the prospects for apiculture as a sustainable and resilient livelihood in the future. Bees are livestock that free range up to 2km from home across all boundaries and barriers, harvesting nectar and pollen sources using their own amazing intelligence and communication. Honey is a compact, self preserving store of wealth that makes an excellent tradeable surplus in any economy that might survive or emerge in an energy descent future.

Honey production is one of the few yields that has not significantly increased as a result of the industrialisation of agriculture. The gains in honey yields from sugar feeding, chemical control of pests and diseases and migratory harvesting across whole continents have been neutralised by the loss of forage from forests, wild spaces and pastures combined with the increasing toxicity of agricultural landscapes. In the USA and Europe pollination services for massive monocultures, rather than honey, provide most apiarists with a living.

The exclusion, morbidity and mortality of bees due to the industrialization of agriculture should be seen as “the real canary in the coalmine” warning us that we might be next. One of the most shocking facts revealed in the doco Honeybee Blues, is that it takes more than half the bee hives in the USA to pollinate the Californian almond crop (50% of world production of almonds) and that it still requires an annual airlift of verroa mite free bees from Australia to complete the job. The arrival of verroa in Australia could see the collapse of almond yields in California (and a consequent spike in the world price of almonds).

To understand the attractive prospects for apiculture I need to explain the rather sobering prospects for agriculture more generally.

The permaculture vision of urban and garden agriculture replacing globalised markets for horticultural products is one that has been given a huge boost by understanding the implications of peak oil. Sedentary bee keeping is an obvious element of that vision, but the combination of peak oil, climate change and economic contraction, if not collapse, will generate many challenges for that permaculture vision of an alternative food system. Those challenges could make bee keeping a more important, even central element of garden agriculture for the future. read more at energy bulletin