You'd be ready to collapse, too
From Rowan Jacobsen's Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis:
What causes stress in bees? Pretty much the same things that cause stress in people.
Picture an ideal workday. You wake up from a deep night's sleep and eat a healthy breakfast that provides plenty of good muscle food as well as brain food, so you operate at peak efficiency. All day you work in a comfortable environment with few distractions and an optimal temperature so you don't have to waste energy shivering or sweating to maintain your temperature. Your exposure to toxins is minimal. The support of your friends and family is strong. You remain alert and relaxed throughout the day, and you are incredibly productive.
Now picture a different scenario. You stagger off a coast-to-coast red-eye flight and chug a Pepsi for breakfast to revive. You hop in your rental car and head for your business meeting, but wouldn't you know it, the GPS is malfunctioning in the car and you get lost. You show up for the meeting late, edgy, and shaking. You have to excuse yourself to hit the bathroom because you've got a stomach bug and the antibiotics just aren't helping. Not to mention the fleas that seem to be leaping from the carpet into your socks. Halfway through the meeting a pest-control guy steps in and sprays the room with a white fog that makes you retch. You are useless throughout the meeting and don't make the sale you'd hoped to make. But you can't dwell on that because you have to head directly to another meeting. In fact, you have meetings all day, until late at night, and then you have to hop another red-eye home. No time to sit down and eat, so you wolf down a box of doughnuts as you drive.
You're in bad shape. Not only are you constantly irritable because of the impossible schedule, but lack of sleep, a sugary diet, and chemical contamination are taxing your immune system. You'll probably get more illnesses, and your work performance will continue to suffer. When you finally make it home to your mate, you won't be terribly interested in romance, because you've got too much on your mind -- such as the fact that your kids seem to have some sort of learning disabilities.
We all have limited energy reserves, and anything that saps those reserves counts as a stressor. Fighting illness, uncomfortable travel, detoxifying dangerous chemicals, worrying about threats, or forcing yourself through a day when you're sleep- and food-deprived all take extra energy that would otherwise be channeled into long-term health projects like the immune system, reproductive system, and the body's ability to repair cellular damage.
A honey bee is designed to lead a life of slow, controlled progression from brood to house bee to forager. Viruses and other pathogens have accompanied honey bees throughout their two-million-year history, but they normally play a quiet, background role. A bumper crop of flowers can't be counted on every year, but there are usually enough varieties out there, and enough food stores in the hive, that something has always been available. Life should be slow, predictable, and low-stress.
Unfortunately, in 2008, most honey bees aren't leading that kind of life. Trucked to new sites every few weeks, jacked up on high-fructose corn syrup, dosed with pesticides and antibiotics, invaded by parasites, and exposed to exotic pathogens, they are worn thinner and thinner. Like us, honey bees could drug off one or two of these stressors -- a mite here, a bad eating day there -- and perform normally, but the combined effect of all those stressors, the steady drum beat day after day, takes its toll: suppressed immune systems, inhibited reproduction, shortened life expectancy, failure to thrive. Eventually it takes just one more push to send them off the edge of a cliff.
-- Ibid, pp. 138-140
We are pushing the honey bee to the very edge of extinction. And when the honey bees is gone, we will soon follow, for every fruit, nearly every vegetable that sets seed, and a host of other plants all of which are the fodder of countless wild herbivores, which are in turn the meat of wild carnivores )not to mention all our stock animals, pets, and work animals), are dependent on the honeybee for pollination.
What causes stress in bees? Pretty much the same things that cause stress in people.
Picture an ideal workday. You wake up from a deep night's sleep and eat a healthy breakfast that provides plenty of good muscle food as well as brain food, so you operate at peak efficiency. All day you work in a comfortable environment with few distractions and an optimal temperature so you don't have to waste energy shivering or sweating to maintain your temperature. Your exposure to toxins is minimal. The support of your friends and family is strong. You remain alert and relaxed throughout the day, and you are incredibly productive.
Now picture a different scenario. You stagger off a coast-to-coast red-eye flight and chug a Pepsi for breakfast to revive. You hop in your rental car and head for your business meeting, but wouldn't you know it, the GPS is malfunctioning in the car and you get lost. You show up for the meeting late, edgy, and shaking. You have to excuse yourself to hit the bathroom because you've got a stomach bug and the antibiotics just aren't helping. Not to mention the fleas that seem to be leaping from the carpet into your socks. Halfway through the meeting a pest-control guy steps in and sprays the room with a white fog that makes you retch. You are useless throughout the meeting and don't make the sale you'd hoped to make. But you can't dwell on that because you have to head directly to another meeting. In fact, you have meetings all day, until late at night, and then you have to hop another red-eye home. No time to sit down and eat, so you wolf down a box of doughnuts as you drive.
You're in bad shape. Not only are you constantly irritable because of the impossible schedule, but lack of sleep, a sugary diet, and chemical contamination are taxing your immune system. You'll probably get more illnesses, and your work performance will continue to suffer. When you finally make it home to your mate, you won't be terribly interested in romance, because you've got too much on your mind -- such as the fact that your kids seem to have some sort of learning disabilities.
We all have limited energy reserves, and anything that saps those reserves counts as a stressor. Fighting illness, uncomfortable travel, detoxifying dangerous chemicals, worrying about threats, or forcing yourself through a day when you're sleep- and food-deprived all take extra energy that would otherwise be channeled into long-term health projects like the immune system, reproductive system, and the body's ability to repair cellular damage.
A honey bee is designed to lead a life of slow, controlled progression from brood to house bee to forager. Viruses and other pathogens have accompanied honey bees throughout their two-million-year history, but they normally play a quiet, background role. A bumper crop of flowers can't be counted on every year, but there are usually enough varieties out there, and enough food stores in the hive, that something has always been available. Life should be slow, predictable, and low-stress.
Unfortunately, in 2008, most honey bees aren't leading that kind of life. Trucked to new sites every few weeks, jacked up on high-fructose corn syrup, dosed with pesticides and antibiotics, invaded by parasites, and exposed to exotic pathogens, they are worn thinner and thinner. Like us, honey bees could drug off one or two of these stressors -- a mite here, a bad eating day there -- and perform normally, but the combined effect of all those stressors, the steady drum beat day after day, takes its toll: suppressed immune systems, inhibited reproduction, shortened life expectancy, failure to thrive. Eventually it takes just one more push to send them off the edge of a cliff.
-- Ibid, pp. 138-140
We are pushing the honey bee to the very edge of extinction. And when the honey bees is gone, we will soon follow, for every fruit, nearly every vegetable that sets seed, and a host of other plants all of which are the fodder of countless wild herbivores, which are in turn the meat of wild carnivores )not to mention all our stock animals, pets, and work animals), are dependent on the honeybee for pollination.