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Antibiotics – the latest threat to our bees

They say what we do to the bees we do to ourselves.

Equally, it seems that what we do to ourselves we are more than happy to carelessly inflict on any other living thing, including our bees.

If bees are in decline it’s not due to some unexplained phenomena. It’s due to human activity; and yet like climate change, we keep looking the other way and making excuses rather than making changes.

While most of us know about the harm that agricultural pesticides do to bees, few may know that we also douse our bees with antibiotics. Beekeepers do this in much the same way as some doctors do with humans – “just in case”.

In large-scale agriculture, particularly in the US and China, bees are essentially ‘factory farmed‘ and beekeepers may apply antibiotics to their hives several times a year – a strategy aimed at preventing bacterial infections that can decimate hives.

You don’t have to think about that for too long to know that the outcome can’t be good.

The practice leaves residues of antibiotics in our honey – a potential health hazard for humans who consume the honey – and, of course, it’s bad news for the bees too.

Beyond pesticides

Indeed, a recent study from the University of Texas found that honeybees treated with a common antibiotic, tetracycline, were half as likely to survive the week after treatment compared to untreated bees.

The reason for this, say the scientists, is (as also happens in humans) the antibiotics killed beneficial gut bacteria that can help to keep pathogenic bacteria in check, break down toxins, promote absorption of nutrients from food and more.

In the bees treated with antibiotics, they also found elevated levels of Serratia, a pathogenic bacterium that afflicts humans and other animals, suggesting that the increased bee deaths might be linked to the loss of that ‘good’ bacteria. And, of course, the more you use antibiotics, the more bacteria evolve to become resistant to the effects – turning prevention into cause.

When I first wrote about this in 2008 I suggested that the thing that connected all the various theories was a “massive failure of these creatures’ immune systems“.

Bees, like humans, have a natural community of microbes in their guts, the ‘microbiome’, which helps modulate behaviour, development and immunity. Also like human bees have specialised gut bacteria that get passed from individual to individual during social interactions.

The research is another illustration of how the indiscriminate use of antibiotics can cause widespread and unintended harm

We’ve been struggling with the issue of Colony Collapse Disorder for more than a decade now. The explanations for it are many and varied: harmful pesticides, habitat loss and disease – often encouraged by the global trade in honeybees and migratory practices of bee keepers – and now antibiotics.

Go organic

Frequent visitors to our site will already know, that we would like to see more farmers make the switch to organic – for our sake but also for the sake of wildlife like bees.

It’s already been shown that common insecticides such as neonics and organophosphates – potent nerve poisons widely used on crops, cause terrible harm to bees. So can the herbicide glyphosate – which has also been shown to increase antibiotic resistance in some bacteria.

That agricultural antibiotics do the same is not exactly surprising – the question is what can we do about it?

Like climate change, protecting bees requires change on all fronts. Certainly pressure needs to be put on farmers to use fewer antibiotics in all their endeavours including honey production. Tighter regulations can make it harder for beekeepers to get hold of ‘just in case’ antibiotics – and there is evidence that regulators are cracking down on the use of antibiotics for bees, though such moves can be slow to come into effect and hard to police.

But consumers can help too, by aligning themselves with brands that understand the issue and work to help bees, by actively choosing organic foods and beauty products, eating local, small scale and seasonal honey (rather than the factory farmed variety) and growing bee-friendly flowers in your garden.

Bees are always busy working for our benefit. It’s time we got busy working for theirs.

Pat Thomas, Editor