My last post got me thinking about Borg bees. After all, if you can introduce liquid nitrogen into a hive, and then select for the colonies that clean up corpses quickly, you can (apparently) help bees defeat an enemy that seems every bit as nasty as the Borg. The varroa are mites that lay eggs inside bee cells and drink bee blood. Even the borg more or less assimilated in nice clean craters, none of this vampiric horror genre for them. Would bees ultimately survive the varroa? Are you willing to bet the ranch (in this case, the things bees do that allows for things like plants, or ranches for that matter) that they would? This is the kind of cyborg gambit that is more and more a staple not only of sci fi but of responses to emergent problems in plant and animal species.
And if you can create another kind of cyborg bee, one with a radio transmitter backpack, then you can track them. In the study I cited, “Large-Range Movements of Neotropical Orchid Bees Observed via Radio Telemetry,” 16 neotropical orchid bees outfitted with transmitters were tracked. Why do this? The reasons are numerous:
1. Bees are arguably the most important pollinating groups for flowering plants.
2. Radio telemetry overcomes previous problems with tracking such bees.
3. Accurate tracking may help scientists “make testable predictions concerning mutualisms, bee biology and parasitism, and the remarkably rapid radiation of angiosperms.”
4. Bees are now seen as doing ecological work (the article calls this “insect ecosystem service”). Because this work is threatened by human interference, we need to document the services and their importance, as well as the places we can address human and other threats to bees as service workers.
I was a little stunned, reading this article, to discover the number of insects that have been tracked using radio telemetry: “carpenter bees, beetles, Mormon crickets, and migrating dragonflies.”
And I found the branching series of articles cited by this one to be increasingly alarming about bee population declines. One, by Cameron et al, “Patterns of widespread decline in North American bumble bees,” found that the “relative abundances of four species have declined by up to 96% and that their surveyed geographic ranges have contracted by 23–87%, some within the last 20 y. We also show that declining populations have significantly higher infection levels of the microsporidian pathogen Nosema bombi and lower genetic diversity compared with co-occurring populations of the stable (nondeclining) species. Higher pathogen prevalence and reduced genetic diversity are, thus, realistic predictors of these alarming patterns of decline in North America, although cause and effect remain uncertain.”
As I read on, I was amazed to see that the bees themselves only weighed a few times what the transmitters weighed, and so the results obviously are possibly compromised by this (would the bees have travelled farther or differently absent their heavy insect High School with textbooks backpacks?). And once again I was reminded that science isn’t always using rare materials; here the cyborg bees
were fitted with small (300mg) radio transmitters (Sparrow Systems, Fisher, IL, 2 radio pulses per second, 378 MHz, antenna length 42mm) at the dorsal thorax using minute amounts of a combination of eyelash adhesive (Andrea glue, American International Industries, Commerce, CA) and superglue (Krazy Glue, Elmers, OH).
Yup, crazy glue and eyelash adhesive. And off they flew, one right across the water to the Panama Canal for a daycation before returning to his normal ‘home’ range.
The third kind of cyborg bee doesn’t wear a backpack, but will be responsible for their contents. An article at Ghacks.com reports that a company called Insentinel is training honeybees to sniff tiny concentrations of suspicious chemicals.
In each case, the bee is somehow altered for some reason, using technologies that range from clearly insect-machine to a less machinic, more “shaper” use of technology (selecting, training, etc). And in each article there is both a “gee whiz” element, and a notion of taking an individual body or hive and altering it for human purposes. However, if we move to a slightly larger cyborg unit,we can see that the bees are part of a huge and complex cybernetic system of flowering plants, declining bee populations, human factors such as environmental toxins and even (purportedly) cell phone/Wifi interference.
This move from the individual cyborg bee to the cyborg problems faced by bees, whether Borged or not, is often what is missing from the popular media representations of bugs with attachments (like the military’s experiments in flying beetles as recon cyborgs) . The larger context s are often not seen as examples of a cyborg society, in which the bee is always/already technologically affected whether or not a radio is superglued on its back.
And the larger context is grim. Americans depend on honeybees from California and Florida; according to popular articles like ABC news’ “Honeybees Dying: Scientists Wonder Why, and Worry About Food Supply,” about a third of our food depends on bee pollination. [http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/honey-bees-dying-scientists-suspect-pesticides-disease-worry/story?id=10191391&page=2].
But in 2009 “almost 29 percent of the bee colonies in the United States collapsed, say scientists who surveyed commercial beekeepers and brokers. That's slightly less than the 36 percent loss in 2008 and the 32 percent counted in 2007, but an informal survey just finished suggests that the die-off continues.” And of course the causes are very difficult to track, and may be multiple. The effects are easier: more bees dying, more expense in restocking bee numbers by beekeepers, resulting in more expensive almonds, apples, soybeans, strawberries. And animals feed on pollinated crops, so there is a multiplier effect on costs there as well.
So the bees are part of a complex that includes natural elements (mites, viruses, funguses) and potentially human/technological ones (pesticides and other toxins; electromagnetic radiation from cell phones). And they are undervalued workers in a ecological service economy that includes many many insects. A study by Christopher Mullin of Penn State found a wide variety of pesticides in hives, and though no one toxin seemed concentrated enough to be lethal, the fact that there were 98 pesticides and metabolites is obviously of concern.
At the end of the ABC article on honeybees, a beekeeper refers to bee population collapses in Europe and India. He is quoted as saying,
"In many ways we view honeybees as an indicator species," like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, he said. "We don't know what's going on. And we all share the same earth.
As we use more and more cyborgian methods to investigate bees and even intervene to help them survive, I can’t help see the irony of the situation: over the course of the Industrial and post – Industrial revolutions, we’ve created a cyborg society that is woefully ignorant about the value of the damage we do to the organic half of the cyborg society equation. And the massive cyborg bodies we’ve built, Borg-like constructions called transnational corporations, continue to chew up resources and ignore feedback loops from a wide range of systems in danger of collapse.
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