Today's Stories

September 14, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Health Care Deceit

M. G. Piety
The Danes Do It (Health Care) Better

September 11-13, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Big Speech: Math Trumps Rhetoric

JoAnn Wypijewski
Trumka Takes Over AFL-CIO

Carl Ginsburg
The Patient as Profit Center

Leonard Peltier
I am Barack Obama's Political Prisoner Now

Franklin Lamb
Ted Kennedy's Changing Take on Israel

Benjamin Dangl
Throwing Bullets at Failed Policies

Mike Whitney
How to Fight Deflation

John Berger
In Search of Antonello

Saul Landau
Watergate and Modern Scandals

Russell Mokhiber
Disgraceful Democrats

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Pryor's Judgment

Felice Pace
NPR's Linda Gradstein Has Done It Again on Gaza

Jordan Flaherty
The Battle Over Discriminatory Housing Laws in New Orleans

Ron Jacobs
It's Time to be Impolite About Afghanistan

David Macaray
The Utility of Boycotts

David Correia
Welcome to the Business-Friendly Carpenter's Union

Robert Bryce
Wind Turbines and Bird Kills

Christopher Brauchli
Defenders of the Classroom

Paul Krassner
Aha! A Few Words About the 9/11 Truth Movement

Charles R. Larson
Deracination

Kim Nicolini
"Extract:" An Exercise in Economic Realism

David Yearsley
Tall Buildings: the Sound and the Silence

Lorenzo Wolff
In Defense of the One Hit Wonder

Poets' Basement
McEnteer and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Pizarchik: the Wrong Choice

September 10, 2009

Joshua Frank
Inside Hanford's B Reactor: a Tour of the World's Most Toxic Nuclear Site

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Bad Money

Brian M. Downing
The State of U.S. National Security

Franklin C. Spinney
Portrait of an Afghan Firefight: Up Close and Personal

Andy Worthington
No Escape From Guantánamo

Chase Madar
Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights

Farzana Versey
A Tale of Two Slums

Ronnie Cummins
Whole Foods, Fair Trade and Organics

Binoy Kampmark
Health Care, Obama and the System

Timothy Lebrón
The Conservative Case for Health Care Reform

Charles R. Larson
A Solution to the Health Care Dilemma

Website of the Day
The Debtor's Revolt Begins!

September 9, 2009

Richard Neville
Trigger-Happy in Afghanistan

Melissa Checker
Double Jeopardy: Carbon Offsets and Human Rights Abuses

Nadia Hijab
Settling for ... Settlements?

Robert Weissman
The Stakes at the Supreme Court

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Arabs Call for General Strike

Russell Mokhiber
Pollan, Mackey, Whole Foods and Single Payer

James Ridgeway
The Dotty Factor: Will Demented Geezers Wreck the Economy?

Richard W. Behan
Obama's Imperative in Afghanistan

James McEnteer
The Photo and the Secretary: How to Appall Robert Gates

Martha Rosenberg
Hatchery Horrors

Website of the Day
Belmondo Verité

September 8, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
The Corporate Stranglehold on Education

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Accused of War Crimes Opposes Investigations

John Ross
Rituals of the Absurd

Jeff Leys
Health Care vs. Warfare: the Future of the Afghan War

Mike Whitney Ashcroft: Repugnant to the Constitution

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Empty Labor Day Speech

Ellen Brown
Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?

Norman Solomon Men With Guns: In Kabul and Washington

Deepak Tripathi
The Axis of Evil and the Great Satan

Laray Polk
Personality Cults, Indoctrination and Inculcation

Charles R. Larson
Just Who Does He Think He Is?

Website of the Day
The President is Not a Guidance Counselor

September 7, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform

Bouthaina Shaaban
In Praise of Admiral Mullen

David Macaray
Obama's Labor Day Report Card

Paul Craig Roberts
Indefensible Nation

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews

Conn Hallinan
Brazil Flexes Its Muscles

Walter Brasch
The Origins of Labor Day, the Unknown Holiday

Mark Weisbrot
IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million

Carl Finamore
China's Birthday Stimulation

C. G. Estabrook
Advance Text of Obama's Big Speech

Website of the Day
One Down, 20,000 to Go

September 4-6, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Deeper Into the Tunnel

Carl Ginsburg
Saving New Orleans' Charity Hospital

Jonathan Cook
The Missing Link in Israeli Organ Theft?

George Wuerthner
The Unintended Consequences of Wolf Hunting

Marc Levy
The Bling They Curse and Carry

Ray McGovern
Holbrooke's Afghan Benchmark

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
It Happened in Miami

Joe Paff
Organizing the Mission

Gareth Porter
Taliban's Tank-Killing Bombs Came From CIA, Not Iran

Devin Beaulieu
Scaremongering About Bolivia and Islam

Anthony Papa
Why Leslie Crocker Snyder Should Not Become New York City's New DA

David Ker Thomson
Love and Dekes in Utopia

Don Fitz
The Case of the Biodevastation 7: What the Police Won't Apologize For

Lee Sustar /
S. Sepehri
The Fallout From Iran's Elections

Jim Goodman
Why Honor Organized Labor?

Wajahat Ali
Domestic Crusaders: Making Muslim American Theater

Ron Jacobs
Agitator Journalism: Remembering Ramparts

Helen Redmond
The Lion Sleeps Tonight: the Crimes and Misdemeanors of Teddy Kennedy

John V. Walsh
Obama to Cindy Sheehan: Get Lost

Charles R. Larson
Mandanipour's Masterpiece: Censoring an Iranian Love Story

Mark Scaramella
Ho-Bleeping-Hum: a Few Well-Chosen Words About Valerie Plame's Book

David Yearsley
Cameron Carpenter's Amazing Organ Transplants

Ben Sonnenberg
Hooking, Breaking Friendships, Cross-Dressing and, Above All, Delphine Seyrig

Poets' Basement
Davies, Orloski and Bready

Website of the Weekend
Architectural Semiotics with Glenn Beck

September 3, 2009

Marcus Rediker
Inside Auburn Prison

Ron Jacobs
Embedded With the Taliban

Mike Whitney
How Bad Will It Get?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Untold Story of the Cuban Five: Indictment À La Carte

Saul Landau
Moby Dick and Asian Typhoons

Anat Matar
Israeli Academics Must Pay a Price to End Occupation

Tanya Golash-Boza
How Immigration Enforcement is Weakening National Security

Dave Lindorff
Which Side Are You On?

Andy Worthington
The Story of Gitmo's Two Syrians

Website of the Day
Plundering Appalachia

September 2, 2009

John Ross
Mexico's Plagues

Vijay Prashad
Hey Ram, the Things the Financial Times Group Does!

Rev. Jim Rigby
Why is Universal Health Care "Un-American"?

Joanne Mariner
What the Inspector General Found

Missy Beattie
Hejira: At Martha's Vineyard with Cindy Sheehan

Soren Ambrose
Multilateral Money

Diane Farsetta
Water: the Newest Wave of Corporate "Social Responsibility"

Nadia Hijab
Mulling Mullen's Message

Shamus Cooke
How to Lower the Deficit Without Killing Social Security

Charles R. Larson
Is Dick Cheney Running Scared?

Website of the Day
Inside the Egg Hatchery

September 1, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Wolf at Trout Creek

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Not Sanctions for Israel?

Mark T. Harris
The Whole Foods Boycott: It's About More Than CEO Hypocrisy

Dean Baker
Bank Profits Are Up: Did You Hear Anyone Say, "Thank You"?

Jeffrey Buchanan
Ending the Human Rights Crisis in KatrinaRitaVille

Robin Mittenthal
A Sea of Monocrops: Old MacDonald Never Had a Farm Like This

Ellen Brown
Mercury Mischief

Martha Rosenberg
Vytorin Marketing is Back

Website of the Day
Crazy Town Hall Protester Interviews

August 31, 2009

Pam Martens
Madoff and the SEC's Revolving Door

Anthony DiMaggio
What Obama Isn't Telling You About Afghanistan

Bouthaina Shaaban
Israeli Bodysnatchers

Ray McGovern
The Press and Torture: Covering for Cheney?

Joseph Shansky
Scenes of Resistance in Honduras

Greg Moses
The Dying Dillos of Austin

Brian McKenna
Pig Sacrifice and Swine Flu Panic

David Macaray
The Tender Trap

Brenda Norrell
Uranium Mining in the Grand Canyon

Paul Craig Roberts
The Environment Loses a Champion

Beth Sherouse
Why I'm Going to the Big Gay March in Washington

Website of the Day
The Failure of the Left Antiwar Movement

August 28-30, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Teddy Kennedy the Hollow Champion

Joshua Frank /
Jeffrey St. Clair
From the Ledge to the Edge: How Tre Arrow Became America's Most Wanted Environmental "Terrorist"

Steve Early
Kennedy's Sins Against Labor

Michael Hudson
Learning About Financialization the Hard Way

Carl Ginsburg
Bernanke in Obamatime

Saul Landau
The Nuclear Gang Rides Again

Dave Marsh
Trapped Again: Michael Jackson's Crossover Dream

Mike Whitney
Band-Aids for the Recession

Dave Lindorff
Obama's War

José Pertierra
A Decision in the Posada Case

Joe Bageant
Obama's Fake Fight for Reform

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Spies Without Espionage

Lee Sustar
On Strike for Health Care Justice

David Ker Thomson
Life in the 'Shed

David Rosen
The Silent Slaughter: Sex Wars and Nation-Building in Iraq

Alison Weir
Israeli Organ Harvesting

Ron Jacobs
Will There be Free Speech in Pittsburgh?

David Swanson
Bush Tortured

Udi Aloni
An Appeal to Israeli Filmmakers

Charles R. Larson
Children During Wartime

Kim Nicolini
District 9: Science Fiction of the Now

David Yearsley
The Wagner Cult in Seattle

Lorenzo Wolff
Riding the Rails with King Curtis

Poets' Basement
Three Poems by Marc Beaudin

Website of the Weekend
The Hidden History of Katrina

August 27, 2009

Andrea Peacock
Bearly Making It: How Many Biologists Does It Take to Count a Dead Grizzly?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Incapacitating the Cuban Five

Ray McGovern
Closing in on the Torturers

Gideon Levy
The Last Refuge: Neve Gordon and the Boycott of Israel

Shamus Cook
World Bankers Agree: the Recession is Over ... Maybe

Norman Solomon
The Afghanistan Gap

Marshall Auerbach
We Already Have a Public Option

Benjamin Dangl
Reclaiming a Continent

Kathryn Gray
The Water Privateers

David Macaray
Please Buy Our Beer (And Join Our Union)

Website of the Day
Stop the Privatization of Ocean Fisheries

August 26, 2009

Gareth Porter
The Leaking Game: Planted News Stories About Iran and Nuclear Weapons

Dave Lindorff
Getting Away With Torture: Holder's Limited, Modified Hangout

Dean Baker
The Reappointment of Bernanke

Laura Carlsen
The Coup and Honduran Women

Paul Craig Roberts
When the Government Comes First

Laura Raymond /
Bill Quigley
Haiti One Year After the Hurricane

Jordan Flaherty
Still Homeless, Still Struggling in New Orleans

Jonathan Cook
The Long Struggle to Reclaim Beersheva's Great Mosque

Robert Bryce
Bamboozled About Energy

Danny Weil
The Future of Charter Schools

Cindy Sheehan
Farewell, Senator Kennedy

John V. Walsh
Cindy Sheehan's Lonely Vigil in Obamaland

Website of the Day
The President's Laugh Line

August 25, 2009

Gabriel Kolko
Israel: A Stalemated Action of History

Danny Weil
The Charter School Hype and How It's Managed

Martine Bulard
China's Wild West

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
The Cuban Five: The Face of Impunity

Bélen Fernández
Why Didn't the Leopard Eat Tom Friedman?

August 24, 2009

Danny Weil
Obama and Duncan's Education Policy: Like Bush's, Only Worse

Neve Gordon
Stopping the Apartheid State
Boycott Israel

John Ross
Mexico's Supreme Court Tosses a Bombshell into Chiapas

Open Letter to Kenneth Roth
Why Has Human Rights Watch Fallen Silent on Honduras?

Dan Bacher
A Burston-Marsteller Greenwash:
Westlands Hoards Surplus Water While Farmers Suffer

August 21-23, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Right Wing's Prince of Gonzo

Patrick Cockburn
The Truth About Afghan Election

Ray McGovern
Unwritten CIA Death Contract Awarded to Blackwater

Carl Ginsburg
Paycheck President

Dave Lindorff
American Justice is Not Blind, But it is Truly Sick

M. Shahid Alam
An "Abnormal" Nationalism

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Story of Camp Ashraf

Eric Walberg
Russia/Georgia/U.S. One Year Later
Who Came Out Ahead

No War on the Moon!
In Defense of the Dark Side of the Moon

Gilad Atzmon
The Hostage Dream: Loving Oneself at the Expense of Another

Crawdad Nelson
What It's Like to Die

David Yearsley
Why I Chose to Play Scarlatti on Bainbridge Island

Justin Frew
Grim Times for Irish Travelers

Website of the Day
Picket Whole Foods Friday!

August 20, 2009

Eugenia Tsao
Inside the DSM:
The Drug Barons' Campaign to Make Us All Crazy

Dave Lindorff
The Worst and the Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

Yonatan Preminger
The Strategy Behind Israel's Migrant Labor Policies

Wajahat Ali
The Detention of Shah Rukh Kahn

Website of the Day
How to cope with flu pandemics

August 19, 2009

David Michael Green
Guess What? He's a Terrible President

Paul Craig Roberts
Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs

Marshall Auerback
Debt Revolt? Tax Strike? There are a Lot of Angry People Out There

Franklin Lamb
AIPAC Sends in the Clowns

John Ross
Three Amigos Summit

Marjorie Cohn
Legendary Lawyer Doris Brin Walker Dies; Represented Angela Davis, Smith Act Defendants

August 18, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Specter of Debt Revolt Is Haunting Europe?

Mary Lynn Cramer
Obama-Fraud: Don't Confuse Medicare with Single-Payer

Jonathan Cook
U.S. Turns Blind Eye to Israel's New Separation Policy

Uri Avnery
Whose Acre?

Ralph Nader
Block Obama's Abject Surrender to Insurance and Drug Companies

Bill Quigley & Davida Finger
Katrina Pain Index - 2009

August 17, 2009

Ray McGovern
Can the Washington Post Save Dick Cheney?

Andy Worthington
Bagram Isn't the New Guantánamo, It's the Old Guantánamo

Patrick Cockburn
Life and Death in Baghdad as Americans Leave

Don Fitz
The True Story of Fox's Hero, Kenneth Gladney

P. Sainath
Drought of Justice, Flood of Funds

Helena Cobban
Zionist Pioneer Renounces Zionism

August 14-16, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Health Plans and Death Plans

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Fall of the House of Stanford

Peter Linebaugh
The Commons, the Castle, the Witch and the Lynx

Esam Al-Amin
What Actually Happened in Fatah's Elections?

Marshall Auerback
Why a Debtor's Revolt Would Work

Mike Whitney
Bulletins From Clunkerville

Paul Krassner
Woodstock at Forty

Saul Landau
Health Care and the Seeds of Disunity

Nikolas Kozloff
Colombian Elites Fear Bolivaran Revolution

Henry A. Giroux
Politics After Hope

John Ross
Sleepwalking Through the Minefield

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Land Sale

Isabella Kenfield
Monsanto's Man in the Obama Administration

David Rosen
Sexual Torture, Yet Again

Ron Jacobs
Unconditional Negotiations, Now!

Wajahat Ali
Obama's Immigration Reforms: Neither Humane Nor Thoughtful

David Macaray
Prison Games

Greg Moses
Down in South Texas: the Geometries of Bob Dylan

Charles R. Larson
Egyptian Economics 101

David Yearsley
Stalked by Bill Evans' Ghost: Kind of Blue at Fifty

Lorenzo Wolff
There Ain't Much to Country Livin': the Drive-By Truckers and the Fine Print

Kim Nicolini
Class, Race and Clint

Poets' Basement
Reiss, Ford and Moser

Website of the Weekend
Timidity and Transparency

August 13, 2009

Eduardo Galeano
I Hate to Bother You

Joanne Mariner
Letting Cheney Off the Hook

Michael Donnelly
Burning Forests for Electricity

Norman Solomon
When the Dead Have No Say

Russell Mokhiber
Boycott Whole Foods

Tim Wise
Sick Heil! The Hitlerizing of Obama

Brian M. Downing
Succession and the Pakistani Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Single-Payer and Medicare

David Manning / Miriam Cotton:
Iran Versus Honduras: a Subtle Difference

Martha Rosenberg
John Hughes, Gone With Only 59 Candles

Website of the Day
Congress Can't Find Their As-teroids

August 12, 2009

Michael J. Watts
Nigeria on the Brink

Bouthaina Shaaban
Where are the Arabs to Stand Up for the Hanoun and Ghawi Families?

Ricardo Alarcón
The Cuban Five: Justice in Wonderland

Binoy Kampmark
Terror Australis

Paul Craig Roberts
Concocting the Appearance of Recovery

Alan Farago
Going Down Absurd: the Future of Florida Bay

James Ridgeway
Ghostwriting Your Meds

Dave Lindorff
10 Questions to Ask If You Find Yourself at an ObamaCare Town Hall Meeting

David Macaray
Labor and the Conventional Wisdom

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Assimilation of Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Website of the Day
A Petition in Support of Janice Harper

August 11, 2009

Ricardo Alarcón
Forbidden Heroes

Marshall Auerback
America's Biggest Economic Problem?

Reza Yavari
Inside Iran's Most Infamous Prison

Winslow T. Wheeler
How Congress Pays For Its Pork

Tim Wise
Red-Baiting and Racism

Uri Avnery
A Moral Person

Deepak Tripathi
Getting Away With Torture

Greg Moses
Time to Plan for the Worst

Benjamin Dangl
Boycotting Big Beer

Dave Lindorff
Hecklers Unite! Why Aren't Progressives Disrupting ObamaCare Town Halls?

Website of the Day
What Bush Told Chirac About the Iraq War

August 10, 2009

David Price
Trial by FBI Investigation

Mike Whitney
There is No Recession; It's a Planned Demolition

Alan Farago
Seeds of Destruction: How the National Economy was Wrecked by the Politics of Deregulation in Florida

Conn Hallinan
The Honduran Coup: a U.S. Connection

Russell Mokhiber
Health Care: In Defense of Disruption

Paul Krassner
The Mystery Behind the Manson Murders

Sousan Hammad
Orgy of the Dead: the 2009 Fatah Conference

Jonathan Cook
Israeli School Apartheid

Ira Glunts
Netanyahu's Sister-in-Law Detained by Israeli Police; Calls Evictions an Unjustified Folly

George Wuerthner
Dead Tree Hysteria

Website of the Day
Conyers: ObamaCare is Crap

August 7 - 9, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
It Pays to Have a Nuke

Mike Whitney
Economy on a Scaffold

Elaine C. Hagopian
Obama's Israel Albatross

Carl Ginsburg
RX For Healthcare

Miguel Tinker Salas
Honduras is Only Part of the Story: the Conservative Counter-Attack in Latin America

Saul Landau
The Kidney Broker and the Money Laundering Rabbis

John Ross
The Mexican Genome: Big Science in the Service of Indian Genocide?

Anthony DiMaggio Obama and the Israel Lobby: Origins of Power

John Stanton
Expanding Human Terrain Systems?

Christopher Brauchli Legal Absurdities: Outing Three Strikes

Wajahat Ali
A Muslim American Hero: an Interview with Dave Eggers on "Zeitoun"

Ron Jacobs
As Long as the Wars Continue, We Must Resist Them

Franklin Lamb
Sunday Morning on the Dunes: Cleaning "Free Gaza Beach"

Bruce E. Levine
Protect Us From Our Friends

Michael Winship
Neighborhood Watch for Planet Earth

David Macaray
Glimmers of Hope for Labor?

Stephen Fleischman
Suicide Squad

Robert Bryce
Unplugging the Next Big Thing: the Hype Over Electric Cars

Robert Dodge, MD: Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered

Mark Seth Lender
The Message of the Glossy Ibis

David Yearsley
Vaucanson's Faun and the Duck in the Attic

Ben Sonnenberg
Chris Fuller's Brilliant Debut

Lorenzo Wolff
When Music's the Character

Poets' Basement
Dominguez and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Warren Buffett's Betrayal

August 6, 2009

Ishmael Reed
Let's All Have a Beer

Paul Craig Roberts
The Expiring Economy

William Blum Assassinations and Coups: Keeping Track of the Empire's Crimes

Michael Donnelly
Rod Coronado: the Hardest Working Man in Animal Rights "Terrorism"

Jonathan Cook
Rabbis Ban Marriage for Israeli "Untouchables"

Dave Lindorff
The Health Care Reform Sell-Out

Ellen Brown
The Public Option in Banking

Website of the Day
Ellsberg on Hiroshima

August 5, 2009

Dedrick Muhammad /
Barbara Ehrenreich
The Destruction of the Black Middle Class

Norman Solomon
The Incredible, Shrinking Health Care Plan

William Blum
The Myths of Afghanistan: Past and Present

Gareth Porter
The ISI and the Taliban: US Officials Are Protecting Pakistani Aid to Taliban

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Myth of Medicare for All

Jim Goodman
Obama Needs to Take a Stand on Trade

Nadia Hijab
Playing From Strength in the Middle East

Gretchen Kroth
Guatemala's Garbage Dump Education System

Steve Macek /
Scott Sanders
Privatizing the Airwaves

Sarah Lazare
Inside G.I. Resistance

Website of the Day
The Locavore Myth

August 4, 2009

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Shell Game

Dave Lindorff
The Recession Isn't Over, By a Long Shot

Patrick Cockburn
Did British Bomb Attacks in Iran Provoke Hostage Crisis?

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Campaign to Silence Human Rights Groups

Jeff Sher
Making a Mess of Health Care Reform

Dean Baker
Why Don't We Globalize Health Care?

Andy Worthington
Gitmo as Hotel California

Uri Avnery
A Jeremiad

Mark Weisbrot
U.S.-Brokered Mediation in Honduras Has Failed

Alvaro Huerta
Hold That Dustbin! So Much for the "End of Racism"

Website of the Day
Pentagon to Ban Facebook and Twitter?

September 14, 2009

Gone With the Bees

The Plight of the Bumblebee

By ADAM FEDERMAN

Bombus franklini, a North American bumblebee, was last seen on August 9, 2006. Professor Emeritus Robbin Thorp, an entomologist at UC Davis, was doing survey work on Mt. Ashland in Oregon when he saw a single worker on a flower, Sulphur eriogonum, near the Pacific Crest Trail. He had last seen the bee in 2003, roughly in the same area, where it had once been very common. “August ninth,” Thorp says. “I’ve got that indelibly emblazoned in my mind.”

Thorp had been keeping tabs on the species since the late 1960s. In 1998, the US Forest Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management supported an intensive monitoring project to determine whether the bee should be listed as an endangered species, in part because of its narrow endemism. The total range of B. franklini is only 190 miles north to south, from southern Oregon to northern California, and 70 miles east to west between the Coast and Sierra-Cascade Ranges.

When Thorp began to monitor the bee, populations were robust, and he even estimated their range to be slightly further to the north and southwest than previously believed. The study was, in part, an attempt to find out why franklini’s range is so restricted and other western bumblebees, such as its close relative Bombus occidentalis, are not. Thorp was investigating that question when something else occurred: Populations of both bees began to decline precipitously. “All of a sudden the bees disappeared out from under me,” he says.

Bees, and particularly the European honeybee, Apis mellifera, have come to symbolize a deepening ecological crisis in North America. Colony Collapse Disorder, first reported in 2006, has been described as “an insect version of AIDS,” ravaging honeybee colonies throughout North America. It has become a cause célèbre of sorts, embraced by Häagen-Dazs, which features the bee on some of its pints of ice cream and asks consumers to imagine a world without pears, raspberries, and strawberries. In fact, the US has become so dependent on honeybees for agricultural purposes that in 2005, for the first time in 85 years, the US allowed for the importation of honeybees to meet pollination demands. Although millions of dollars have been invested in an effort to pinpoint the cause, the honeybee lobby and some environmental organizations say it’s not enough, and argue that if dairy cows were disappearing, the response would be slightly more engaged.

The decline of bumblebees has received far less attention, though in the public imagination their plight has often been conflated with that of the honeybee. Not only do bumblebees pollinate about 15 percent of our food crops (valued at $3 billion), they also occupy a critical role as native pollinators. Plant pollinator interactions can be so specific and thus the loss of even one species carries with it potentially severe ecological consequences. As E. O. Wilson writes, “If the last pollinator species adapted to a plant is erased … the plant will soon follow.” There are close to 50 bumblebee species in the United States and Canada that have evolved with various plants and flowers over the course of millions of years; our knowledge of those species, however, is incredibly weak.

In recent years, there has been much loose talk about the overall decline of pollinators, and the causes are manifold: habitat loss, pesticides, the spread of disease, and, without fail, global warming. The tendency to make sweeping claims about the demise of all pollinators has led to a lack of specificity when it comes to why particular species have declined, or in the case of B. franklini, disappeared. One of the only news stories to highlight the plight of bumblebees, published in The Washington Post last August, noted that “the causes of bumblebee decline are not scientifically defined and might be a combination of factors.”

A crucial factor, according to Thorp and other scientists, was the rise of the commercial bumblebee rearing industry in the early 1990s, largely for greenhouse tomato pollination. Captive bees, they say, played a key role in spreading disease, which has led to the decline of several North American species, all of which belong to the same subgenus. If their theory proves to be correct, the rapid growth of the greenhouse tomato industry over the last two decades may have inadvertently wiped out a number of important native pollinators.

Around the same time that Thorp noticed a decline in B. franklini, John Ascher, a research scientist in the division of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History, was having trouble finding samples of Bombus occidentalis, a common western bumblebee, for his personal collection in California. When Ascher went to graduate school in Ithaca, New York, he was able to find samples of Bombus affinis, B. terricola, and B. ashtoni without difficulty. (BB. affinis, terricola, franklini, and occidentalis belong to the same subgenus. B. ashtoni is a social parasite that specializes on members of this group). But in 2001, the bees began to disappear. B. terricola became rare, Ascher says, and BB. affinis and ashtoni nonexistent. The declines that Ascher, Thorp, and others observed were not site specific. A recent study carried out by Sheila Colla and Laurence Packer at York University in Toronto compared surveys of B. affinis – the species most closely related to B. franklini – from 1971-73 and 2004-06 both in Ontario and throughout its native range (18 sites in Canada and 35 in the US). From 2004 to 2006, they found only one individual of B. affinis, foraging on a woodland sunflower in Ontario’s Pinery Provincial Park. None were found in the US.

“It would be like if you went out one day and there were no cardinals, or there were no mockingbirds anymore,” Ascher says. “It’s that obvious to bee people.”

n 1997, just months before he began his monitoring project, Thorp attended a symposium of the Entomological Society of America during which he learned that an outbreak of Nosema bombi – a fungus that lives in the bees’ intestinal tract – had wiped out commercial populations of B. occidentalis in North America. Breeders couldn’t get rid of the disease and were suffering a shortage of colonies. In an e-mail to a bombus list-serv in 1998, Adrian Van Doorn, then head of the pollination department at Koppert Biological Systems, a commercial breeder, noted that they had been rearing B. occidentalis for several years with few problems, but that in 1997 the rearing stock had “become infected with N. bombi.” There was no treatment for the disease, and the breeders were unable to eradicate it. A competing company, Biobest, suffered similar losses, and both companies would eventually phase out production of B. occidentalis altogether. Today they produce only one bee for distribution in all of North America: Bombus impatiens, an eastern bumblebee whose range extends from Maine to southern Florida. After observing sharp declines of B. franklini and B. occidentalis, Thorp began to wonder if there was a possible connection to the disease outbreak that had swept through the commercial facilities.

Thorp knew that the USDA Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) had allowed Biobest to ship queens of both B. occidentalis and impatiens to Belgium, where they were reared in facilities that likely housed the European bee Bombus terrestris, the preferred species of commercial breeders. The colonies were then shipped back to North America and distributed for use in greenhouse and possibly open field pollination in the US. This went on from 1992 to 1994 until APHIS, under pressure from scientists, conservation groups, and even some industry representatives, terminated the practice.

Thorp argues that while the bees were in European facilities that housed B. terrestris, they acquired an exotic strain of N. bombi. When the colonies were shipped back to the US and distributed, the commercial bees, which can easily escape from greenhouses if they aren’t equipped with insect screens (and few were at the time), were able to infect related wild populations. The disease spread from there, carried by impatiens on the East Coast and B. occidentalis on the West.

“Basically, these two species in the West were declining while other bee species were thriving very well in the same areas,” Thorp says. “It was not obvious habitat alteration or pesticides or global warming or other things that could potentially, and have on record, gotten rid of local bumblebee populations in various areas and are threats to bumblebees. This seemed to be very unique and very specific. And then it turned out that people in the East began noticing that two other very closely related species, which were at one time quite common, had also disappeared.”

The evidence to support Thorp’s hypothesis is circumstantial. A sudden and dramatic decline of several species belonging to the same subgenus points to the introduction of an exotic disease. The timing coincides with the outbreak of N. bombi within commercial rearing facilities, and there is an established point of entry via the importation of colonies from European rearing facilities during the early years of the industry. The big question is whether a European strain of N. bombi ever entered the country and whether scientists will ever be able to figure that out.

Both Koppert and Biobest strongly dispute Thorp’s hypothesis and argue that the pathogen entered their facilities from wild bees collected for the purpose of replenishing genetic stock. In the early 1990s, Koppert helped to establish a joint venture, Bees West Inc., which had a rearing facility near Watsonville, California. Tom Kueneman, the founder of Bees West and one of those who opposed the trans-Atlantic shipment of bumblebees, says the company used only three collection sites within about 50 miles of Watsonville, and that there was only one small commercial greenhouse nearby; otherwise, the nearest facilities were at least 150 miles from the company’s headquarters. Kueneman adds that Koppert and Bees West had close to 99 percent of the market share west of the Rockies and that Biobest had a very small presence there. “It’s really a non-story if you want to look at scientific facts,” he says.

Kueneman and Rene Ruiter, Koppert’s general manager, argue that the very wet El Niño years and high humidity of the mid-1990s led to a higher prevalence of N. bombi among native populations of B. occidentalis. When those bees were collected and housed at high density, the disease spread quickly and wiped out the commercial stock.

“Back in the ‘90s, we collected B. occidentalis in California … and it had a lot of nosema,” Ruiter says. “That was the reason why we discontinued B. occidentalis. The bee itself contained nosema and we were unable to stamp it out.”

But at the time, there were few regulations governing what was then a young industry, and no one was keeping a close eye on where the bees were being shipped once they entered the US, if they were housed in facilities with insect screens, and if colonies were properly disposed of after use.

Indeed, the commercial bumblebee industry has grown so rapidly in the last two decades that it is hard to remember what life was like before cherry and grape tomatoes were available in supermarkets year round. Although certain species were exported from England to New Zealand in the 1870s and 1880s for red clover pollination, and attempts to rear bumblebees were made in the early 1900s, their use on a commercial scale is relatively new.

Dr. R. De Jonghe first used B. terrestris for tomato pollination in the mid-1980s and launched Biobest in 1987. “Within a few years in the Low Countries,” writes Hayo H. W. Velthuis in a brief history of the domestication of the bumblebee, “there was hardly a tomato grower left that still used pollination through artificial vibration.” (Artificial vibration refers to the costly practice of hand pollinating tomatoes, the industry norm before the use of bumblebees.) Koppert soon followed suit and began to rear bees for crop pollination on a commercial scale.

Since then, the greenhouse tomato industry has continued to expand – it represents roughly 17 percent of US fresh tomato supply – and with it the use of commercially reared bumblebees. “You can’t grow them on that scale without the bees,” says Martin Weijters, head grower at Houweling Nurseries, a large greenhouse facility in California. Mexico has far outpaced the US and Canada in greenhouse tomato production in recent years, and the use of bumblebees for blueberry and cranberry pollination has become increasingly popular.

In the early 1990s, few had heard of the commercial bumblebee industry and it remains unclear precisely how many colonies were imported from Europe and where they were sent. At the time, there were greenhouse facilities in British Columbia, Oregon, Washington, and California. Biobest’s general manager, Richard Ward, who was not with the company at the time, says they probably imported no more than a few thousand colonies and that most if not all were B. impatiens. Ruiter says that since Koppert never sent queens to Europe, it would have been virtually impossible for an exotic strain of Nosema bombi to enter their rearing facilities.

Thorp argues, however, that the fact that Koppert never sent queens to Europe misses the point. They could have collected bees carrying a nonnative strain of N. bombi when they were replenishing their breeding stock. “If the disease organisms had gotten out into the field, they could easily have picked it up in their collections for replenishing their genetic stock,” he says.

lthough there is a trail of evidence establishing the shipment of queens to Europe and colonies back to North America, there is little documentation of the path the bees took once they returned. In a 2004 article, Robert V. Flanders, former USDA senior entomologist, said that the imported bees were distributed “throughout the United States with courtesy permits issued by APHIS.”

According to Flanders, the bees were to be received by the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture – the company distributing the bees, Beneficial Resources Inc., now defunct, was based in Pennsylvania – where they would be checked for parasites and pathogens. They were also to be accompanied by a zoosanitary certificate from the host country ensuring that the production facilities had been inspected and that the bees were free of pathogens.

Karl Valley, chief of the division of entomology at the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture at the time (and currently chief of the division of plant protection), says that the inspection involved removing a single bee from each package, placing it in alcohol, and examining the exterior portions of the body for mites. They did not look for pathogens or other diseases specific to bumblebees. He doesn’t recall how many shipments they received, where the bees were sent after they were examined, or if records from that period still exist.

Additional specimens were also sent to the Bee Laboratory in Beltsville, MD. According to a permit issued in 1992 and obtained by Dr. Thorp through a Freedom Of Information Act request, some of the bees were quarantined at the Maryland facility. “When cleared,” the document states, “Dr. Shumanuki [sic] will release the bees to you and notify this office.”

Dr. Hachiro Shimanuki was the research leader at the Beltsville Lab at the time and now lives in Florida. He recalls having examined only one sample of bumblebees from Europe over a three-year period and says that the company provided the sample.

“We certainly couldn’t tell you whether it was a one percent sample or a one-thousandth of a percent sample,” he told me. “It was just something that they sent to us as being typical of the kind of shipment they would like to make.”

“There was really no request to look for any particular disease,” Shimanuki adds. “As I recall, I think all it was was: Would the importation endanger our honeybees? That was really the question I guess that we tried to resolve in some way. That was our concern. But other than that, we didn’t know what to look for.”

There’s another note on the permit record. It states that Dr. De Jonghe, a veterinarian and founder of Biobest, is the largest producer of bumblebees in the world and that the bees are “certified to be free of pathogens.”

* * *

Leamington, Ontario (the “Tomato Capital of Canada”) until recently had the highest concentration of commercial greenhouses in all of North America. (That honor now goes to Mexico, where Koppert has had a rearing facility since 2004 and produces B. impatiens, a bee that is not native to Mexico or the West Coast, for crop pollination.) The number of bumblebees needed for greenhouse pollination can reach into the tens of thousands. Houweling Nurseries in southern California, with 124 acres under glass, introduces roughly 20 hives with between 50 and 70 bees twice a week. That comes close to 30,000 bees a year.

Although Houweling installed insect screens on all of its vent windows in 2000 (to keep other insects out, not to prevent bees from escaping), they are not required by law and, without them, worker bees can easily escape, forage for pollen in the wild, and then return to the greenhouse. (According to Kueneman, during the early years of the industry, less than half of all greenhouses were using insect screens.) Hives sent to the West Coast, far outside the native range of B. impatiens, must be equipped with queen excluders – a very narrow rectangular opening large enough only for workers to get out. When the growers are through with the hives, they are required by law to destroy them either by drowning the bees or freezing them overnight.

Michael Otterstatter has studied the interaction between wild bees and pathogens for more than two decades and, five years ago, with a team of scientists from the University of Toronto, decided to look at whether commercial bees had higher rates of disease and if those diseases were spilling into wild populations. Otterstatter conducted a straightforward study that compared the prevalence of four pathogens among bees foraging in close proximity to commercial greenhouses with bees foraging in areas where there were no greenhouses. They sampled from six sites in southwestern Ontario, including Leamington, and found that bees near commercial greenhouses had a much higher rate of disease than those collected elsewhere. In fact, the presence of Crithidia bombi, a gut pathogen that lives within the intestinal tract of bumblebees (like Nosema bombi) and can spread between bees at flowers, was found only in bees foraging near greenhouses.

“It actually turns out to be present in almost 90 percent of the [commercial] colonies we looked at,” Otterstatter says. “Nearly all of them. And the other place that you find this pathogen is in populations of bees right around greenhouses, within a few kilometers….It really looked like a disease that you only find around greenhouses.”

Otterstatter’s research team also found that the prevalence of N. bombi was three times higher at the Leamington site than elsewhere and that the infections tended to be more intense. Otterstatter notes that every study of commercially reared bees conducted in North America, Europe, and elsewhere has revealed very high levels of parasitic organisms, many of which are rare or entirely absent from most wild populations.

The commercial bumblebee industry is relatively young. As greenhouse production has expanded, so has the need for pollinators.
Koppert’s Ruiter points out that his company’s bees were not used in Otterstatter’s study and says that the unusually high rate of disease is not a reflection of the industry at large. “It’s appalling that something like that happens,” he says. “I’m embarrassed for my industry. On the other hand, when I called him about his study, he was forthright in admitting that he didn’t use our material, which is a good sign for us that we are doing what we’re supposed to be doing, which is keeping things disease free.”

According to Ruiter, Koppert’s bees are inspected every two weeks by the Michigan Department of Agriculture and annually by Michigan State University. Ward, of Biobest, says that their facility is inspected on a regular basis without warning and that every shipment of bees made to the US or Mexico must have a health certificate signed by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA).

The rise of the commercial bumblebee industry reveals the limits of APHIS’s regulatory authority. Prior to 1997, when Koppert’s bees were infected with N. bombi, there was a gentleman’s agreement that B. occidentalis would be used only in the western United States and B. impatiens in the east, roughly within their natural ranges. In 1994, when the importation of bees from Europe was discontinued, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy spelled out the agency’s policy in a letter addressing concerns raised by Congressman Sam Farr (D-CA). “Risk assessments conducted by APHIS officials indicate that this type of movement could result in the introduction of bumblebee pests and diseases into new areas, such as eastern species of parasitic nematodes into Western States,” he wrote. Therefore APHIS would not be issuing permits for the movement of eastern species west of the 100th meridian and vice versa.

But now that B. occidentalis has been removed from the market, B. impatiens is shipped freely to western states. When I asked Wayne Wehling, senior entomologist at the USDA, if APHIS still agreed with its earlier risk assessments he said, “Well, yes. That’s the simple answer.

“Certainly we have been all over the board with that,” he acknowledged. “And I think we’ve been all over the board largely because of the lack of clarity in the regulatory authority as to what our capacities really are.”

Although the same concerns apply today, there are few restrictions (other than the use of queen excluders) on the interstate shipment of B. impatiens in the US. The largest greenhouse tomato-producing states – Arizona, Texas, and Colorado – are all states in which the bee is not native, and while the companies are happy to abide by the law, they do not share the concern about the shipment of bees outside of their native ranges.

For conservationists and many scientists, the movement of an eastern species to the West is reckless. If a queen did somehow escape and the bee became naturalized, it could compete with local species for floral resources, and close relatives of B. impatiens would be susceptible to nonnative diseases. “The diseases that are in B. impatiens could be virulent in things out here. We just don’t know and I don’t think we want to risk trying,” Thorp says.

Globally, the issues and potential problems are perhaps even more pressing. B. terrestris has been introduced to Japan and Chile, where it is not native, and has become naturalized. Two parasites previously unknown in Japan, including N. bombi, have entered the country along with the commercial bumblebees. There are reports that B. terrestris has migrated from Chile into Argentina and that the bee may have been spotted in Uruguay as well. It is only in the last few years that the importation of B. terrestris into Mexico has been stopped. According to Wehling, the bee has already established itself in areas surrounding greenhouse production in the state of Michoacan, west of Mexico City.

In Canada, a laissez-faire approach rules. The greenhouse industry in southwestern British Columbia relies heavily on commercial bumblebees and, although queen excluders must be present on all hives shipped west of the 100th meridian, most greenhouses do not have screens covering the vents, so worker bees would have no trouble escaping. Given the urgency of a memo from Agriculture Canada’s Central Plant Health Laboratory to APHIS in 1993, this is even more surprising:

“We really must get together to discuss a plan of action,” it reads. “It appears that attempts to limit the movement of Bombus is not working. Bombus impatiens is being moved into California. Perhaps there is a need to review the whole policy of Bombus importations into North America before all hell breaks loose.”

he battle over the bees echoes other controversies that have erupted around domestication of previously wild species. One example cited frequently in the literature on bumblebees is the spread of sea lice among farmed salmon in the Pacific Northwest, which led to the decimation of wild populations. Many fishermen, conservationists, and activists warned early on that the proliferation of disease among farmed, nonnative Atlantic salmon could spread to wild fish. They were largely ignored and told that no evidence had been found to prove such a hypothesis and that in fact the pathogens had migrated from wild salmon to farm stock.

Large fish die-offs were observed as early as 1989. In 2001, an outbreak of sea lice in Broughton, British Columbia led to one of the most dramatic declines of wild salmon ever seen. In a single generation, local pink salmon runs fell from 3.6 million spawners to 147,000.

Bumblebees, of course, are not salmon, but some of the same principles apply. “Feedlot farming attempts to break immutable laws of nature by overcrowding animals, lowering their genetic diversity and putting them where they do not belong,” wrote Alexandra Morton in an essay on salmon farming published in 2004. The titles of many such essays and books are becoming all too familiar: “Silent Spring of the Sea,” Fruitless Fall, etc. In the case of bumblebees, there is a wealth of evidence pointing to the risks associated with the importation of nonnative species and of pathogen spillover. Yet, according to Otterstatter, Thorp, and others, the regulations in place are hardly adequate to ensure that risks are minimized. Discontinuing the shipment of bees beyond their native ranges and requiring all greenhouses to install insect screens would be a start, they say.

“Bumblebees are marvelous pollinators and I really wouldn’t want to see the industry come to a halt,” Thorp says. “But I would like to see a lot more protection of the potential environmental risk.”

Adam Federman is a contributing writer to Earth Island Journal, where this article originally appeared. His last article for the magazine was on illegal logging in Siberia. He can be reached at: adamfederman@gmail.com

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