Where are the bees?

May 06, 2013

African tradition has it that bees in a home often denote that there are visitors on the way.

By Gerald Tenywa

trueUntil World Environment Day, June 5, in a campaign, Save Lake Victoria, Vision Group media platforms is running investigative articles, programmes and commentaries highlighting the irresponsible human activities threatening the world’s largest fresh water.Lake Victoria is under threat and the very people this water source is supposed to serve are the ones threatening its existence.

African tradition has it that bees in a home often denote that there are visitors on the way. Whether this is true or not, the silence caused by absence of bees at Namulanda along Entebbe Road is becoming too loud for the local residents to bear.

The bees, experts say, are part of the silent victims of a chemical war on pests by flower farms around Entebbe peninsula.

They say this silence is making fruit trees along the lake shores barren for lack of pollination. In some cases, frustrated farmers are cutting down the barren fruit trees such as mangoes and turning them into firewood.

Not only does cutting down of the trees fuel poverty, it also exposes the soil to erosive agents such as rain, which leads to silting of the lake.

 “The warm relationship between us and bees is divine,” says Godfrey Mugerwa, a resident of Namulanda.

He adds that when the earth was created, bees were man’s best friend. “The bees pollinate our crops, so when you kill the bees, you kill the earth because no food would be produced,” he says.

FARMERS LEFT IN TEARS

In a scene reminiscent of the biblical barren fig tree, Mugerwa and thou­sands of residents of Namulanda, helplessly point at their fruitless mango trees. They say the flower farms around the lake have become poisonous to the bees.

 “It is now fruiting season and I would have expected to see bees coming to the garden,” says Mugerwa, adding that: “I want you to tell me if you have seen bees in the last one hour we have walked together

When we complain, politicians say we are against the flower farms.”

 His neighbour, Josephine Kibirige, who used to work on one of the flower farms, says they started observ­ing a decline in the population of bees in the last decade.

The LC3 for Sissa points out that complaints started flooding the sub-county offices after the setting up of flower farms along the shores of Lake Victoria.

As politi­cians   turned into praise singers for the flow­er sector for providing employment and raking in billions of shillings into the economy, the gains were coming at the expense of the pollinators and large amounts of water sucked in by the farms to irrigate the flowers.

 Such fears are shared by leading scientists at Makerere University, the National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) and Nature Ugan­da, a local NGO.

This has prompted studies that have established that the productivity of farms in the vicinity of flower farms has dropped.

NEMA REACTS

A team of scientists led by NEMA found that the bee population in villages around the flower farms had declined. Dr. Tom Okurut, the executive director of NEMA, says this suggests that pesticides have a hand in the decreasing bee population, but was not conclusive.

“The study shows the bee popula­tion has declined. But the question is, has it declined because of flower farming or other factors? We need further studies in order to have a conclusive answer.”

Other sources say there is need to isolate the particular agro-chemical that could be affecting the bee population.

“We need to identify the particular chemical by exposing the bees to different chemicals and see how they respond,” a source who preferred anonymity, told Sunday Vision.  

While NEMA’s study on flower farms did not produce conclusive results, research elsewhere has  linked the decline of the bee popula­tion to rampant use of pesticides.

This, according to Anthony Wolibwa, an environmentalist, is the reason why most flower farms are shifting from Europe to countries like Uganda, with poorly implemented environmental regulations, and where labour and water are cheaper.

“Governments are too hungry for dollars and they will accept flowers wholeheartedly, even when they know that they are polluting the environ­ment,” says Wolibwa.

He adds: “Flower investors are treated like sacred cows because they are given so many privileges such as tax holidays. 

After the expiry of the period for the tax holiday, they shift to another country.”  As the investors play hide-and-seek in the less developed countries, the bee population and human health suffer.  

“We moved around the flower farms and the fruiting was so poor,” Wolibwa says. “The chemicals kill indiscriminately.

Not only is it danger­ous to bees, but also to human health. It is not easy to avoid chemicals, but the problem is poor pesticide management.

When you go to flower farms, you find poor disposal of flower cuttings. Bees also take chemicals through water. The poor management causes leakage into the environment,” he explains.

MONOCULTURE HURTING DIVERSITY

In addition to pesticides, research­ers at Nature Uganda say mono­culture such as tea or sugarcane growing has less diversity in relation to plants, birds and bees.

“We conducted case studies and discovered that monoculture farms had less diversity than mixed farms,” says Achilles Byaruhanga, the director of Nature Uganda, a partner of Birdlife International “In areas where there are different crops, you find more plants, bees and birds,” he says.

This, according to Byaruhanga, means that farmers around the lake, where banana and coffee growing has dominated the landscape for centuries, have been bet­ter stewards of the environ­ment than the expanding flower farms and plantations of sugarcane and tea.

Similarly, plantations  around large forests such as Mabira have higher production than areas further away.

As deforestation widens, now estimated at 92,000 hectares, pollinators are disappearing.  “The catchment is under attack be­cause of habitat destruction and the use of pesticides,” says Byaruhanga.

WHAT DO WE STAND TO LOSE?

As a result of pesticide use and habitat destruction, according to Byaruhanga, agro-production declines by 40%.

“Bees are extremely important. Pollinators literally put money in our pockets. It is not surprising that farm­ers around flower farms are cursing because losing bees means food insecurity and economic insecurity,” Byaruhanga says.

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