Feature

The all important Bees in the Biodiesel equation

Br Dr Garth Cambray

Photo credit: Jim Cambray

Albert Einstein once said, "if bees were to disappear, man would only have a few years to live ". This statement was based on the fact that humans require bees to pollinate many of the crops we rely on for food. As most flowering plants are pollinated by bees a loss of these valuable pollinators means losing food. Looking further ahead, this may also mean a loss of fuel.

When crops are grown in fields, huge numbers of bees are required to pollinate vast areas of flowers which can flower all at once.  To manage this in a sustainable and productive way beekeepers manage large numbers of beehives transporting the key ingredient, the honey bee, Apis mellifera, in boxes to crop farming areas when needed. 

Apis mellifera has a life strategy that makes it suitable for this purpose – like humans, they forms city like structures with division of labour, meaning that a colony of bees in a hive is able to have some bees foraging for pollen and nectar, thus pollinating crops, and bringing protein (pollen) and fuel (nectar) back to the hive. Within the hive, other bees process this into foods and hive parts, and a certain amount of food is invested in defence and climate control. Other bees are in charge of hive cleanliness and many other factors.

As a result of the communal structure of the beehive, it is able to achieve very high levels of productivity and a beehive can support and maintain a large population – even producing enough surplus honey that some of this population can be maintained on savings through winter, allowing the bees to be the first major pollinators to be present in spring. Hence, in large industrial agricultural countries such as the USA, honeybee hives are required in their millions to pollinate crops including almonds, citrus, sunflower, canola, deciduous fruits, squashes, strawberries, soybeans, cotton seed, berries and almost every other crop we can think of that has flowers. In many cases without bees, the crops fail.

With the rapid increase in the cost of conventional fuels, the devastating impact of burning fossil fuels on climate change and biodiversity, globally a sense of urgency has replaced the indifference of the 1990s in finding and developing alternative biofuel replacements. Flowering crops are an important source of raw material for replacement fuels biodiesel and bioethanol.  What happens if we take the bees out of the biodiesel (or biofuel) economy?

Biodiesel refers to that fuel made by reacting an alcohol, typically methanol, with a lipid, in the presence of catalysts, resulting in the creation of a fatty acid alcohol ester. These fuels perform well in a diesel engine, and are the most effective currently available fossil fuel substitutes for diesel engines. Bioethanol, produced by fermentation is the most effective fuel for petrol (gasoline) engines.

Current global biodiesel strategies tend to focus on growing oilseed crops to produce the vast quantities of oilfats needed to make biodiesel. The major oilseed crops are rapeseed and its cousin canola, soybean oil, palm oil, sunflower oil, jatropha oil and then more expensive oil crops such as cottonseed oil and peanut oil, which are too expensive to consider using for realistic biodiesel production.

Of that list, rapeseed, canola, sunflower, oil palm and cottonseed are all crops which require bees for pollination. Without bees, you have no biodiesel – in reality. Every seed from which these oils are extracted required at least one visit by a bee to produce the oil needed to make the biodiesel. For enough fuel to drive a vehicle 1km we are looking at 100's of millions of flowers being pollinated by bees.

As the world, and specifically the rather fuel hungry economies of North America and Europe decide more and more firmly to focus resources on developing a biofuel economy, less and less attention is being focussed on the foundation of this economy, the honeybee. As an example, the European Union has a strategy to ensure that 5.75% of transport fuels used in 2010 will be biofuels.

As the northern hemisphere enters spring, the honeybee colonies are becoming active again, with bees being able to leave their hives, fly out and find pollen to grow their populations and survive. In North America, many of these bees just never came back – something has damaged the ability of bees to return to their hives and the spring pollination season has been, to date a disaster with more than 50% of beehives dying out in early spring around North America, with some areas reporting as high as 70% loss of colonies. This has a direct effect on the current US$14 billion industry supported by bee pollinated crops, but it can have a far larger long term effect on the fledgling North American biofuel industry.

If policy makers and planners in major economies are to take biofuel investments, specifically in biodiesel, seriously, risks to the industry must be minimised. The risk of oil seed crop failure must be minimised in all ways so as to ensure a reliable supply of substitute fuel that will not bring disrepute to the biofuel industry.

In this regard, biofuel, specifically, biodiesel, requires biodiversity in terms of pollinators, and requires more reliable pollinators. African bees, with their greater biodiversity, strength and resilience may be the foundation on which a future North American biodiesel economy will be built.

More information:

  Dr Garth Cambray is a beekeeper and scientist based at Makana Meadery in South Africa.

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 African bees – a solution to North America's bee problems?

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