Charter of San Michele all’Adige: Full English Translation
Edmund Mach Foundation, San Michele all’Adige, June 12, 2018
Appeal for the protection of the biodiversity of native subspecies of Apis mellifera Linnaeus, 1758 in Italy
FEM - General Register 2018 N. 0003490 - E 24/04/2018 - Presidency - Attached Document
Summary
This document, drawn up and signed by scientific researchers and prominent figures in the world of beekeeping and environmentalism, aims to submit to the political administrations the urgency of granting adequate faunal protection to the honeybee (Apis mellifera Linnaeus, 1758) and, in particular, to its native subspecies. This species, despite being managed by beekeepers for many millennia, cannot be considered a domestic animal and, as a critical pollinating insect (insetto pronubo), plays an irreplaceable role in the conservation of biodiversity and therefore in the maintenance of natural balances, without counting its impact on agricultural production.
A. mellifera is an insect originally distributed throughout a large part of Europe, all of Africa (including Madagascar), the Middle East, part of the Arabian Peninsula, and some areas of Central Asia. From Europe, the honeybee was then introduced to the Americas, Asia, and Oceania. As with all wild species, the evolutionary path and current biological characteristics of the honeybee make adaptation to its living environment fundamental for this species. This adaptation to the multitude of environmental conditions present in its vast original range, together with the geological and climatic events of past eras, has led to the subdivision of A. mellifera into 31 subspecies, each originally well-adapted to its own geographical area. The Mediterranean Basin, due to its great variety of environments, expresses the greatest intraspecific diversity.
Over the last century and a half, general technological progress and progress internal to the world of beekeeping itself have involuntarily caused a devastating genetic impoverishment of many of these local populations, with evident repercussions on productivity and health, seriously endangering the conservation of the native A. mellifera subspecies in Europe. The evaluation of the negative repercussions the depletion of A. mellifera subspecies is having on ecological balances and the food production system is ongoing, while the negative effects this problem is producing on beekeeping are known and evident. In this document, the scientific arguments supporting this vision are precisely presented, on the basis of which concrete actions aimed at safeguarding the honeybee, also and above all as a biological entity, can be pursued, according to various operational modalities. This document does not intend to oppose the actions undertaken by the world of beekeeping, but to contribute to a more global view of the very serious problem of the decline of honeybees.
Introduction
The honeybee, A. mellifera Linnaeus, 1758, is the bee that has been used by humans for beekeeping for millennia. The object of predation since prehistoric times, that is, the removal of honey, larvae, and wax from hives found in the wild environment, as has occurred and still occurs today for all species of the genus Apis, but also for other Apoidea apiformes in the tropical areas of our planet, it is precisely the bio-ethological characteristics of A. mellifera that allowed the birth of beekeeping.
There is rich iconographic and documentary evidence relating to this noble human activity, based on archaeological finds dating back at least 4,500 years. For example, among the numerous decorations found in the Temple of Shesepibre in Egypt, built by Nyuserre Ini around 2,500 BC, there is the oldest representation of a complex and evolved management of bees and honey, which undoubtedly attests to a development path of beekeeping techniques that began much earlier. It is very probable, in fact, that beekeeping with the honeybee arose in the same region and more or less in the same period when, in the Fertile Crescent, about 10–12,000 years ago, agriculture, animal husbandry, and animal domestication became established.
Over the millennia, beekeeping has experienced extraordinary development and spread, reaching a great variety of technical solutions, many of which are still preserved today in various areas of the Mediterranean Basin and the Near East.
The honeybee and other species of eusocial Apoidea, which live in complex and permanent societies (such as some tropical bees of the genera Trigona and Melipona), have also inspired a series of symbolisms, beliefs, and myths, and therefore play a great role in the spiritual, cultural, and political evolution of human societies throughout the World.
Despite this very long and prolonged relationship between honeybees and humans, we can declare with certainty that this extraordinary animal has never been domesticated.
Domestication is understood as the process through which an animal or plant species is made domestic, meaning dependent on coexistence with humans and controlled in its conditions of feeding and reproduction by the latter.
Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus, 23–79 AD) had already expressed himself on the fact that the honeybee managed by beekeepers had not become a domestic animal, in the first paragraphs of the book dedicated to bees in his Naturalis Historia (“...cum sint neque mansueti generis neque feri...” or “...not belonging to either domestic animals nor to wild ones...”). Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882), in his work entitled The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, also concluded that it is precisely the biological peculiarities of A. mellifera colonies that prevented this process of domestication.
Even Eva Crane (1912–2007), the greatest scholar of beekeeping in the 20th century, even of the various beekeeping practices worldwide, gives a clear definition of beekeeping while highlighting its extraneousness from the raising of domesticated animals. In fact, Eva Crane defines beekeeping as “the maintenance of strong healthy colonies of honeybees in hives designed for the convenience of the operator, and the removal from the hives (and subsequent processing) of the products for which the colonies are kept.” Even more extraordinary is the comparison this English researcher proposes between beekeeping and the only other human activity similar to it: “The use of bees as micro manipulators to harvest food from plants perhaps has its nearest parallel in the use of cormorants (on a neck-line which prevents swallowing) to catch fish. The beekeeper has an advantage over the fisherman in that the bees convert the nectar into honey, a very high-energy food, before he takes his harvest.” Eva Crane refers to the traditional ukai fishing with cormorants, practiced in Japan.
It is precisely the wild nature ("selvaticità") of the honeybee, its not being a domestic animal, that is the starting point of this document.
Darwin had observed that honeybees behave as wild organisms even when introduced into areas far from their origins; today, when we speak of a wild species and its protection, it is important to establish whether it is a native (autoctono) or non-native (alloctono) organism. The honeybee is native to a large part of Europe, all of Africa, the Middle East, a large part of the Arabian Peninsula, and some areas of Central Asia. Over the millennia, the honeybee has conquered this vast range, characterized by very different climates and vegetation, diversifying, through natural selection, into well-characterized populations that have been identified as subspecies, first based on morphological and ethological bases, and more recently through molecular biology studies.
In animal and plant biology, the subspecies is a taxonomic category consisting of one or more populations differentiated from others of the same species by a set of hereditary diagnostic characters and formed by the selective action of various factors and geographical isolation. However, since there is no reproductive barrier between subspecies, if they come into contact, the populations can interbreed, giving rise to fertile offspring; for this reason, different subspecies are not observed in the same range in nature. It is important to underline, however, that when there is no insurmountable physical barrier between two subspecies, they remain distinct but the presence of a more or less defined hybridization zone is observed in the area of contact.
The majority of A. mellifera subspecies have ranges in contact with one or more different subspecies, but there are also endemic subspecies of islands and therefore not subject to the formation of hybridization zones. If, due to human action, different subspecies are forced to coexist in the same area, they are destined, over time, to lose their respective genetic uniqueness (e.g., A. m. siciliana and A. m. ligustica).
The A. mellifera subspecies identified and recognized by the international scientific community to date are 31.