Disappearing bees, and other myths and conspiracies

[urbpan]

I've been feeling some pressure to write about the great bee disappearance even though I don't really know too much about it, and the fact that the mainstream media is all over it kind of turns me off. I do feel like my role is to straighten people out about the hype, and to correct some important misconceptions. The phenomenon is spooky, because the bees that are disappearing are just disappearing. They aren't dropping dead in their hives, they are flying away and leaving the hives empty.

Anyway, important things to know: We are talking about honeybees, semidomestic insects native to Eurasia that have been kept for honey production for millennia. Not any of the other several thousand species of bees, wasps, hornets, etc. (But then again, if those disappeared, it wouldn't be as obvious, because people don't keep them in semi-captive colonies.) So if you are worried about how wild plants in North America are going to reproduce without honeybees, don't, because those wild plants will be pollinated by whatever was pollinating them for the millions of years they existed before honeybees were introduced.

The big problem (and the reason that the corporate controlled media would bother to cover a story about an insect species' decline) is that honeybees are used to pollinate commercial crops. Hives are put in to trucks and driven hundreds of miles to farms, and allowed out to pollinate fields of melons, or orchards of plums or whatever crop needs a pollinator to 'bear fruit.' These large scale beekeepers are the ones who are finding big chunks of their (flock? herd?) animal collections simply empty. They are also the ones putting their bees through the stress of a ride on a truck, they are the ones feeding their bees high fructose corn syrup to make up for the fact that many crops are poor nectar producers, and they are ones exposing their bees to crops that have been given insecticides that make all parts of the plant poisonous including the nectar and pollen.

"Why are the bees declining?" begins to sound a little coy, if not naive. (If only someone would write a groundbreaking book about the dangers of widespread insecticide use...)

If you continue to be curious about the missing bees, please read this article: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=1829

Comments

[ankhanu.livejournal.com]

I've heard the Halifax farmer's market is very good. I haven't been there though.

Unfortunatley, the local grocery stores are not very helpful to our local producers, causing them to lose a lot of crop. They won't put in orders for large quantities of produce early enough for the producers to harvest the orders and are too willing to go to imported products for lower costs (and generally quality), resulting in producers not knowing if an order will even be placed. I'm glad I'm not trying to make a living in agriculture :P

[silvaerina-tael.livejournal.com]

The Halifax market is huge, and very diverse, never mind labyrinthine. I'd have to check about whether the local groceries do that here as well. They probably get more money from the larger growers in Ontario and the New England States (incentives) than local. I remember reading a paper that states only 15-20%, if that, of food is grown in the Maritimes for the Maritimes. I found this rather disturbing.

[ankhanu.livejournal.com]

Sobey's seems to be particularly uncooperative in working with local producers, though Superstore isn't fantastically cooperative either, but a bit better. At least this is what I've gathered from working with a few growers on CB. The growers in the Valley and Truro might have an easier time, but I doubt it.

[silvaerina-tael.livejournal.com]

That's the feeling I got, which is why farmer's markets are rather big here. And with that article on the insecticides used on a lot of crops that bees pollinate, I'm even more leery of buying crops shipped from away, never mind the honey, and with practices I know nothing about.