TWILGHT OF THE BEES

Aeswiren brings us back from turkey euphoria with a dose of sobering reality.

“Right now the gathering crisis of the honeybee is out of the headlines, because it's winter in the Northern Hemisphere. But as soon as spring arrives--beginning with the great Almond pollination in California in February, the disintegration of the US Beekeeping industry will be glaringly obvious once again. CCD-- Colony Collapse Disorder was the big story last summer and spring. The question posed by mainstream media was "what's killing the bees?" The answer is not one that either the media or the world will really want to hear.Read "Fruitless Fall-- the Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis" by Rowan Jacobsen (Bloomsbury USA) for all the details. Essential points:-- Square large cell industrial hive "frames"-- with 5.4 mm sized cells-- are as alien to bee nature as factory farming is to cows, pigs and chickens. CCD is most probably the result of multiple stresses on bees-- from being shipped around the country to work various crops, to being exposed to pesticides, especially the new, insidious neonicotinoids like imidacloprid, to the horror of infestation with Varroa Mites (imagine doing hard physical work with two or three ticks the size of teapots sucking your blood). At a certain point, the bees are so weakened they can't keep up bee life, the neonicotinoids overwhelm their ability to "think" straight as a group mind and they disperse and die.Africanized bees-- smaller than the gentle Italian origin industrialized bees, build smaller combs with smaller cell size and destroy Varroa mites. However, they are impossible to use in an industrial way, for their famous orneriness.However-- allow industrialized bees to work with small cell sizes – closer to their natural range-- and they too get rid of Varroa Mites. The difference seems to be that in the 5.4 mm cells the mites can hide behind the larvae and pupae they are parasitizing without making noise. In 4.9 mm cells, they can't help but make sound moving around. Nurse bees detect them and chew their legs off and toss their bodies out of the nest.In the wild, bees make different sizes of cells and bees through the season, and produce small bees for over wintering, and in the spring, but larger bees in mid summer and fall. The industrial bee hive doesn't allow for this, being one size fits all, all year round.As a business, Bee Keeping is as underwater as a Sub Prime Mortgage. Costs have reached something in the order of $100 a hive per year, but today, hives can only produce about $50 to $80 worth of honey. This is why the huge Almond Pollination Frenzy in California every February is crucial to bee keepers now. California produces 80% of the world's almonds, and world consumption of almonds is soaring. Almond Growers must have bees to pollinate their trees or they get no almonds and currently they are spending about $2000 per acre to produce between 2,000 and 3,000 lbs of almonds for which they are averaging $2 a pound. Out of the $2000 they now pay beekeepers $150 to $180 per hive. However, so many industrialized hives are sickly, weak or dead, that there is now considerable tension between almond growers and beekeepers over the issue of insufficient pollination. On the other side of the coin, so many hives die from being shipped to California-- whether from stress or disease picked up from other hives-- that beekeepers have to factor in losses of as much as one third of their hives.Without honeybees a huge range of crops-- from Oranges to those Almonds will either cease to exist, or have to be pollinated by hand. Hand pollination is becoming common in parts of china that are too toxic for bees or any other pollinators to survive in. Hand pollinated fruit in the USA? Likely to be very expensive. Without pollinators, large sections of US Agriculture are quite likely to collapse and disappear. Honeybees are the canaries in the coalmine when it comes to industrialized agriculture. The whole system is perversely exploitative, unhealthy and unsustainable. As it decays and quite possibly breaks down, food quality will diminish even further and prices will rise quickly.”