What Was Behind the Honey Bee Wipeout?

[marmar]

from Terrain, via AlterNet:



What Was Behind the Honey Bee Wipeout?

By Gina Covina, Terrain. Posted October 16, 2007.


Everyone has a theory why the honeybees started dying off. Try malnutrition.



On Alan Wilson's table at the Oakland Farmers' Market, row after row of glass honey jars catch the early morning sun that angles down Ninth Street. Some of the honey gleams a reddish brown, some a paler amber, depending on the particular mix of flower species the bees foraged. All of it was produced by Wilson's colonies, which number a third of what he had last fall, before the infamous bee die-off that afflicted growers around the world. "I'd better get the honey while I can," one customer remarks.

The flurry of media attention given this winter's bee losses, now labeled "colony collapse disorder," has updated the world of bees for a heretofore-clueless public. Our image of honeybees is a lot like our bucolic images of farm animals -- and just as far from the brutal truth of today's corporate agriculture. We picture fields of clover, blossoming orchards, the wildflowers beneath the trees, filled with happy bees industriously gathering nectar and pollen to take back to the hive. As the bees gather pollen, they transfer it from plant to plant, thus assuring cross-pollination.

Fewer people can picture what happens at the hive, where the bees feed the protein-rich pollen to their developing brood. The adults live on honey they make from collected nectar -- sipped from the throats of flowers into the bees' honey stomachs, disgorged at the hive into the hexagonal wax combs made by the bees, fanned by bee wings to evaporate excess moisture until it reaches the perfect syrupy consistency, and then sealed with a wax cap to keep it clean and ready to sustain the colony over the winter. In order to do all this, bees rely on a diverse range of flowers blooming over a wide stretch of the year.

The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is a European native, one of very few bee species in the world to store honey in bulk and live fulltime in large colonies (30,000 to 100,000 individuals). It is the only bee with a long history of intensive management by people. For almost all of this time, and continuing today in many parts of the world, the rosy picture of bee life painted above is largely accurate. But when beekeeping meets industrial agriculture, the result is very different. Colony collapse disorder may have many contributing causes, but it comes down to bees hitting the biological limits of our agricultural system. It's not so much a bee crisis as a pollination crisis. And we may end up calling it agricultural collapse disorder. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/environment/65289/

[mike_c]

1. recommended-- this is a pretty good article, mostly spot on....

It missed some of the latest research results into CCD, mentioned that silly cell phone debacle, which should just be quietly forgotten, and worst of all, used the Einstein non-quote that aside from being bogus is patently false (only about 30 percent of human agriculture is insect pollinated, and honey bees account for only a portion of that, albeit a big portion of the agribusiness end). What this article did best was shine a light on big ag and a style of husbandry that is entirely profit driven. The California almond crop is the largest managed pollination event in the world, and it-- and other practices like it-- are ultimately not sustainable IMO.

[Javaman]

2. Bees can't surf. nt