Maybe I was a bit unfair

A couple of posts ago, I basically excoriated the beekeeping industry for practices that hurt bees and that these practices contribute solely to CCD. That is a bit unfair as there are other factors to consider.

Migratory beekeeping has been happening almost as long as humans have kept bees. Egyptians put hives on barges and coasted them up and down the Nile. Other peoples have strapped them to donkeys to follow the flow. When intercontinental rails opened up, beekeepers were there with their hives. Some bees migrate all season long: Borneo beekeepers sometimes migrate with the bees in a small reversal. CCD didn't affect the Egyptians - but those bees had access to multiple flower types along the Nile's fecund shores.

In America, migratory beekeeping is so popular because the current agricultural model is to lay waste to the land, er, rather...plant one crop and only one crop over all surrounding acreage. This monoculture model directly contributes to the undernourishment of the bees. Even if migratory beekeeping wasn't practiced, this lack of biodiversity would likely have some ill effect on the bees, just not to the same degree.

Due to monoculture crops, the land itself is weakened and must be supplemented with all sorts of synthetic fertilizers to nourish the crops. And, due to the lack of full nutrition to the crops, the weakened crops must be supplemented with all sorts of pesticides. Pesticides kill insects indiscriminately; bees are insects. Get the idea? Most of these pesticides do not kill instantly, but rather allow time for the bees to bring them back to the hive, thereby exacerbating the problems inside the hives with existing miticides. And remember, those pesticides are still present when you eat your fruits and veggies. Some of the pesticides are now systemic to the plants: they become part of the plant so that growers need not worry about rain or watering washing off the posion. Pests thus have no way to avoid the pesticide as it becomes part and parcel with the plant. So, that means you can't wash it off, either.

The problems affecting bees will soon be problems affecting us. To a degree, they already do in that the nutrition we get from monoculture crops is a ghost of what it should be and the pesticide residues. A recent study in Spain found that men between 18 and 23 all have significant traces of multiple pesticides in their blood. Many even had traces of DDT, something that I believe was banned before most of these men were born. The study wanted to see if their was a correlation between pesticides and fertilization or lack thereof. If these residual traces do have an effect on humans, what kind of effect do they have on beneficial insects?

So, and this will seem like crazy talk to those who now my conservative viewpoints, my point of this blog is this: a cycle of bad agricultural practices feeds into bad beekeeping practices and will land all of us in a bad spot if we don't change how we view how and what we eat. Will it be easy? By no means. Change rarely is nor is making the right choices. But that doesn't make it any less necessary.

Posted by Bob Nelson