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Scary their numbers are decreasing. I have a friend who raises them and sells the honey. He has had problems over the years. I love HONEY! So good for local allergies. I've used it to help for years. Plus it tastes so great. I read a book where the child said, "eating honey is like tasting God"
What was killing all those honeybees in recent years? New research shows a link between an increase in the death of bees and insecticides, specifically the chemicals used to coat corn seeds.
Sorry I haven't read the whole thread, but there was an article in the Los Angeles Times within the past week or so saying that bees are making a modest come-back of sorts. The context was the critical role which honey bees play in fertilizing the California almond trees. Apparently beekeepers come from all over the country under contract for this purpose, bringing their hives with them. The window of opportunity is rather short - several weeks if I am remembering correctly.
Interesting to get a bit of historical perspective, since the OP here is from 2008. I hope the Times article is correct and that the bees are faring somewhat better now.
Sorry I haven't read the whole thread, but there was an article in the Los Angeles Times within the past week or so saying that bees are making a modest come-back of sorts. The context was the critical role which honey bees play in fertilizing the California almond trees. Apparently beekeepers come from all over the country under contract for this purpose, bringing their hives with them. The window of opportunity is rather short - several weeks if I am remembering correctly.
Couldn't this be part of the problem?
What happens when PEOPLE from all over the country converge in one small area? We share germs, bacteria and viruses that others haven't been exposed to.
Why would it be any different with bees? They do not naturally converge, from all over the country, on one small area like that.
Humans destroyed countless zillions of wild bees of all kinds by robbing them of food and habitat without much of a notice (as always). Now, it's a turn of the "factory" farmed bees which seems cannot withstand rigors of the factory beekeeping. I drive a lot and, honestly, I'm surprised that some bees still survive in the land of uninterrupted greenery, lawns and corn fields.
We definitely need more flowering plants, particularly in urban areas.
Have you been to agricultural rural areas recently? Finding something flowering there is a challenge unlike urban areas that provide some sort of habitat and food for insects. Super specialized mono agriculture is like a kiss of death.
Sorry I haven't read the whole thread, but there was an article in the Los Angeles Times within the past week or so saying that bees are making a modest come-back of sorts. The context was the critical role which honey bees play in fertilizing the California almond trees. Apparently beekeepers come from all over the country under contract for this purpose, bringing their hives with them. The window of opportunity is rather short - several weeks if I am remembering correctly.
Interesting to get a bit of historical perspective, since the OP here is from 2008. I hope the Times article is correct and that the bees are faring somewhat better now.
Yup, the professor who taught our course was bragging about how he was paid $160 per hive to ship his beehives - on flatbed trucks, hundreds of them - to the almond trees for pollination. There had to be a beehive every 1.5 acres, and bees were brought in from all over. The professor said that honey was not his business, and he didn't really care about what he got from that - it was the mobile hives that made him his money. I have a friend in SC who has been doing it for years, then sells the honey back in SC.
So are bees on the rise, or are they just being more commercialized and mobile? Wouldn't it be more advantageous to keep the bees on the almond orchards, and have a secondary honey-producing facility?
Just to quickly say the new study on the insecticide used on corn seed is the NEWEST and most promising reason why there's been this problem of Colony Collapse, altho when I first heard about CC and expressed concern to a beekeeping group, one beekeeper told me the bees will be okay. And as far as this post originating sometime back, there were indeed several theories about it, as our poster wondered about, one being transporting the bees some distance, but nothing was resolved as the case. In fact, there was an intriguing documentary about honeybees and causes of Colony Collapse a number of years ago, too, which final conclusions remained in the theory world.
There have been a few things that have affected beekeeping over the years, like one was a particular extremely tiny bug that got them, and more recently the South American bees that are swarming their way on up into North America, but this CC is before the killer swarms and CC is also the latest thing that STILL nobody knows what the cause is. So, if this new study proves true, banning that seed insecticide may actually prevent what could be the loss of the entire honeybee population in the United States. In fact, the year the original post was made, the exact insecticide in the new study was banned in Germany, Italy, France and other countries because they DID understand it was that corn seed insecticide that was killing all the honeybees! The EPA for some reason did not follow suit.
More and more smaller family farms are doing well by farming "the old way," where they don't crowd livestock or inject hormones, they don't use poisons, and when vegies hit the stores they are RIPE and not covered in wax. The trend to organic is not only good for animals and people, and good as a sustainable way to keep food on the table for America IF we were to have to cut back on oil-based truck shipping or go through some terrible national disaster, but also it's been proven that many people WILL shell out the extra dollars for organic, they won't eat anything else, and besides, the huge farms are more like corporations in the way they operate, so this one change in insecticide is not going to hurt them. GG
Last edited by gigimac; 03-17-2012 at 10:02 AM..
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