As you may have noticed, last week the media was once again filled with yet another round of collapsing honeybee stories, this time the coverage being about the loss of 42.1 percent of hives in the US over the past year, the second largest die-off on record.
Worth bearing in mind that most of these colonies which are collapsing and otherwise struggling wouldn’t exist in the first place were it not for industrial agriculture and large-scale (industrial?) commercial beekeeping. The are a product of that system and the system is having trouble maintaining one of its necessary components.
You make a good point. One might then say that Colony Collapse Disorder is a symptom of the faltering industrial beekeeping system, while Honeybee Collapse Disorder is a symptom of the faltering industrial agricultural system. Cheers!
I think you’ve gone right to the heart of it, Allan. I’m seeing a lot of controversy on the subject of bees lately, people yelling endless talking points at each other, without listening to the other side. But the idea that bees don’t fit into industrial monocultures strikes me as likely very close to the truth.
For that matter, humans probably don’t fit very well into industrial monocultures either, eh?
My first thoughts to above link, Silly scientists. I suspect that if you feed any bee just corn syrup, it would be its kryptonite.
And then the insecticides.
I remember reading that in the US and Canada some people were importing from Europe the Russian strain of Apis Mellifera, as opposed to the more conventional Italian and Carolinian ones. The Russian’s are well suited to the colder climates, as well, show a propensity for gnawing the Varroa mites off of their fellow bees. I recall the name of Kirk Webster as someone who has been partaking in the “live and let die” approach of trying to select for a hardier honeybee which would be able to fend off the mites.
ALL stories like the one above track back to the FUNDING OF POLITICS. The existing monetary system, as frauds by privately controlled banks, which are enforced by governments, is the most extreme example of that problem of the history of the FUNDING OF POLITICS. However, every other issue follows the same basic pattern of crazy corruption, where the profits from frauds are able to be reinvested in more frauds.
There is an overwhelming amount of JUNK SCIENCE, involved in vicious feedback loops, where those who profit from the established systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, are then able to continue to dominate the FUNDING OF POLITICS. Every time that one attempts to come up with any better resolutions to the problems created by crazy corrupt governments serving the short-term special interests, one runs into the PRACTICAL IMPOSSIBILITY OF OVERCOMING THE ALREADY ESTABLISHED PATTERNS OF THE FUNDING OF POLITICS.
I have spent the last few decades working on that problem, because it is theoretically the most important one, where the maximum leverage exists. However, the only thing that has happened after working on that problem was that the more that I learned, the worse it got! There is a long list of problems similar to the problems observed with bees. They all follow the same patterns, whereby governments are almost inconceivably crazy and corrupt, and that is automatically getting worse, faster …
Every attempt to propose possible solutions to any of the problems (manifested on the long list of similar problems) always run into the same obstacles regarding the FUNDING OF POLITICS. After the crazy corruption of the public “money” supply was achieved, then everything else automatically became runaway vicious spirals of more and more crazy corruption, through the subsequent FUNDING OF POLITICS driving the enforcement of frauds, along with the matching evil deliberate ignorance.
Pretty well every problem would require solutions that were in the public interest, that would limit the short-term profits of some vested special interests. NONE of those kinds of solutions have a hope in hell of actually being implemented due to the ways that the FUNDING OF POLITICS has been operating. After one appreciates the magnitude of the social insanities represented by the existing monetary and taxation systems being extremely unbalanced in favour of tiny minorities of the population, against everyone else, one then can put all other issues, such as those related to bees, into an overall perspective.
Tragically, there are NO practical political solutions, because there are no ways to prevent the FUNDING OF POLITICS from continuing to be extremely unbalanced, and automatically getting worse, faster. The basic monetary system has become like a metastasizing cancer, that is killing the society that is it growing within. That original crazy corruption was due to the ways that the FUNDING OF POLITICS could achieve the creation of criminally insane…
Hmmm. Well, I know that one of the wings of the New Zealand Parliament House here in Wellington is called the Beehive. But I don’t know how much I’d say that the problems I mentioned with bees can be ultimately traced back to the funding of politics. Kind of lets us smaller guys off the hook a bit too easily. Although I certainly agree that the monetary system needs to be changed, there’s much more that can be done in the meantime.
As my friend put it, “not much can be fixed until we fix the monetary system, but just fixing the monetary system isn’t necessarily going to fix anything.”
“… nothing can be fixed until we fix the monetary system, but just fixing the monetary system isn’t necessarily going to fix anything.”
Yes!
That IS the kind of Catch 22 we are facing!
Yeah, no easy solutions, eh?
EDIT 04/06/2015: I should have pointed out that I wasn’t implying a Catch-22, nor do I think it’s one. What I was implying (via my friend’s statement) was that although the monetary system needs a revamping, just doing that alone won’t automatically fix things. Supposing that actually happened, there would still be a lot more to do in various other fields. Not a Catch-22, just a lot to do.
I’m not a bee keeper, just a general biologist, so this may be a silly question, but why are they treating arachnid-infestations in hives with “strips of insecticide”? Mites aren’t insects.
Huh, good question. At first I thought that maybe I had used the terminology incorrectly. But upon double checking, no, one of the most common brands of strips, Checkmite+, is listed as being an insecticide. However, Checkmite+ strips are also used for the purpose of getting rid of Small Hive Beetles – which do count as insects. Maybe that’s why?