Food for Thought

Here's a coupla items I culled from the beekeeping groups on the 'net.

This first one is all about the chemical crap that gets into honey because of what some of us do to the bees, and what the bees face when they go out a-foraging. "We have found unprecedented levels of miticides and agricultural pesticides in honey bee colonies from across the US and one Canadian province." Yuck! It's going to come back to bite us, I'm thinking. See why it's so much better to keep bees in a natural, organic way? 'Nuff said.

The other one is yet another study on CCD. I'm really ambivalent about it, first of all it's that samo samo "universityscientificmethodology" assumption that some One Cause can be isolated as the killer. Holistic approaches need not apply for grant funding. Most of us are beginning to understand that, nope, it's the whole factory-farm approach; the totality of the things we have done and are doing to the bees; and the overall attitude some of us have toward beekeeping that is at the heart of the problem.

But on the other hand I just got through ranting in those aforementioned beek groups about the myopia that natural organic beeks have related to scientific research on viruses. All I heard was "we're always gonna have viruses! Whut ya wanna go and spend money on yet another research on one for?" and "rely upon natural selection to cull the weak bees, there isn't anything you should do to baby along the weaker bees, the strong will survive" and the always popular "shut up li'l newbie, you don't understand X, Y and Z ..." followed by some ideologically bent lecture on genetics or something. [sigh]

I think it's better to know than to not. It's better to understand a virus being at the heart of some stresses on the colonies than to be a luddite. But that's just my own bias. Read the articles, make up your own mind.