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Date: Fri, 11 May 2007 21:47:11 -0400 (EDT)
To: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
cc: ellen &AElig twinsprings.com
From: Robert Albert Felty <robfelty &AElig umich.edu>
Subject: why the bees are (or rather aren't) dying
Status: O

This is a very interesting article about how organicly raised bees are not 
having the same troubles that have recently been reported about bees.
http://www.informationliberation.com/index.php?id=21912

article text pasted below:
"Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic 
beekeeper from Prince Edward Island. She has twice run for a seat in 
Ottawa's House of Commons, making strong showings around 5% for Canada's 
fledgling Green Party. She is also leader of the provincial wing of her 
party. In a widely circulated email, she wrote:

I'm on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, 
and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial 
beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with 
the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to 
fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They 
also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with 
pollination services, which stresses the colonies.

Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site at Here, Michael 
Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the 
top page:

Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I'm happy to say 
my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter 
and coming up with hives that won't hurt my back from lifting or better 
ways to feed the bees.

This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I've gone to natural 
sized cells. In case you weren't aware, and I wasn't for a long time, the 
foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would 
find in a natural hive. I've measured sections of natural worker brood 
comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. What most people use for worker brood is 
foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter. If you translate that into three 
dimensions instead of one, it produces a bee that is about half as large 
again as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have 
virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of 
this is shorter capping times by one day, and shorter post-capping times 
by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells, and less Varroa 
reproduce in the cells.

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us 
that the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a 
larger than normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, 
have we here a solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the 
CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? 
Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?

These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion 
that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have 
struck from out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is 
likely that some biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is 
no shortage of evidence that we have been fast approaching this limit for 
some time.

We've been pushing them too hard, Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate professor 
of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told the 
CBC. And we're starving them out by feeding them artificially and moving 
them great distances. Given the stress commercial bees are under, Kevan 
suggests CCD might be caused by parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or 
long wet springs, or pesticides, or genetically modified crops. Maybe it's 
all of the above...

-- 
Robert Felty http://www-personal.umich.edu/~robfelty

"As far as I know, this computer has never had an undetected error."