No ORGANIC Bee Losses
"...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."
No ORGANIC Bee losses
2007 05 06
Received from Lancifer | redicecreations.com
I am quite involved with many alternative agriculture
groups, and I received this email from a trusted
friend...you might want to check it out for your news
section...
 "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... |
SOURCE: Red Ice Creations