[redicecreations] No ORGANIC Bee Losses

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Misty L. Trepke

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[redicecreations] No ORGANIC Bee Losses

http://www.redicecreations.com/article.php?id=974

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...

 

Article Received from Lancifer