This morning's New York Times had an editorial about the most recent 
plight of beekeepers.  Here is the text:

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February 22, 2007
Editorial Notebook

Keeping Bees Among Us
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG


Mention honeybees, and most people think two things: stinging and 
industriousness. A beekeeper thinks: jubilation, harmony, the 
civilization of insects. Nothing in nature is more vibrant — literally 
— than a strong hive on the increase in late spring and early summer. 
And few things are more depressing than opening the lid on a hive and 
pulling apart the supers, the boxes where bees raise young and store 
honey, and finding that the colony inside has died.

  It is far more than the death of individual bees. It is the death of 
prosperity itself.

My dad kept bees when I was young, and now I keep them. There were 
problems in my dad’s day: ants, skunks, wax moths and a couple of 
deadly but well-known bee diseases, like foulbrood and nosema. But my 
dad’s day — the late 1950s and early ’60s — looks, in retrospect, like 
a golden age. No one had heard of tracheal mites or varroa mites — two 
tiny pests that have decimated hives in the past 15 years and made 
beekeeping much more complicated than it used to be.

Now there are alarming reports of a new bee problem, called colony 
collapse disorder. “Disorder” is something of a code word. It means 
that no one really knows what is causing the sudden death of hives. 
There were heavy losses last fall, mainly among migratory beekeepers, 
who move their colonies from crop to crop as fields and orchards come 
into blossom. The threat of this new disorder isn’t merely the loss of 
bees. It’s also the loss of crops — a long list of them, including most 
tree fruits — that depend on pollination by honeybees.

Scientists are already hard at work searching for the cause of this 
disorder, which may be fungal. It may even be that transporting hives 
from crop to crop stresses bees more than we think. But I know from my 
own experience with bees — as someone who keeps only a couple of hives, 
never moves them and leaves most of the honey for the colony itself — 
that we must do everything we can to keep these creatures among us, as 
much for their sake as for our own.

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Adrian M. Wenner		(805) 963-8508 (home office phone)
967 Garcia Road			[log in to unmask]
Santa Barbara, CA  93103	www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/index.htm

"Having one view prevail is harmful; it becomes a belief system, not 
science."
					Zaven Khachaturian — 2006

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