> Marla Spivak shared her insights
> Best 70 minutes I have seen on the subject in a long time. 

Pete, I watched all of it but didn’t find it particularly insightful.

Marla didn’t identify any specific pollinators that are “in peril” 
in any specific areas of her home state of Minnesota. Nor 
did she provide any case history data demonstrating specific
actions Minnesota farmers or city dwellers could take that 
would definately make a proven and substantial 
landscape scale improvement in their numbers.  

Example: She showed this photo of a strip of wildflowers 
planted between corn fields in Iowa
http://www.imagegainer.com/images/PaulCherubini/cornstrip.jpg
but didn’t identify any specific pollinators in that landscape 
that are in peril nor did she provide case history data 
demonstrating the strips actually made a mathematically 
significant landscape scale improvement in their numbers.  

She also didn’t talk about the costs to the taxpayers of planting 
enough strips of wildflowers or other forms of pollinator habitat 
that would make a mathematically significant landscape scale 
improvement in their numbers.  Nor did she talk about all the 
herbicides, fossil fueled farm machinery and human labor 
needed to create and maintain the wildflower strips
Nor did she explain why there is a compelling need to boost 
pollinator numbers in upper Midwestern USA farm landscapes 
that are dominated by wind and self pollinated crops.

With regard to honeybees her main point was that the 
annual 30% losses in the USA were “unsustainable”.  But
then she did not go on to provide case history data demonstrating 
mitigations such as planting wildflower strips have actually 
ever resulted in a mathematically significant reduction in annual
losses in any given area of the country.

Paul Cherubini
El Dorado, Calif.

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