> ...A section 18 was got for menthol... > Consider if we had as said in the documentary... instead > of one commercial beekeeper managing 60,000 hives > but 60,000 beekeepers with a single hive the problem > of getting solutions to beekeeping problems? > Hard to get a room full of beekeepers to agree let alone 60,000 ! > Point is beekeepers buying truck loads of products keep the industry going. But the actual answer came from asking "what is Europe using?". Europe is not known for large numbers of colonies per operation, yet a consensus still emerged. I've seen European beekeepers chided in discussions here as if size was related to competence, rather than economics and the extent of monoculture. So, with menthol, the actual story seems to be that innovation from far-smaller European operations was copied by the larger US operations. But what about the Section 18? Can a group of small hobby beekeepers be effective in a political/regulatory context, like a section 18 approval? Ask NY State's apiarist, whose boss attempted to implement a more invasive hive-inspection scheme, carefully orchestrated support from the larger beekeepers and the Farm Bureau, and got his regulations, but got his funding pulled by the Governor's office, leaving the State apiarist with no inspectors at all. Trying to compare a large-scale migratory pollination outfit with a smaller, non-migratory outfit is like comparing a marching band to a jazz quartet. Both can play the same song, but one does it while marching in a large group, and the other does it without any sheet music. The two kinds of music have very little to do with each other, and they use very different instruments and techniques. *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html