The logic of this argument (after skimming through the original paper) is not very clear. The author talks about how researchers, even when seeking grants, talk about unsustainable honey bee colony losses, and address those losses in terms of various stressors. All of which presumably ultimately are explained by the parameters of industrial agriculture. Besides attacking a straw man ("unsustainable honey bee losses"), there appear to be gaps in the logical sequence of cause and effect.
From the text of the paper:
To review, when honey bee researchers frame honey bee health issues, we often focus on the fact that deteriorating colony health has negative consequences for our agricultural system. But, when we consider the problem of industrial agriculture, we see that colony loss is actually the logical result of the way that we farm, and the way we push honey bees to produce in conditions that are not designed to support their survival (Spivak 2013). When we broaden our framing, we find that industrial agriculture is not the victim of unsustainable colony loss; it is the cause.
This is not actually new information. Sociologists, ecologists, geographers, agroecologists, journalists, and many beekeepers and farmers have provided critical analyses that describe this ‘manifestly unsustainable system’ (Nimmo 2015a, 2015b, Goulson and Nicholls 2016, Maderson and Wynne-Jones 2016, Suryanarayanan et al. 2018; Cilia 2019, 2020, Durant 2019a, Ellis et al. 2020, McGivney 2020). Many of these analyses explicitly connect honey bee health issues to industrial agriculture (e.g., the ‘apis-industrial complex’) and to the political, social, and economic structures that underlie this system. These resources are relevant to honey bee research because they help to describe the context in which honey bee health issues are situated. However, we honey bee researchers rarely cite our colleagues across disciplines. We focus on specific aspects of honey bee health, and we skip the broader context.
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