Robin Dartington said:
> the core group of professional beekeepers on this
> list has concentrated on crushing
There was no intent to crush. If anything was "crushed",
it merely collapsed under the weight of the evidence.
Also, the comments have come from both for-profit
beekeepers and for-pleasure-only hobby beekeepers.
> the observation
It was not "observation".
Observation requires evidence to observe.
It was apparently pure speculation.
> that artificial honey (made by feeding refined sugar or fructose
> syrup) is a deficient food for honeybees compared with their natural
> food - honey--
A basic point skipped in the above is that the natural food for bees
is NECTAR, not honey. Bees do not consume honey directly, but must
dilute it with water first. Comparing alternative feeds with honey
is somewhat like comparing grape juice with grape jam.
Comparing alternative feeds with nectar would be comparing "apples
to apples" ("apple juice to apple juice"?).
> and on a passing reference to greed being a poor motive for action.
I'm not sure what "greed" has to do with the issue. It would be
silly to accuse a beekeeper of having "taken too much honey" last
fall, and not leaving enough honey to sustain the bees through the
poor foraging conditions that extended from April through July in
parts of the USA. Even a colony from which no honey was harvested
last year would have certainly eaten through 100% of stores by late
May under these conditions. The East got and it still getting so
much rain that TV meteorologists are getting letters and e-mails
saying simply "please make it stop". The Midwest is suffering drought.
Some beekeepers were forced to start feeding some hives in June.
Many hives will produce no harvestable crop. What other than disaster
would prompt beekeepers to "feed" in June and July?
> Some beekeepers remove honey the bees would otherwise eat themselves,
> and substitute sugar syrup, in order to increase their income.
Who are these "some beekeepers"? I don't know any.
"Income" is NOT the reason for fall feeding. In fact, harvesting honey
that would be required for overwintering and replacing it with syrup
would put the colony at risk if evaporation was not completed between
last harvest and first clustering. Think of all the fanning required to
evaporate sufficient feed from a feeder to make up a colony's complete
winter stores. Think of late summer and fall nighttime temperatures,
when it is simply to chilly to expect any evaporation at all.
The concept is laughable anywhere beyond 20 degrees from the equator.
The reason for fall feeding is to SUPPLEMENT the colony's stores, to
better insure winter survival. No one wants to see a colony starve
in winter or early spring. Not all colonies need feeding in fall,
which clearly disproves the claim that there is a general practice
of harvesting that might be described as "greedy".
Here's the question - do I remove 3 supers in the fall harvest,
leave one for the bees, and feed to insure that they pack the
broodnest and super, or do I remove 2 and leave 2? I must make
a decision in about 30 seconds, and I cannot leave partial supers.
It is a subjective judgment, and is most often decided by the amount
of time between the harvest and first frost, the contents of the
broodnest, and the strength of the hive.
> I happen to believe it is bad beekeeping to actually drive bees to
> starvation by taking too much of the spring crop,
>>WHAT<< spring crop? You don't seem to understand that "spring" here
in the parts of the USA this year was a near complete disaster for
many beekeepers. Any beekeeper would much rather not have to feed
bees, as the labor required is extensive, the feed itself is certainly
not free, and the effort takes away time from other tasks. It would
appear that we will not be burdened by much harvesting, so perhaps
the labor is simply "different" than usual. :)
> [Keith Benson] cuts to the point with 'don't confuse the presence
> of a molecule or two of something with the necessity of its presence,
> in the end it may simply be tolerated and not required'.
To go further, please understand that the "molecule or two" found in
honey becomes a mere statistical probability for any one bee once the
honey has been diluted prior to consumption. Look at it this way:
Let's model a cell of honey with a 1/2 pound bag of M&Ms candy.
Let's assume that the red M&Ms represent the "vitamins and minerals"
found in that specific cell of honey (which is over-representing
the percentages by several orders of magnitude). Now, let me pour
each member of this list a handful of candy from the bag. Did you
get ANY red M&Ms in your handful? If the bees required some specific
mineral or mix of minerals and vitamins, does this mean that some
meals are "deficient", while others are not? Given that we are
dealing with a game of chance here, what happens to the bee who NEVER
gets a red M&M? Does that bee die as a larvae? As a young adult?
In a more realistic model, we would first "dilute" the M&Ms with
something else, (perhaps gumdrops), which would FURTHER reduce
the chances that any one person would have a red M&M in their hand.
Regardless, my example should make clear that any claim that such
minor components of nectar could be "critical to health" would imply
that such minor components must somehow be provided with certainty
to all bees in a hive. This should be an easy-to-grasp refutation
of any claim that such minerals found in nectar are mission-critical
to bee health.
> why do plants expend energy on adding traces of minerals, enzymes,
> vitamins minerals and (we are told) other components not yet analysed?
They don't.
They don't expend energy on it because they don't "add" anything.
The minerals come from the water and the soil. Nectar is not "magic",
it is a mere carbohydrate created from water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight.
> It would seem that pollen is produced for the use of the plant itself -
> so that would not be the place to put components designed only to help
> the pollinators.
Many pollinators are attracted by nectar, and it might seem counter-productive
for a plant to produce pollen that would be collected and eaten, rather than
simply spread around to other plants, but if one looks at bees with care,
one finds that even a bee that has "groomed" itself and packed its pollen
baskets has some pollen on its body, and THAT pollen will be spread.
It is also true that plants that produce many seeds or many fruits are
also seemingly "inefficient", in that most of these seeds will never have a
chance of sprouting. But it is a matter of viewpoint. Some might call it
"inefficient", others would describe it as "elegantly redundant and fail-safe".
jim (Who finds claims about honey as a "superior bee feed"
"...full of sound and fury, signifying nothing..."
[Macbeth - Act V Scene 5] )
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