> My understanding is that the package bees that were
> illegally imported into Portugal complete with SHB
> came from the USA and were accompanied by an official
> certificate...

By definition, anything "illegally imported" would have bogus
paperwork that might look "official", but could not include any
legitimate and true "official certificates".

It could be that the paperwork was intended to merely meet the
requirements for shipment between US states, paperwork that
described bees other than the specific bees shipped, or forged
paperwork.  Depending upon the state in the US to which one is
shipping or transporting bees, the inspections and paperwork can
be just as rigorous as those required to "export" bees, as in
the US, each state calls bees from every other state "imported".
(It should be made clear that the "United States" are much less
"united" than the EU on such issues. In many regards, the states
are more "untied" than "united".)

> Can anybody explain please how such certificates
> are issued and what checks are made to ensure that
> they are accurate?

The short (but mostly useless) answer for international shipments
is that specific requirements are negotiated between the two
countries, based upon the WTO SPS guidelines and the OIE
bio-sanitary rules, with each negotiation perhaps resulting
in a slightly different set of requirements depending upon the
specific "science based" concerns of the destination country in
their "risk analysis".

The shorter, plain English version is "You never
get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate".

But does anyone know more specifics than are revealed in
the press release on the web?  What I have read raises
multiple questions.

http://www.bbka.org.uk/news/news/small-hive-beetle-found-i.shtml

  "The SHB has this month been intercepted
   in an unauthorised consignment of queen
   bees imported into Portugal from Texas...."

Sadly, the "unauthorised consignment" got past Portuguese
customs inspection staff and into multiple apiaries before
the fraud was discovered, and before the SHB were detected:

  "Veterinary Authorities took rapid action to
   isolate the apiaries, destroy all colonies
   and associated beekeeping equipment and
   treat the soil."

Keith Tignor (VA State Apiarist) would have set up a "bait"
colony on the site with an SHB trap to attract, detect, and
kill off any surviving SHB that might later emerge from the
soil, rather than prompt them to travel further afield, but
Keith is a Jedi-Master Beekeeper, which is rare for a PhD
entomologist.  Can someone who speaks Portuguese suggest this
tactic to the Portuguese authorities?

Note that "certification" is demonstrated yet again to be
a poor replacement for port-of-entry inspection.  Inspection
would have found the SHB on the bees regardless of the
integrity and/or competence of the shipper and receiver.
(To review, one needs a system design that is independent
of "trust", rather than completely dependent upon it.
One also needs a system that expects and handles human error,
rather than assuming human perfection as a given.)

Given the quote above, I'm not sure what is meant by the use
of the term "intercepted". Where I come from, "intercepted"
would be used if the consignment was stopped at the port of
entry, before reaching the beekeeper.  A more accurate term
would be "fumble" in the US, and "own goal" everywhere else.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again - the UK has the ONLY
adequate program for detecting and preventing such incidents.
They remove all attendants, replace them with locally-bred workers,
and send the (killed) attendants to a lab for analysis.  Anything
less is... uh, less.


If the "unauthorized consignment" was the act of a legitimate queen
producer, rather than a smuggler, someone screwed up badly, which
is not terribly surprising consider the complexity of the WTO
regulations and the EU's own regulations, which conflict with, and
in some cases violate, the WTO treaties.  (This is not unique to the
EU, all WTO members are openly gaming the system in one way or
another, or at least interpreting agreements in very self-serving ways.)

If detected at port of entry, then there would be no doubt that
the SHB came from that queen shipment.  (Canada had a very similar
problem a while ago with bees from the other side of the planet.
Accusations were tossed back and forth, strict proof was demanded,
the evidence was less than compelling in the view of the exporter,
and no one learned anything as a result, nor did anyone change their
systems to expect and account for future human error or disagreement.)

As an aside, the WTO has published 900+ pages of regulations to date.
How can this possibly be called "free trade"?
It certainly isn't fair trade, is it?


        jim (Single-handedly consuming a large fraction of
             the last of the world's dwindling irony reserves)

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