I've taken some flack on my views that almonds are ruining beekeeping as we new it in the USA. I 
don't feel the practice is sustainable. Turns out I'm not the only one who believes this. 

Again, we have the answers to straighten out the honeybee loss problem - just not the answers 
some folks want to hear. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/31/animalwelfare.environment

from the Guardian in the UK
titled: Last flight of the honeybee?


Jeff Pettis is not sure where he comes on the pole. The senior manager at the federal bee 
laboratory in Maryland, he's the man responsible for coordinating the US government's response 
to CCD. Pettis advises some beekeepers may do well to forgo the almond pollination and rest their 
bees. "You are getting them ready for February when the sunlight hours and the temperature are 
telling them it's too early in the year to be foraging at full strength," he says.

Deceiving bees is an essential part of the business. Beekeepers dupe them into thinking it's 
already summer by moving them to warm locations in winter and feeding them an array of protein 
and energy supplements. The more food that comes into the hive, the more eggs the queen lays, 
to create more of the worker bees to go out and pollinate.

The bee broker Joe Traynor says the deception goes much further than trucking bees south. "We're 
interfering with their natural cycle because we want strong colonies for almond pollination. We're 
stimulating hives in August, September and October, and making the queens do a lot more laying. 
As a result the queens are suffering burnout. It used to be that a beekeeper could pretty much 
leave his bees alone during winter. That's no longer the case."

Moreover, scientists funded by the Almond Board of California are now experimenting with 
artificial pheromones that trick bees into thinking there are more larvae in the hive that need 
feeding, so they forage more, and in the process pollinate more almond blossom.

This is the Almond Board's profit-driven response to a potential shortfall of honeybees: to work 
even harder those that remain. Bees are being treated as a machine with no consideration for their 
life cycle and downtimes. And any machine pushed to its limits and not well maintained will break.

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