Greetikngs Folks:
First of all, the interesting article has been penned by an imaginative
(full of fillers), investigative journalist, not even a green hand in “bee-
having,” for this type of article is often given to a freelancer
(typically a “Reporter at Large” in The New Yorker) as a writing
assignment, a dabbler that pokes at a controversial issue for mass-
consumption and money. Otherwise it should have appeared as a
*scientific* article in, say, Nature, with Work Cited pages and
Bibliography. None of that but anecdotes and interviews here. (Elvis’
fans, when *interviewed*, will swear the King is still alive and kicking!)
Thus, one should not jump to a conclusion simply because the author is an
excellent observer; rather, the writer, as she notes, is not an expert
with years of *practical* beekeeping experience. The situation might be
different with a scientist, say a microbiologist, who examines a pathogen,
for examining a pathogen(s) has been the focus of his/her life. The same
journalist, in fact, can write another compelling article on the Demise of
Bumble Bees in America, War in Iraq, or Intelligent Falling Theory for
that matter, but the List members should be mindful that “How likely is it
that an unknown journalist can single-handedly identify the font et origo
of CCD pathogen when ‘researchers’ and ‘scientists’ so far cannot?”
The article typifies another media sensation: CCD is sensational, thus a
good seller.
Couched in Latinate nomenclature and technical jargons, the article proves
that the writer had done her homework for the assignment; for example, she
fastidiously and meticulously, in Prufrockian fashion, remembers to record
Latinate scientific names for many bees and technical jargons, such
as “metagenomic analysis” to establish what College Freshmen Composition I
class calls, “the Writer’s Authority,” a vital component in rhetoric that
helps the reader to trust the author. And she does a good job, proving
that she did her homework, indeed. Any arm-chair philosopher, however,
could have given this type of “padding” with fillers. In practical
matters, however, she fails to convince me that she has any practical
experience of beekeeping, which highlights the entertainment value of the
article, and never scientific. Here are two examples, among others:
“On my return home, I relayed what I’d learned to my husband. I told him I
was opposed to the nail approach, and he said he was opposed to an
electric fence. Ultimately, we settled on a third option, not recommended
by anyone. We ran a wire cable between two trees, about twenty feet off
the ground, and attached a pulley to it. Then we mounted the hive on a
platform that could be raised and lowered by rope.”
Hardly an American Inventor. A hanging hive, IMHO, is not ingenuity but
the exact blooming opposite; surely, one can expect something like this
from Harry Potter, an excellent childrens’ book I will never bother. No
green-hand in beekeeping would entertain such impracticality, however, let
alone the danger its fall might cause, not to humans, mind you, but to the
bees and the queen, in particular. (The more moving parts, the more
problems)
Another example attesting that this is just a journalistic report appears
in the following:
“As for my honeybees, they seem to be doing fine. After their unfortunate
fall, I was worried that the queen might have been crushed or perhaps
suffocated by her nervous attendants, an accident known as ‘balling’.”
I have never seen “attendants” (from the same hive) BALL a queen in the
way the author describes here, regardless of the circumstance, which
convinces me that she does not seem to understand the term she uses so
broadly. On the contrary, the queen pheromon has a calming effect on
attendants and workers as it forces them into a cohesive unit; in an
earlier episode, she did describe how, after the bear attack, the
remaining bees clustered, presumably with a queen. The said fall, in this
incident, would not change the smell of queen pheromon although the
workers might fire off alarm bells, which is not likely to trigger a
regicide, a tremendous leap of logic.
Her credit, I must confess, is that once again she brought the issues of
CCD to the national forefront, regardless, stiring up the mud a bit
thicker, reducing the clarity.
YSK
YSK HONEY FARM
OK
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