> ...A section 18 was got for menthol...

> Consider if we had as said in the documentary... instead 
> of one commercial beekeeper managing 60,000 hives 
> but 60,000 beekeepers with a single hive the problem 
> of getting solutions to beekeeping problems?

> Hard to get a room full of beekeepers to agree let alone 60,000 !

> Point is beekeepers buying truck loads of products keep the industry
going.

But the actual answer came from asking "what is Europe using?". 
Europe is not known for large numbers of colonies per operation, yet a
consensus still emerged.
I've seen European beekeepers chided in discussions here as if size was
related to competence, rather than economics and the extent of monoculture.


So, with menthol, the actual story seems to be that innovation from
far-smaller European operations was copied by the larger US operations.

But what about the Section 18? Can a group of small hobby beekeepers be
effective in a political/regulatory context, like a section 18 approval? Ask
NY State's apiarist, whose boss attempted to implement a more invasive
hive-inspection scheme, carefully orchestrated support from the larger
beekeepers and the Farm Bureau, and got his regulations, but got his funding
pulled by the Governor's office, leaving the State apiarist with no
inspectors at all.  

Trying to compare a large-scale migratory pollination outfit with a smaller,
non-migratory outfit is like comparing a marching band to a jazz quartet.
Both can play the same song, but one does it while marching in a large
group, and the other does it without any sheet music. The two kinds of music
have very little to do with each other, and they use very different
instruments and techniques.



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