PLB:

> that in my grandfather's time orchards were and always had been a good place 
to keep bees,


Peter beat me to this one.  Orchard's are among the first places where pesticides were used.  Old orchards, to this day, often have high arsenic and other heavy metals in the soils. I did a lot of work along this line when I was engaged in using bees for pollution studies.  Unlike modern synthetic, organic pesticides, the inorganic pesticides have much longer residual times.  The organic chemicals are made up of long chains of carbon that break down - some very fast (hours, days), some take months or years - but the inorganic pesticides made up of arsenic, sulfur, copper, etc. are 'elements' that don't really go away.

Jerry




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