The other shoe drops yet again in the ongoing saga of the "Pollinator
Protection Racket".  The currently-elected set of overworked volunteers who
lead beekeeping organizations are shocked that the well-paid professional
fund-raisers hired by the Xerces Society, et al have out-maneuvered them yet
again, by busily defining honey bees as "non-native", and "invasive"
everywhere they could.

http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060009767

So, because there were severe problems specific to the husbandry of honey
bees, and the press blew this up into "CCD", suddenly bees were charismatic.
The Xerces types immediately offered to "help" the volunteer beekeeper
leadership in dealing with "Washington".  Suddenly, the message was changed
from "how to help honey bees" into "how to help 'pollinators'", even though
the other pollinators did insignificant amounts of practical pollination,
and only a few specific species (alfalfa leafcutter bees, for example) had
only a tiny role in agriculture.

This allowed the Xerces types to expand their funding and lobbying base to
include not just "environmental" sources, but to actually start grabbing a
significant amount of funding from agricultural sources such as USDA and
Farm Bill funds.  The lie of "alternative pollinators" being agriculturally
significant was planted in many places, and the phrase "pollinators" became
a codeword to describe an scheme to divert funding and allocate it equally
"by species", rather than by the amount of actual pollination being done be
each species, or the specific problems each species faced.  (Remember the
"pollinator" stamps?  A butterfly, a bat, a hummingbird, and a bumblebee.
No honeybee, but a bat?  That should have been a big clue.)

A few years have passed, and now the current beekeeping leadership finds
that the trap is closing.  Even with a specific Presidential mandate, most
all federal agencies with land-management powers have policies in place that
define honey bees as an "invasive species".  The reason why is explained by
the linked article - the "Xerces Society, a Portland, Ore-based nonprofit
organization dedicated to protecting wild pollinators", is NOT an ally of
beekeeping, but is instead, a competitor for funding, mind-set, and policy.
In some cases, they promote the "preservation" of "pollinators" who depend
upon ecosystems and plant mixes that no longer exist, but must be
handcrafted, while honey bees and their husbandry threaten none of this,
they can compete with the agenda of these NGOs for funding and attention.

Watch as a clearly-worded executive order from the President "Presidential
Memorandum -- Creating a Federal Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey
Bees and Other Pollinators" is slowly manipulated by the agencies to make
honey bees a footnote, rather than a focus of the efforts, and to maximize
the hijacking of the dollars to fund more "outreach" (aka fundraising) by
the "Pollinator Protection Racket" crowd.

The text of the executive order is here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/20/presidential-memorandu
m-creating-federal-strategy-promote-health-honey-b
http://tinyurl.com/kk2g6f3

These groups work to exclude honey bees in the mistaken belief that
"competition" exists between native bees and honey bees.  They falsely
promote the "alternative" pollinators as useful, which has directly led to
the extinction of several bumblebee species  in CA, as they opposed the use
of imported bumblebees for greenhouse tomato pollination, which resulted in
native species being exported, bred, and re-imported by the bumblebee
breeders, along with a very nasty version of bumblebee nosema that did the
killing when the imported bumblebees inevitably escaped from their
greenhouses.

When are we going to learn that these fund-raising machines are not our
friends or allies, and love only money?

The bottom line of the dataset gathered about "invasives" is that
colonization rates by exotic species are high, but extirpation (local
extinction) rates are negligible.  So-called "invasives" do NOT "compete"
with native species, the only competition is over funding and attention.

Remember kids, species evolve over time to adapt to exploiting a specific
set of circumstances (a "niche", if you will), and the odds that an invasive
would have independently adapted to the same exact set of circumstances in
its native range are pretty much "astronomical".

If not for National Forest permits to allow me to place hives in old burns
and clearcuts for Sourwood blooms, and National Park permits to allow me to
move flatbeds of hives along the Blue Ridge Parkway in the wee hours, I
would have not been a commercial beekeeper, as the logistics of going around
the federal lands would have been impossible, moreso during apple bloom,
when snow and ice were often still around.

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