You sate, “Foreign does not equal invasive by the most widely accepted definition.”  Who is doing the “accepting” please?  Furthermore, if in fact “foreign” does not equal “invasive,” as you labor here, then what’s the problem of moving honeybees?  They are not invasive, right?  Then you go on to suggest, “The key to defining invasive is not whether it's native or non-native but whether it out-competes native species.”  Agreed.  I have never seen Native Americans out-compete any other races in spite of their numerous casinos and bingo parlors.  Maybe they will in the next century.

Granted that honeybees are non-indigenous species, can you then say that honeybees, a “foreign species,” “have adversely affected the habitats economically, environmentally, and ecologically?” 

Moving onto the Monarchs.  Even if we enact the Monarch butterfly release law, as seen in earlier posts, who is going to enforce the law?  A State Highway Patrol?  This sort of law is difficult to enforce because it deals with moral and ethical behavior.  In the People’s Republic of where I live, there is this stupid law dictating that conjugal affairs must be carried out missionary only—presumably “to protect the weaker sex.” (Never mind we are number one in domestic violence and number one in female incarceration and used to be number one in divorce rate in the union, and to boot, we are in the smack dab buckle of the Bible Belt)  Sure, I see a highway patrol man outside my bedroom window at night, telling me, no, no, no, you naughty boy, waving his index finger, quoting the State Statute.

Seriously, monarchs reorient their flight patterns when intentionally dislocated by researchers from where they were; for instance, when plucked out of, say, Kansas, and then placed in the Carolinas, they will re-orient themselves toward the thoroughfare heading down to Mexico, a journey that takes four generations, thus, making the release law ineffective to say the least.  This is the kind of plasticity I was talking about in my earlier post, the kind of adaptability in nature that often defies our attempt to impose black and white law and order in reality.

Most important, one cannot improve the environment by focusing on native pollinators alone; as others have already eloquently pointed out, we should improve the environment holistically from all sides.  A good honeybee habitat nurtures all sorts of fauna.  I have planted hundreds of Vitex plants over the years, for example, and I see numerous butterflies, bumbles, honeybees, nameless tiny bees, insects, and even certain beetles that eat bees, as well.  Should I kill all the other pollinators since I had planted Vitex exclusively for my bee forage?  Having two or more species of pollinators are far better than having native ones alone; in fact, the more options we have, the better for the environment.  Thus focusing on native pollinators alone is similar to having only one firewall.

Nearly all the measures to stop flying insects have failed; consider Hawaii and Australia.  They did not have mites for while, but they do now.  We are talking about State and National efforts to stop them. We have failed to stop the AHB migration north; one can waste billions to stop it, but can’t.  We cannot even control the foot traffic across the border.  How in the world are we going to stop the movement of flying insects up in the air?  Certain birds will change their migration route to find better food source: the location of the insect and animal habitats themselves are not written in stone.  A Canadian province that has never seen monarchs before might see them when the climate shifts, for instance.

When Jim (F) and I argued about this issue many years ago, our position was that we support all sorts of pollinators—as far as the native pollinator supporter s *do not* take a slice out of the pie ear-marked for honeybee research and support.  Furthermore, I pointed out that to piggyback on honeybee research money is parasitic.  If I want to find funding sources for native pollinators alone, I should find such sources independent of bee-funding.

Yoon

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