>America's honeybees are in a bad way.                                          
>                                                                               
>                                                                               
>   Already weakened by 12 years of battling blood-sucking mites, bees          
>   have been brought to their knees by a soggy spring on the heels of          
>   many regions' exceptionally cold winter. Experts estimate that more         
>   than 90 percent of wild colonies have been wiped out nationwide,            
>   along with a large number of those tended by beekeepers.                    
                                                                                
[snip]                                                                          
                                                                                
>Bee experts said that they can't predict how the                               
>   decline in the wild bee population will affect wild plants and the          
>   animals that eat them. But they guessed that in places such as New          
>   York and New Jersey, which may have no wild honeybees left, there           
>   aren't going to be too many wild berries this year.                         
                                                                                
Is there anyone besides me who finds this (and other pronouncements of doom     
in this article) to be excessively pessimistic, ignoring the possible           
ameliorating effects of *native* bee species? There *is* a native bee           
expert in Shimanuki's lab there in Beltsville, after all - so there is no       
obvious excuse for them to neglect to mention this anywhere.                    
Exasperated, as usual,                                                          
                                                                                
Doug Yanega       Illinois Natural History Survey, 607 E. Peabody Dr.           
Champaign, IL 61820 USA      phone (217) 244-6817, fax (217) 333-4949           
 affiliate, Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dept. of Entomology             
          http://www.inhs.uiuc.edu:80/~dyanega/my_home.html                     
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness                 
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82