Tradition vs. Reality

Peter:

I did not mean to come off contentious, or worse belligerent, when I asked 
you to back up your opinions with facts.  I apologize if I came off rough 
to you.  I will do my best to maintain civility in the following discourse.

Without any substantiation, nevertheless, statements such as migratory 
beekeeping has not caused any harm to beekeeping industry overall are just 
too broad, a sweeping generalization, indeed, particularly in the light of 
at least one article a list member had provided a while ago which attests 
to the contrary.  In fact, you had asked the same member,  claiming to the 
contrary to your position, to present hu’s (sic) hard data over and over.  
You would concur, I am sure, that you should be asked to present your 
data, as well.  (I believe this was what Aaron was concerned about in his 
recent email: stop townhall-gossiping)

Before I sweat my teeth, though, allow me to offer a working definition 
of “migratory beekeeping”:  “A massive-scale, modern, hybrid beekeeping 
practice in which beekeepers move a huge number of colonies across the 
state line to serve the pollination needs for industrialized monocrops to 
profit solely from the pollination contract.”  Fair enough?  Please feel 
free to add, edit, revise, tear apart this definition since this is just 
my working definition for this particular discussion.

But allow me to point out the gap in your opinion.  On the one hand, you 
believe that migratory beekeeping should go on given its longstanding 
tradition here and elsewhere; on the other, you realize in the following 
the problems it is facing:  “Those same beekeepers are now having a hard 
time keeping their bees alive.  What changed? Mites. We have not really 
got a handle on it. Nosema. No doubt it's contributing. But the one thing 
that didn't change: trucking bees. Bees have been trucked around big time 
since at least the 1940s. This is not the cause of current problems.”

Tradition is a great thing when the external variables remain steady.  But 
the external variables never remain steady in nature “red in tooth and 
claw.”: mites, SHB, AHB, CCD, agricultural intensification through more 
toxic sprays, dwindling forage areas, imports of bees and honey in global 
trade, global warming, to just name a few.  I have not even mentioned 
Cashmere and Israeli viruses.  The tradition you speak of here lives 
forever in the past, frozen solid inside the picture-frame with a vintage 
pickup or wagon, because such tradition is no longer viable due to changes 
in the external reality.  The variables in the good old days were much 
simpler than now; all they had to deal with were AFB, mites, and nosema; 
they were able to make up their loss via swarm-catching.  Fast foreward 
into modern beekeeping.  Facing these myriad variables, factors heretofore 
unknown to us, one must reexamine the viability of the old paradigm.

Although I do not claim myself a seer, I am afraid that there will be time 
when migratory beekeeping will be regulated, particularly given all the 
stresses coming from eight directions to beekeeping and to bees 
themselves.  Now I did not state “stopped” cold but regulated, deservingly 
so, due to the reasons many beekeepers on this list have expressed.

Even as I type my thoughts, there is a war going on against tradition in 
the Pacific.  It has been the Japanese tradition to catch and eat whales, 
a practice, they insist, that must continue, for it is their 
stinkin’ “tradition” to do so.  But the reality is that there are only 
limited numbers of whales, particularly sperm whales, left in the world.  
Worse, due to their long baby-rearing cycles, nobody knows which number of 
whales represents that equilibrium, the sustainable number between eating 
them and letting them go.  Let’s say there are only five sperm whales left 
in the world, but as the Japanese insist on their longstanding tradition, 
they have eaten all the five, effectively making those whales into dodo’s, 
once and for all.

Or should we re-examine the tradition, this age-old practice that has 
failed to reflect the so many changes in reality?  For my part, I’d say 
they should start eating anchovies since they have already finished with 
cods.

Wishing every one a great turkey day, another longstanding tradition that 
has nearly wiped out the indigenous species via inbreeding the Perfect 
Standard,

Yoon

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