Brian Frederickson writes:  “likewise on the bee front 1/2 the colonies we 
had in the US in the 1960's, every other year another bee crash/crisis.”

     Like I said before Brian, the pendulum has been swinging in the other 
direction for a while now, and an adjustment continues to be taking place 
as we speak.  Things may have gone passed a limit in the time when there 
were more bees in North America than there are now, and if so, that might 
in large part explain why we are seeing the difficulties that we clearly 
are seeing.   
     It is hard to make a living at beekeeping now, especially if your 
practices are bucking nature too much.  To some degree we all have to deal 
with the problems that bucking nature too much has brought upon the world, 
but when it comes to beekeeping at least, it is those who continue to try 
to fit a square peg into a round hole that are most at risk and often have 
the most to lose.  
     You seem to have a strong belief that the practices you use are sound 
and sustainable, not only in terms of being able to keep some bees around, 
but to make a living at it.  If so, you needn’t get in too much of a lather 
about others who haven’t figured out what you have because your practices 
will be among the ones that survive.  I am convinced that there are kinds 
of beekeeping operations out there that are capable of surviving anything 
that has been visited upon us so far.  These will be the future of 
beekeeping. 
     I understand that your frustration with the state of modern beekeeping 
extends to much more than that.  It goes to the way humans have been 
relating to nature in general for a long time.  But if you get in too much 
of a fret about it, you risk losing that vital degree of objectivity 
required to judge the big picture in terms of the facts on the ground, and 
with that goes your ability to convince the skeptics.  Some of what you say 
may be true, but a lot of it seems pretty hypothetical at this point.  Like 
the idea that commercial migratory beekeeping is causing all the big 
problems in beekeeping today.  I would like to see more facts and rational 
argumentation to support this supposition.

Steve Noble  
   

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