In a message dated 13/04/2011 19:32:46 GMT Daylight Time, [log in to unmask] writes: It looks like he was right. In the past two decades, the United States has lost 100-300 billion bees, and the problem has spread to Europe and beyond. While industrialized beekeeping operations do kill millions of bees each year, several other factors contribute to their massive die-off. Not just bees but all manner of insects. A few days ago I was on a long coach journey coming home from the Normandy beaches (including visiting the vast US war cemetery near Omaha Beach). Normandy is cider country! There are lots of small orchards and every garden has an apple tree. There are lots of small fields with flowering hedgerows. It's also cheese country with lots of small herds of dairy cattle grazing flower-rich fields (which is why their cheese tastes so good). By the time we left Normandy, having started clear, the windscreen of the coach was almost opaque from impacted insects and the driver had to get out his mop and bucket to clean it. Further east, the landscape and agriculture changed with large fields, fewer flowers and more 'industrial' arable. The driver cleaned the windscreen again as son as we had arrived back in England, having been through the Channel tunnel, but it was nowhere near as dirty as it had become during the first leg of the journey of roughly equivalent distance. Thence we headed north towards Cambridge, skirting London and passing through commercial agriculture for 100 miles. The windscreen was hardly spattered at all and the driver didn't bother to clean it. Chris *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html Guidelines for posting to BEE-L can be found at: http://honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm