<It's not about us, it's about the bees.> I guess that's a matter of opinion, I raise bees for me, not the bees. Don't get me wrong I care for them and all, and do the best I can for their health given the constraints that I have, but I look at the alternatives too. The best environment for the bees is not agricultural, I have them there for my benefit and deal the best I can with the side effects thereof. In my opinion the best we can do is get the highest yield (sustainable yield, but that's not a debate I want to get into again, so lets go with consistent yield for now) possible out of that land which is under production. The alternatives I see are a) let people starve (more so than are currently anyway, and b) put more land under production to make up for lower yields and wreck more ecosystems. If there were a more economical way to produce food other than using pesticides farmers would already be doing it. Farmers are out to make money too. Hopefully there will be even safer pesticides in the future, but I haven't seen any conclusive evidence that the ones we are using now are any more dangerous than previous, in fact just the opposite. They are insecticides, noone should be surprised they kill our favorite insects when they are fed it directly. Short of planting dust I haven't seen any demonstration of extremely bad "in the field" problems so far. I left my bees next to treated corn and soy a couple years, they did no worse than before when the ground was hay. I'm sure it won't be too much longer before we need a new class of insecticide because too many bugs are resistant to this one. Let's hope it doesn't have more field observable effects than the ones we have now. Jeremy West Michigan *********************************************** 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