This morning's New York Times had an editorial about the most recent
plight of beekeepers. Here is the text:
+++++
February 22, 2007
Editorial Notebook
Keeping Bees Among Us
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Mention honeybees, and most people think two things: stinging and
industriousness. A beekeeper thinks: jubilation, harmony, the
civilization of insects. Nothing in nature is more vibrant — literally
— than a strong hive on the increase in late spring and early summer.
And few things are more depressing than opening the lid on a hive and
pulling apart the supers, the boxes where bees raise young and store
honey, and finding that the colony inside has died.
It is far more than the death of individual bees. It is the death of
prosperity itself.
My dad kept bees when I was young, and now I keep them. There were
problems in my dad’s day: ants, skunks, wax moths and a couple of
deadly but well-known bee diseases, like foulbrood and nosema. But my
dad’s day — the late 1950s and early ’60s — looks, in retrospect, like
a golden age. No one had heard of tracheal mites or varroa mites — two
tiny pests that have decimated hives in the past 15 years and made
beekeeping much more complicated than it used to be.
Now there are alarming reports of a new bee problem, called colony
collapse disorder. “Disorder” is something of a code word. It means
that no one really knows what is causing the sudden death of hives.
There were heavy losses last fall, mainly among migratory beekeepers,
who move their colonies from crop to crop as fields and orchards come
into blossom. The threat of this new disorder isn’t merely the loss of
bees. It’s also the loss of crops — a long list of them, including most
tree fruits — that depend on pollination by honeybees.
Scientists are already hard at work searching for the cause of this
disorder, which may be fungal. It may even be that transporting hives
from crop to crop stresses bees more than we think. But I know from my
own experience with bees — as someone who keeps only a couple of hives,
never moves them and leaves most of the honey for the colony itself —
that we must do everything we can to keep these creatures among us, as
much for their sake as for our own.
++++++++++++
Adrian M. Wenner (805) 963-8508 (home office phone)
967 Garcia Road [log in to unmask]
Santa Barbara, CA 93103 www.beesource.com/pov/wenner/index.htm
"Having one view prevail is harmful; it becomes a belief system, not
science."
Zaven Khachaturian — 2006
-- Visit www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l for rules, FAQ and other info ---
|