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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