Driving something around on a truck does not necessarily translate into a 
big relative expenditure of energy, particularily if the payload will 
result in a considerable increase in yield.  It presently takes 7.3 energy 
units of non-renewble energy to make 1 energy unit of food in the US (the 
entire system takes 10.2 Quads to produce 1.4 Quads of food energy).  If 
someone were to do the calculations, from strictly an energetic 
standpoint, moving bees and, thus increasing yield, might make sense and 
ultimately reduce the 7.3 state-of-affair.  Fertiliser application, 
afterall, gobbles 40% of the US food energy use in food cultivation... 
transportation is just a blip.  If you can get the same yield by 
decreasing fertiliser use and bumping up the bee density, then I think 
bees could play a part in reducing overall energy use in agriculture.  No 
one knows this for sure: I only bring this counter arguement forward to 
demonstrate that this assumption may not be a given.  Allen previously 
pointed out the possible pitfalls of this logic, his good example was 
organic apple production where hand-thinning is the only way to deal with 
over-abundant fruit set.  These pitfalls, however, should encourage us to 
look into the dynamics of this relationship rather than write the whole 
area of study off at the outset.

I am not so foolish, and neither are any of you, to conflate 
sustainability entirely with energetics.  There are clearly more factors 
that need to be considered when formulating sustainable agriculture than 
just this one element (eg Ted presents the case of 500 vs the 5000). A lot 
of these issues, however, are not as readily as calculated as energetics.

Adony  

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