Aaron, my apologies for not having been able to abridge my thoughts below
better. Should you decide not to post it, I can understand and accept it.
<On Sustainable Beekeeping>
Personally, I take the term “sustainable,” as used by Brian here on this
list, to mean “balanced” (or as close as possible to “natural
setting”), “maintainable,” or “harmonious” (without endangering or wiping
out the species, that is), an attempt to bring *a holistic approach* by
looking at how beekeeping is an integral part of an interdependent,
complex, larger ecosystem that has taken eons to arrive at, rather than a
singular operation independent of other factors in our industrialized
setting.
I believe the diatribe between the two camps, whether pro or con, stems
from man’s undying, almost religious, desire to control everything,
particularly nature, for maximum efficiency and maximum profiteering.
Sure, we gain some, lose some, and at times, we seem to find the middle
ground, at least for a while. But at times we seem to go too far. Using
the above definition, let us examine how far our industry has departed
from the balanced and maintainable (I am not using the words “natural”
or “organic” deliberately) way of keeping bees by stretching the
term “sustainable” in migratory operation:
1. Pollination alone is not how our bees survive in nature. It is
nectar-gathering, and supplemental pollen-gathering in the process, for
which bees have been engineered through natural selection. Hence,
industrial almond pollination exclusively serves us, the humans, totally
ignoring their needs, an irresponsible stewardship. In other words, there
is no give-and-take in this marriage, hence not symbiotic. What’s in it
for THEM?
2. Worse, a massive dose of almond pollen alone, as many on this list
have already observed, does not serve the bees well, granted almond pollen
has any value, in and of itself. (Indeed one cannot live by bread alone
but moonshine and shoe-shine women, eh-hem!) Almond honey is
internationally famous for a cooking ingredient but not much else. Given
the low grad almond nectar, it is as if someone is forcing us to live on
fish for a month, but on nothing else.
3. Even under the most ideal circumstance, nature cannot afford such
vast wasteland of monocrop: worse, such industrial-scale number of hives
in one spot, breathing and breeding pathogens as a list member has pointed
out earlier when a migratory person, loaded with mites, warms toward your
yards because he too must make a living and the price is good. Even if
all the million hives are in perfect health, individual bees carry
different levels of susceptibility to pathogens, the varying degrees of
genetic mutations and variations we all carry in us (sickle-cell anemia
for African descendants and stomach cancer for Southeast Asians for loving
carcinogenic pickled, salted, and grilled stuff).
My point is not genetic variations will result in pathogen propagation;
rather, how we all have different degrees of susceptibility due to our
varying genetic makeup. Some will serve as a portal to a new pathogen
quicker than others, providing a vector, a door-opener. Similarly, not
all the bees are same, even if they may appear healthy.
4. Pressing on the above line of argument, it does not take rocket
science to figure out how a pandemic epidemic often coincides with
*overcrowding* of a single species; the condition in such setting is ripe
for the pathogens to migrate not only horizontally (intra-species) but
also vertically (inter-species), jumping from species to species. For
instance, the rats gave us the Plague; monkeys, AIDS; birds, SARS; pigs
(and probably cows), MRSA (Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus).
Consider MRSA for instance; having jumped from a pig sty to humans, it
then migrated to crowded hospitals, the germ bed for humans. Having
escaped the crowded hospital, MRSA is now common in locker rooms
(Community-Acquired-MRSA), another crowded living space occupied by
healthy young athletes. On the origin of MRSA in Netherlands and how pig
farmers started to experience this antibiotic-resistant strain, see the
url below:
http://public.cq.com/docs/hb/hbnews110-000002636736.html
5. Given such attested patterns of vertical migration of pathogens,
bees will, through overcrowding, experience new pathogens heretofore
unheard of, horizontally as well as vertically (like SHB); for example,
nosema (a spore-forming, unicellular, parasitic fungi) has never been an
issue in the south, and still isn’t in my operation, thanks to a warmer
climate and screened bottom ventilation. However, it appears that even a
common strain of nosema can wreak havoc in the north—just as a certain
strain of common pneumonia or tuberculosis in humans has lately turned
deadly and resistant:
http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/795_antibio.html
(Excellent article explaining the mechanism as to how *bacteria* become
resistant)
It has already been documented that apis-pathogens do cross species-
barrier (Cerena, Mellifera, and possibly Dorsata) and infect each other
given the chance, always lurking to find a niche. If I were a virus, I
too would love to break into bees piled up in one locale as smorgasbord,
thus outsmarting human ingenuity as we often outfox ourselves.
http://209.85.173.104/search?
q=cache:I3w5UUSGKeQJ:blc.arizona.edu/courses/181lab/TAfiles/44/Bad%
2520proposal%2520good%
2520proposal.doc+apis+mellifera+and+cerena+disease&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us
(Deformed Wing Virus jumping from Cerena to Mellifera; watch out for the
wrpas)
6. To say the obvious, the reason for such rising number of
unforeseen vectors appears to be the direct result of stressing bees in
our industrial operation, activities that are remotely related to bee’s
natural way of surviving: massive scale feeding, massive requeening,
massive movement across the continent, massive-scale monocrops, massive
exposure to chemical sprays that sustain the monocrops, massive
disappearance of forage land to develop more monocrop land, massive
importation of foreign bees from one country to another to meet that
industrial demand and make up the massive loss—activities that forces us
to treat the living and breathing organism as an unbreakable steel-bolt in
the giant beekeeping factory.
The typical argument for such monocroping has been reduced prices for our
groceries. Probably so or may be not so. The illegal immigrants, too,
argued that our grocery bills would shoot up once the agricultural
industry loses their field labor, a reason they used for their amnesty.
But actually the prices have remained more or less the same, if not lower
than before; in fact, people report that we have produced more with fewer
illegal workers in the field. Although my heart, too, would like to
believe that the collapse of beekeeping will create a domino effect across
the entire economy, my head tells me differently. Nothing drives people
more irrationally than the media sensationalism, such as Y2K hullabaloo,
or the never-ending Kingdom Come.
7. This massive industrial-scale beekeeping operation, mentioned
above, illustrates keeping bees independently, above and beyond nature—
never realizing that beekeeping is only a small part of that giant total
ecosystem, about which we have been myopic and about which we do not seem
to acknowledge that it took eons for nature to build its current supple
equilibrium.
8. Successful migratory beekeeping, if continued, along with
industrial monocroping, seems to offset that delicate equilibrium, that
difficult balance overnight, irrevocably—the ultimate exercise of mastery
and control of nature by a handful of humans wanting to maximize their
profit. Under such scenarios, it is not entirely impossible to lose bees
on the surface of the planet forever. Hobbyists and sideliners, too, will
succumb to such wheeling and dealing demise, for “No good deed should go
unpunished.” As far as I know, there is no other species of insects,
other than the kind of ants that swell up its abdomen to collect “honey”
for the period of dearth. Yes, it is hard to even think about the
disappearance of bees off the planet, but they don’t seem to be thriving
under current mode.
One time, and still to some extent, the buzz word in beekeeping was
Integrated Pest Management (IPM) preached by a few; in a nutshell, IPM
tries to attack the bee-problems in a holistic way by closely monitoring
the colonies throughout the year rather than treating, say, mites at one
time, and then forgetting about it. Similarly, we should look at the bee
operation in an integrated way, holistically, by looking at the whole
picture that considers all the global issues Marla and others have already
pointed out.
The issue is not whether someone should make a living via almond-farming
or migratory beekeeping; rather, it is whether such practice will impact
and jeopardize the ecology in a few decades, a struggling and balanced
system nature has taken for eons to create, irrevocably. This is a far
far far larger issue than someone’s ability to put the bread and butter on
the table. For instance, where will the chemical sprays from massive
monocroping end up in the long run, just as where will all the rubber
particles from the tires we wear out every year end up? We are breathing
them in daily. They will end up in your and my blood stream, if they have
already not done so. I am not blaming anyone else here, but go take a
walk along a river. Look at the industrial garbage that chokes our
rivers; I would never eat a catfish from it: it is full of sores and
ulcers inside. I know I used to angle them along the Cimarron River.
Without such macro-vision, finding the “cure” for Israeli virus alone will
not cut, an ingenious duct tape to hold a hot engine part for a while.
The fact that American bee suppliers cannot meet the domestic demand seems
to indicate the industry is in deep doo doo; we used to import bees to
other countries. Now that we found a virus from Australian imports,
should we now try others like Chile, Argentina, Europe, and China. Why
not? Such bar-hopping for foreign sources will help us *exhaust* the
import sources. What then? This has been the pattern up till now.
Indeed, for a hobbyist, a single colony death is a national tragedy, and
it should be so, and it must remain so. However, for a migratory
beekeeper, ten-thousand colony loss is a mere statistics, a figure against
last year’s benchmark, for he will order twenty-thousand more next year.
Why not? But from where? Try Mars? What’s wrong with him to expect
*different results* next year while putting in the *same* input, year
after year?
Yoon
In the 70’s F today, my bees are flying in the dead of winter!
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