> Who conducted and sponsored those studies? Were they well designed and
> were the results properly interpreted.
I guess we have to ask that about all the various tests and studies we hear
about. Also, we have to consider the sample sizes on each side of the
comparison and possible bias in selection, inadvertant or deliberate.
>Peaches typically top the list of USDA's dirty dozen fruits and vegetables.
>On commercial peaches, they have found 50 plus pesticides, some of them
>illegal, while organic peaches showed 1-3 in the same testing.
That is a good example of what I mentioned above. While the results are
interesting, it is quite obvious that the organic samples wre cherry-picked,
while the non-organic samples were more numerous and from a far wider range
of locations, even outside the country. The (fortunate) results of a few
samples were compared to the worst (I assume) of the very much larger and
very diverse sampling. No mention was made of *any* non-organic samples
having surprisingly low levels, which I assume must have occurred, so, using
what I know and comparing it to the report, I can only conclude that the
observations reported are probably biased. I'll file it under,
"Interesting, but non-definative".
>My personal preference is for eating from the group with fewer pesticides.
>Minimize the damage. Growing your own is best. It can ensure ripeness for
>the full complement of enzymes, flavanoids etc. and you can grow disease
>resistant variates plus employ IMP. It also minimizes the carbon foot
>print.
Sure, and my Mom's Apple Pie is best. One thing that people often ignore,
occasionally to their peril is that eating exclusively from a small patch of
ground and drinking from one specific well can be a crapshoot compared to
eating and drinking from a variety of sources if your ground or well happens
to be poisoned with some element or compound that is not immediately obvious
to our senses, or deficient in some essential mineral.
I happen to agree with you, though. Organic and home-grown is the ideal and
very nice. I love to eat from my garden for the few weeks that each item is
in season, and when it is not under snow, but here we are considering the
the real world and what most people experience, not Shangri La.
Unfortunately, it seems most of us don't always get "the ideal" for many
good reasons, so dwelling on it distracts us from reality.
At any rate, I think we are off-topic here and muddying the water. We are
discussing, or attempting to discuss, *bee* feeds, not going back into the
organic logical and semantic quagmire.
Please, people don't hijack this thread.
We're talking bees here, not humans, and it is well documented that in many
instances, the food available to the bees in their immediate environment is
tainted -- lethally tainted -- sometimes and that properly chosen and
prepared supplements are likely to have a far lower level of toxins --
vanishingly low -- than many of the 'natural' foods available to them in the
field in this modern world. That is particularly true when the beekeeper
*knows* that there is spraying going on nearby.
That's what we are talking about.
The argument often raised that there are places and some times when bees
find themselves in perfect conditions and they have optimal conditions.
That is a most disingenuous red herring. Comparing some rare and distant
ideal with a real and present solution is specious. It amazes me how often
people fool themselves and others with such a transparent fallacy.
We are talking the real world here and most bees are suffering from
nutritional deficiencies periodically, and all bees experience nutritional
deficiencies seasonally for certain.
Is nutritional deficiency a bad thing? Is it a necessary trigger for the
bees to prepare for winter? That has been suggested. I don't know, but
when supplement were fed in California, it was learned that the bees
prospered and wintered so well that they made superior pollination units
that could subsequently be split.
The popular, but specious argument that any local pollen has to be the
perfect, natural and sufficient feed turns out to be entirely ridiculous
when we think for even a second or two. Maybe the bees evolved entirely on
pollens, but what pollens, and where?
Did they thrive, or merely eke out an existence, thriving some years and
verging on extinction another? To use one of the less questionable
analogies people so love; humans can live on potatoes or gruel for years on
end, but few believe that this is optimal, or even healthy. We all are
aware of how much larger and healthier succeeding generations become when
populations are able to get off their subsistence diet (some local
exceptions and the damage from excess eating and unfortunate choices being
duly noted in advance, and discounted).
Our bees are far from their mythical ancestral homes and many are maintained
far north of their natural latitudes. Moreover, the plants they encounter
are in all probability not much like the plants of that theoretical and
apocryphal 'home', either in species or seasonality.
Some of the flowering plants our bees visit cover acres or hundreds of
acres, but are effectively only one plant, replicated many times. Moreover,
what we see blooming in an area varies vastly from year to year, both
because of weather and climate, and because of tractors and seeders -- and
sprayers. Spraying, crop rotating and monoculture are making things much
harder for bees, by narrowing the variety of food, while predation by mites
ups the bees' nutritional requirements.
Let's face it. Bees can usually survive on nothing but what they can find
outside the hive, *however*, most of us want out bees to do more than merely
survive. (The rest can stop reading here). We want our bees to thrive, and
make a surplus for us. We don't want to fight to keep up our numbers.
For us, we consider feeding our bees as natural as feeding our children, our
dog or our horse.
Anyone can see when a large mammal is starving: their ribs start to show.
How many can see that an insect is starving?
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