Geoff Manning on the east coast of Australia said:-
"Whilst it is hard to speak for 
the whole industry, I think it is true to say, at least for the eastern 
states that we would only spend about 4-6 weeks at the most on 
agricultural land.  This would be spring build and we then move to honey 
flows on either forest or perhaps grazing land.  So the likely exposure 
to insecticides is much reduced."

Here in Western Australia the pattern of migratory beekeeping is not dissimilar. In my own case only the bees used for managed pollination of orchards in spring are possibly exposed directly to pesticide risk, and obvious chemical damage is rare but does happen from time to time.
However it is the insidious exposure that all my bees receive when watering at streams, and rivers carrying run-off from agricultural lands far distant that worries me most.
About 7 minutes into the Dan Rather report, I was struck by the photo album pictures of masses of bees hanging off the outsides of the hives whilst being moved by truck. From memory it was said to be in Minnesota in the early 1960s. It was a very familiar sight to me, since it was my experience too when moving bees in the 1970s and early 1980s, here in Western Australia. But I haven't experienced that since then. Back then the hardest thing was to keep bees out of boxes, since swarms would colonise any boxes or supers stacks where they could gain entry through a hole or crack. Now the hardest thing is to keep bees in the boxes, and swarms from my own hives are a rarity and from the feral hives even more so.

Another thing that strikes me when watching YouTube videos of bees being worked in commercial apiaries in the USA, (which is also evident in the Dan Rather report) is that pictures showing opening of "strong" hives, where a frame is pulled from the centre of the broodnest, it more often than not shows a beautiful frame of brood with good stores of honey and pollen with a disproportionately low population of attendant adult bees both on that frame and the remaining frames still in the brood box. In my understanding of strong hives, when a brood frame is pulled, hardly any brood is visible until the frame is shaken to dump the bees back into the box or in front of the entrance. So where are they?Mites didn't get 'em, nor hive beetles, 'cos we don't have them here. But our farmers are progressive and are right up there with the latest offerings from the "plant protection" companies. Go figure.

PeterD
In western Australia, and like many others, wondering if we are just too clever for our own good.

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