Well, my neighbours and I, after attending a Super Canola workshop  at a
nearby town, decided it was time to open some hives and to see if I need
to run to the bank and arrange to buy packages.
 
(See 'What's New' at http://www.internode.net/HoneyBee/ for the workshop
slides).
 
You see, we had fed several semi-truckloads of refined white sugar to the
bees last fall in the understanding that this would enhance the wintering
of the bees.  We had no idea what a huge mistake we were making; you see,
this, unfortunately, was before we read a brilliant rhetotical essay on
this very list, pointing out the evils of the practice.
 
On reading the article, I realized immediately, that our western ways have
been developed over many years under direct influence from empirical data
and hard experience gathered by dedicated scientists and successful
beekeepers, and with vastly insufficient input from rhetoric,
unsubstantiated theory, wild leaps of faith, associative logic, allegory,
ignorance, whimsy, good old-fashioned misinformation and hunches.
 
I realized I was in deep trouble, and was immediately plunged into stark
terror for my fate -- and that of my bees. I could immediately see how I
went wrong: If only I had known better, I should have left those bees to
winter unmedicated and untreated on that rock-hard Canola honey instead of
feeding white sugar, and I should *never* have insulated the hives against
the loving carresses of that minus forty degree wind that nature brings in
her wisdom to select the bees that are good enough to survive in a
territory where bees have never before been able to survive long on their
own.
 
I knew immediately that everything I had done on the illusion that I
understood the bees and their needs, was being merely selfish and
exploitive.  And I came to understood how a tiny bit of experience and a
tiny bit of expertise in a totally unrelated field in a tiny part of the
world and a huge lack of humility and perspective could be effortlessly
extended to immediately establish immutable truths for widely varying
enterprises in widely scattered and vastly diverse parts of a huge planet,
a planet with a climate that ranges from polar to tropical, and
populations that vary from primitive to industrial.
 
When we arrived at the site to inspect the bees, we opened the hives
humbly and with great trepidation, fearing the worst.  What a relief!  So
far, at least, it appeared that things -- in spite of my ignorant
interference with the ways of Nature -- are looking good.
 
We opened about thirty hives (the worst looking) out of eighty, and of the
thirty, we found one dead (drone layer?) and two or three looking poor --
with only two to three frames of bees.  The rest were looking pretty nice,
with large clusters just starting to expand across the top bars of the top
box.  It is still early to say, since we can have minus forty weather
still, but losses seem light so far, and if the weather stays around or a
bit above freezing during the days -- as it has recently, we should be
smiling this spring.
 
I must say that the trip to the hives did me good, and somewhat -- but not
completely -- restored my faith in my old ways and caused me to question,
only a little bit,  my newfound insight.  Maybe -- just maybe -- I do know
what I am doing when it comes to bees.  Maybe I'm even good at it.  Maybe
the other hundreds of dedicated commercial beekeepers who manage to eke
out a living by understanding their bees and their needs aren't just dumb
 
 
and greedy after all.
 
Nonetheless, in about a month it will be time to start our annual frenzy
of bee abuse and exploitation as we have now come to understand it.  I
understand it is already under way elsewhere.
 
We'll start, as usual, with forcing unnatural and toxic highly refined
white sugar syrup on them and follow that closely with patties of protein
and vitamins that are unavailable to bees on their own: soy flour and
brewers yeast mixed with pollen stolen by deceit from hives last summer
and, of course more of the dreaded white sugar (Bees, like kids are
suckers for sweets).
 
If they survive and thrive in spite of our nefarious and ignorant attempts
to poison them in the name of nutrition, we will then place grease patties
on them, providing lipids they would never encounter in nature along with -
- you guessed it folks -- more highly refined white sugar.  This by way of
introducing drugs.  And they can't just say 'No'.
 
If they don't get diabetes or holes in their teeth, which they should
according the advanced form of associative, discontinuous and and
rhetorical logic we have recently come to love and admire, we will then
proceed to spit them up into new colonies headed by degenerate queens
raised under artificial conditions by misdirected queen breeders who will
have selected their genes merely for the selfish and human-centred
purposes of having pride in producing bees that resist disease, winter
well, make strong colonies, and produce abundant honey in diverse
conditions with minimum management.
 
This will be only the beginning of what we used to (misguidedly) to think
of as an annual symbiotic process between man & insect, but which we now
understand is merely a brutal distortion and exploitation of nature.
 
We now know better, but it is so hard to change our ways...
 
Allen Dick