On Tue, 13 Mar 2007 15:21:35 -0400, Ted Hancock <[log in to unmask]> 
wrote:
>People seem to interpret this research in two different ways. One view is
>that we can best produce food by nuking a crop with pesticides to kill the
>weeds (and local pollinators), then bring in our nice healthy honey bees
>to do the pollination.

I trust that most beekeepers are not happy about the loss of diversity in 
agriculture.  What is good for native pollinators - a diversity of forages 
and successional flowering - is clearly good for our managed bees.  Even 
from a self-serving "short life" perspective, I cannot see how any 
beekeeper is benefiting from the dominance of soybean/corn cropping 
systems and the decline of clover/alfalfa as a livestock forage and 
nitrogen-fixing plow-down.  There is a nutritional need in N. America for 
increased consumption of a diverse source of fruits and vegetables and 
decreased consumption of fats and sweeteners... I would speculate that the 
landscape would generally be more bee friendly if the objective was to 
meet this need (in 1995 to meet the recommended requirements for the US 
diet the acreages of dark green leafy and deep yellow vegetables would 
need to increase by 1.4 million acres and fruit by 3-4 million acres).     

Someone asked me to make the case why an "ethical" person should eat honey 
over organic cane sugar.  While I explained that it takes less non-
renewable energy to make a calorie of honey and that the labour standards 
in the production of honey were better, I realised pollination is also a 
big part... by eating honey you support a very sustainable agricultural 
input. I admit when I said this I was going from intuition and not from a 
carefully researched position.

Allen raised the issue "is pollination the limiting factor" in yield.  I 
find this question so interesting and think it is worthy of the attention 
by the sustainable agriculture community.  Rephrased: which inputs give us 
the most profitable and sustainable (eg takes less non-renewable energy, 
produces less greenhouses gases, retains more wealth within our rural 
communities) increase in yield.  I have never seen this problem laid out 
in this way and I think it would be a productive way to tackle this 
problem.  As Allen points out, the results from this line of research may 
be very contectualised.  The only way to tell is to conduct studies at 
many randomly selected sites and over a few years and measure how strong 
the interaction is between the input and the environment. 

Returning to Ted.  If there is in fact a generalised trend within new 
cropping system to erode what is left of naturally-regenerating 
pollination systems, I don't think this is something to cheer about.  When 
a pollination system that did not cost a farmer a cent and was input-free, 
is replaced with a system that costs farmers money, and requires bees to 
be trucked around, fed sucrose for winter and medicated, this can only be 
seen as a big step backwards.  Nonetheless, given the circumstances, 
trucking bees around may be the most sustainable way to keep yields up now 
that the wild bees are no longer players in the pollination of many crops.

Adony

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