Once again Jim provides entertaining, well honed, logic with its low 
ph designed to cut right through the crap.  Only this time, as is often the 
case, the appearance of logic is created by skillfully dissecting out and 
displaying only part of the picture.  What is absent from Jim’s reasoning 
this time is mention of the reality that in the world of government 
research money, like all forms of government funding, it’s a free for all 
out there; it’s every scientist and farm group for themselves. That’s just 
the way it is.  Not only that, it’s usually really hard to get funding via 
the legislative process, especially by means of a stand alone bill. It is 
the nature of legislation, especially funding bills, to automatically come 
with coat tails.  It is SOP in Washington to grab onto those coat tails 
because it’s a hell of a lot easier to ride the coat tails of a bill that 
has momentum than to create a separate bill and enough momentum for it to 
make it through the gauntlet.  
     I admit, I haven’t really followed this Pollinator Protection Act, but 
frankly I would be surprised if it made it through with out earmarks from 
some much more unrelated areas than Native Pollinators.
     The fact is that beekeeping research is and always has been under 
funded.  So has research into native pollinators and entomology as a 
whole.  It is understandable that beekeepers would want everyone else to 
keep their hands off their research funding bill; to keep it strictly on 
task.  But it’s not despicable of those interested in native pollinators to 
want a piece of the pie.  They have a harder and more strictly 
environmental argument to make for deserving research money.  Their 
argument, like many environmental arguments, is more difficult to relate 
directly to economic interests.  This may be the chance of a life time for 
them.  Everyone knows what a raw deal the Native Pollinators got when the 
European Honeybees came to North America.  Give them a break, Jim :>).

Steve Noble         

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