Keith Benson said:

> Just to play devils advocate here - what do you think the soil was like,
> say, before we imported the little buggers?  Methinks you downplay the
> role of native pollinators too much.

The "native pollinators" are in worse overall shape than honeybees, and the
decline in these native pollinators was one of the reasons for the growth of
migratory beekeeping as a way of making a living.

Monoculture farms and elimination of "weedy patches" through the creation
of larger farm plots and use on herbicides/insecticides turned "native
pollinators" into "extinct pollinators" in the areas where crops are grown.

Why else would a grower pay someone to bring bees on a truck from a
thousand miles away?  If native pollinators could do the job, beekeepers
would not need to "pollinate" so much.

Here's a pair of sites that go into more detail:

http://www.desertmuseum.org/conservation/fp/
http://www.pollinator.com/


I sent Rick Green an off-list e-mail with the following points, and
given the number of posts on this thread, I guess that I should list
them here.  Fair warning, this is a very USA-centric view.

1)  Invasive Exotic Pests and Diseases that have killed nearly all feral hives, and
     many managed hives, halving the number of hives and beekeepers in less than
     20 years.

2)  New "time-release" pesticides, that can be carried back to the hive by foragers,
     killing many more bees than traditional pesticides, which killed only foragers.

3)  Newer forms of pesticides, such as "Gaucho", which clearly kill hives, but
     seem to be difficult to link to bee deaths via existing analysis technology.

4)  Genetically modified crops, and the risks posed by these crops when bees
     are in the area, cross-pollinating.  (Inadvertent spreading of GM traits to
     other plants, risk of creating herbicide-resistant weeds, etc)

5)  Protecting the image of honey as a pure product when honey shipped from
     China is found to be contaminated with antibiotics, and testing of imports
     is currently spotty, at best.

6)  Protecting against the continued introduction of additional exotic invasive pests
     and diseases when USDA APHIS is unwilling to even prohibit importation
     of shipments of bees KNOWN to be infested with specific diseases and/or
     pests, simply because those diseases or pests have been detected in some
     part of the US at some point in the past.  (See my article in the December
     issues of both ABJ and Bee Culture about this)

7)  Attempting to work with an administration that is utterly clueless about (1)
     through (6) to the point of attempting to de-fund nearly all US federal bee
     research (see my Nov, 2002 ABJ article about this)

8)  Public perception of "bees as scary", combined with the expansion of suburbs
     into rural areas, resulting in attempts to "ban" beekeeping, in violation of
     "right to farm" laws on the books in every state.

Note that I did NOT list "AHB" as an "issue".  It is no longer an issue, as the
media scares have died down.  AHB is a fact of life in warmer places.
It only stays "an issue" as long as people try to make it an issue.