“That is why we have a surveillance and eradication program in place.  To get rid of them.  Australia has a good track record in eradication of pests that other in the world have failed to eradicate and said couldn't be eradicated. “

Yes, here in America we too tried to trap and “eradicate” as many AHB’s swarms as possible, moving up from Mexico, in a tight surveillance, I in fact live in one of those states where we have DNA-confirmed AHB’s since 2003, but they are now found in nearly all southern states because even the Almighty cannot seal up the air through which they travel.  No man-made barrier, biological, chemical, or otherwise, will stop insects flying in the air.  Australia has, it appears so far, good luck in fending off Apis Cerana and mites, trafficking on their own, but the word choice “eradication” is unscientific and unrealistic.  It is just a matter of when, not if.

Australia has not been able to “eradicate” European rabbits and Cane toads, to name just a few, with all the state-of-the-art scientific know-hows, such as making a species sterile and then let it mate?  (It may have been much easier to eradicate the aborigines since they can’t fly in the air)  I too would like to hear that Australia has completely eradicated Apis Cerana and mites, too, but that is a wishful thinking.  How can you quarantine the sky?  How can you quarantine flying insects?  How can you detect and not miss one swarm infiltrating into a virgin territory?  Some mites stay on the bloom, probably not on the bees necessarily (especially so are hummingbird mites that hitchhike onto the next host).

“Firstly it [Australian imports] would give you clean bees to start with, e.g. on almond pollination, and secondly you can then later requeen with your resistant queens that you are breeding.  This overcomes the shortage of bees you have.  However if you do not have a shortage of bees, then there will be no market for Australian packages.”

Ah, here comes the sales pitch.  For almond pollination, nearly or close to half of the entire American colonies will congregate around a small area in California, a government-sponsored germ bed for free bee disease-exchange; the clean bees, therefore, will exacerbate and magnify the bee pathogens because they have never encountered many new pathogens brought on by migratory beekeepers, much less having developed any resistance against any.  Worse, requeening thousands colonies is not always feasible, granted we get the new queens for free (you wish), thus proving impractical.  As for the supply and demand side of almond pollination, I am not sure we are having shortage of bees every year.  There seems to be a pattern that each year we go through this rumor of bee shortages; however, when the season actually arrives, the out-of-state beekeepers cannot find any takers at a dirt-cheap rate.  I am also aware that many almond growers themselves are giving up almonds due to water scarcity and decreasing profit margins, thus alleviating the alleged bee-shortage even further.

Importing bees, at best, is a stop-gap measure, a myopic policy that ignores the long-term survival of bees and bee biology.  American bees have been fighting mites for nearly twenty years now, having just barely established a toe-hold against mites in certain regions, in particular in the advent of AHB’s, among other known and unknown factors.  By bringing in “pure” bees from Australia, are we not regressing and retarding our bees back to twenty years ago?  Why? Isn’t this an act of animal cruelty?  You have just rescued the bees from the gas chamber and then you put them right back in it because “they have never been in there”?  Can we not simply say, “been there and done that,” and move on into a new era of beekeeping?  Why would anyone like to make a nightmare last longer?  

Granted that Aussie breeders use selective Italian stocks known to be mite and other pathogen resistant in Italy, that is not the same thing as actually using bees in America saturated with cut-throat competition here and right now.  That is not even a field study.  Nature “red in tooth and claw” forged our bees to come to terms with all the pathogens we humans have introduced to them here in America.  Why do we want to set the clock back to Stone Age?  Why do we want to open up yet more opportunities for yet other bee disasters, invariably associated with global trafficking of bees?

Why do we have to become the world’s largest parking lot for all sorts of pathogens?  No one has ever suffered death from not eating an almond or an orange.  There are other fruits and vegetables that contain higher nutritional values than these two special crops offer.  Sure, I too like to eat them once in a while, but importing bees from outside to fatten a few growers’ bank accounts ignores the long-term, unforeseen consequences.  Isn’t this how we ended up with mites, SHB, and AHB in the first place?  The greed of the few will subject all of us into serfdom once unknown bee pathogens and enemies come to roost in this world’s largest parking lot.  Are we ever going to learn anything?  You sure we Americans are not suckers?

Yoon

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