Peter got it right.  

If we refuse to take our bees, at any price, to growers who will spray chemicals *in bloom* the growers will think twice before dousing the flowers our bees will labor on.  To reinforce such ban, we can also add a single liner in our honey jars: “Never Spray Plants in Bloom for Safe Honey” or “Never Spray the Blooms for Natural Honey.”  

Let’s kick off this silent global campaign, folks.  I call on all the beekeeper-brother and sisterhood to do this.  I am talking to you guys, the guardians of pollinators, in UK and Argentina and elsewhere in the world.  When we order or make our next labels, please remember to add this one liner: Never Spray Plants in Bloom!  For we will keep the bloom sacred.  For we refuse to eat honey with chemical residue.  For we care about the future of our children.  For we refuse to be slaves for the chemical giants.

Spraying on flowers is not the same thing as spraying on leaves and stalks, or even coating seeds, which in and of itself is damnable enough.  It is an ultimate act that prostitutes the very holiest act of procreation.  There is no way to determine its long-term effects on epigentics of the plants: changes in the gene expression of the plant rendered by other unknown mechanism than DNA sequence whose unforeseen impact may last multiple generations, irrevocably.  

Spraying flowers, for example, may cause the next generation of the plant to be sterile, among other unknown consequences.  Then the grower must buy seeds from a handful of companies because the ones that got sprayed may not germinate as we have already seen such monopoly of the big industry.  (Who knows they are in bed together on this?  Never forget that the world goes around on the grease of greed). 

This non-germinating plant then interacts with whatever remaining “natural” plants nearby and such interaction will contaminate its gene pool, thus altering their DNA in the long run.  Look, it took millions of years for this plant/insect to be where it is now, and we are trying to undo that in a few years.  That is an irresponsible, if not irrevocable, act of man owning/controlling the earth.  This is a man-induced mutation that may choke our own throat, ultimately.  The above may sound far-fetched; however, if you look at how genes get turned on and off during the earliest cell division, you can see it is a matter of timing, intensity, and duration that determines an egg to develop into a specific species.  If you add a new synthetic chemical into this mix of timing, intensity, and duration, we are moving right into The Brave New World, for we do not know the full-blown, long-term consequences of this interference that benefits only humans, temporarily.

Why don’t we just kill off all the insects?  We, as others have already said, do not own the earth; the earth owns us.  Don’t you forget it.  Look at the recent catastrophe in Haiti: we are not in control of the earth.  We are just another insect species crawling on it.  We don’t even own the bees we keep; most of the time we interfere.  They enemy is indeed us, you and me.  Let us refuse to take our bees to growers that spray plants in bloom.  That’s right.  You heard me.   Keep the bloom sacred.  That is our responsibility.

Yoon

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