No Organic Bee Losses

There is currently great speculation about what is killing honey bees
around the world. One suggestion is that they are affected by microwave
radiation from cellphone towers, another is that pesticides are responsible. It
may be that radiation in combination with toxic chemicals is responsible. (In
humans, such radiation opens the blood/brain barrier and allows toxins and
viruses into the brain.) At any rate, both microwave radiation and toxic
chemicals are stressors, so reducing either would increase immunity, whether you are
a human or a bee.
I have a friend who runs an organic CSA a few miles from me, and he
reports that his bees are thriving.
-Shivani

No Organic Bee Losses

"Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic
beekeeper from Prince Edward Island. She has twice run for a seat in Ottawa's
House of Commons, making strong showings around 5% for Canada's fledgling Green
Party. She is also leader of the provincial wing of her party. In a widely
circulated email, she wrote:

I'm on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans,
and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is
reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial
guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites,
and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all
over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the
colonies.

Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site at Here, Michael Bush
felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world right on the top page:

Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I'm happy to say my
biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and
coming up with hives that won't hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed
the bees.

This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I've gone to natural
sized cells. In case you weren't aware, and I wasn't for a long time, the
foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would find in a
natural hive. I've measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are
4.6mm in diameter. What most people use for worker brood is foundation that is
5.4mm in diameter. If you translate that into three dimensions instead of one,
it produces a bee that is about half as large again as is natural. By letting
the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and
Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day,
and shorter post-capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into
the cells, and less Varroa reproduce in the cells.

Who should be surprised that the major media reports forget to tell us that
the dying bees are actually hyper-bred varieties that we coax into a larger th
an normal body size? It sounds just like the beef industry. And, have we here a
solution to the vanishing bee problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group,
or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage
affect government action in dealing with this issue?

These are important questions to ask. It is not an uncommonly held opinion
that, although this new pattern of bee colony collapse seems to have struck from
out of the blue (which suggests a triggering agent), it is likely that some
biological limit in the bees has been crossed. There is no shortage of evidence
that we have been fast approaching this limit for some time.

We've been pushing them too hard, Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate professor of
environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told the CBC.
And we're starving them out by feeding them artificially and moving them great
distances. Given the stress commercial bees are under, Kevan suggests CCD might
be caused by parasitic mites, or long cold winters, or long wet springs, or
pesticides, or genetically modified crops. Maybe it's all of the above...

Article Received from Lancifer


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