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  • From: Richard Stewart <rstewart AT zoomtown.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] Bees (was: Zucchini problem)
  • Date: Sun, 1 Aug 2010 10:07:32 -0400

Bill I agree completely with you. There needs to be more science, but there
are also a lot of questions on the LD level testing and the EPA and how
easily they let this all go through. It may just be that neonics just kill
bees and have nothing to do with CCD or that enough is sticking around in the
pollen and its acting as a binary with something else. Like I said in the
post before fungicides are being looked at now as a possible culprit.

You never see an articles about off use chemicals in beehives either, which
some commercial operations do do, especially the older guys. The problem is,
you have massive monocrops, be it fruit, seed crops (like alf-alfa), oil seed
(sunflower and rapeseed), and certain vegetable crops (mainly vines), and
almonds almonds. We grow them to be easier to harvest and produce as
cheaply as possible and because they are so large then NEED to have
pollinators brought in. The only type of bees you can do this with are
European Honey Bees. Honey Bees want to sit in one location forage as much
stuff as they possibly can and swarm..sometimes several times. Most of the
commercial guys feed their bees artificial feeds replacing pollen and nectar)
as their main source of food as well. All that honey in the hive adds to
much weight to the bee boxes and they need to keep their truck loads to as
few as possible to make money.

The numbers of losses that we are seeing are from the big commercial
operations that move their bees and of all crops, almonds, is the single
driving force in what happens in the commercial aspects of beekeeping. All
other crops are a distant second. They were paying upwards of 200.00 PER
colony to get some, any bees, in certain areas of the almonds this year. Most
contracts were for less, but its not going to get any better. A thousand
colonies (typical commercial scale size more or less) will gross between 120
and 200K in almonds. Then you have a whole year of MUCH smaller pollination
contracts across the country. The more they get moved the less time they
have to forage properly and then they are fed HFCS, treated for mites, with
miticides some legal, some not so, and then supplement pollen with patties
made up of the most a variety of things designed to mimic pollen.

I'd like to see a sort of common sense approach to all of this and maybe
tackle the monocrop idea as much as the migration of bees across the country.
How far can a system be stretched to maximum capacity/return and be
sustainable?

Richard Stewart
rstewart AT zoomtown.com



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