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  • From: "birdcr AT concentric.net" <birdcr AT concentric.net>
  • To: Blair Christian <blair.christian AT gmail.com>, ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [ocba] Pollination discussion...
  • Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 06:15:45 -0500 (CDT)

We watched this documentary about a month ago. Several European
countries held protests. Hundreds of beekeepers dressed out in
beekeeping gear tossed hundreds if not thousands of dead bee hives
into huge piles at their protests. The governments responded and
banned these pesticides.

We however remain uniformed due to the corporate influence over
our government and media.

Vanishing of the Bees can be picked up at the Orange County
Library or on Netflix.

Randy Emmitt



On Wed Oct 19 08:59:47 CDT 2011, Blair Christian
<blair.christian AT gmail.com> wrote:

> I saw a documentary on Netflix streaming last night called
> ?Vanishing
> of the
> Bees?http://www.netflix.com/Movie/Vanishing-of-the-Bees/70166291
> It?s the first partial explanation I?ve seen for ?CCD? (colony
> collapse disorder).  It?s pretty informative and presents a big
> picture of some issues in the US ag system and relates it to
> other bee
> colony issues in other parts of the world. CCD is the American
> name,
> but the same symptoms have occurred all over the world, starting
> at
> least 5 years before US beekeepers made the press.
> A main argument they make is that new pesticides which have
> sublethal
> effects to bees are a big part of CCD.  These leave the bees more
> susceptible to other issues (kind of analogous to how AIDS
> weakens the
> immune system, where one doesn?t die directly from AIDS, but
> indirectly from it because it compromises your immune system),
> Specifically they point to two new products from a class of
> pesticides
> called neonicotinoids that were introduced by Bayer and another
> company and were related to bee colony deaths in Europe starting
> in
> about 2000 (US CCD hit the news in about 2006).
> I thought I?d pass it along since legitimate causes of CCD didn?t
> get
> any press, just the hype beforehand.
>
> I know there are some in-the-loop entomologists on this listserv.
> Does anybody have any criticism of the science? Are there any
> randomized studies? (I'm a statistician, so I know a little
> about
> clinical trials) Apparently there is a loop hole for pesticide
> companies. To show a pesticide is "bee safe" they only have to
> show
> that it doesn't directly kill bees in some short period of time.
> As a
> backlash, it looked like some commercial pollinators were
> actually
> starting to deny farmers services based on the pesticides they
> use...
>
> Lastly, a big question that I've always wondered about: Why are
> we so
> focused on using honeybees for pollination? Honeybees weren't
> native
> to the Americas. Are there any alternative pollinator programs
> out
> there? Do we just use honeybees for pollination because they
> scale
> well? From a more holistic and ecological perspective, it seems
> like
> having multiple pollination species would be a big benefit. I
> love my
> bees, but I'm just curious.
> _______________________________________________
> ocba mailing list
> North Carolina Beekeeping
> http://www.theocba.org/
>



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