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["Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>]

Hmmm... that article says that 60% of the west coast bees and 70% of the 
east coast bees are gone.
   My son up in western Washington says the bees are mostly gone there. 
Where we live, there are lots of woods, hayfields, pastures, rural lawns 
that don't get sprayed much.  There will be corn planted soon, but I don't 
think it gets sprayed all that much.  We have LOTS of bees working our 
winter blooming honeysuckle, our pears, plums, peaches and purple dead 
nettles.  We don't keep bees, but I can say that there are mostly black ones 
probably from wild hives, and belted ones probably mostly from tame hives. 
I wish now I'd looked for golden ones, haven't seen many of those since the 
mite trouble began.  There were hardly any bees at all for the first few 
years we owned our property, but the population has come up a lot the last 
few years.  The black wild ones were about the only ones we ever saw when 
the mites were so bad, but we see a lot more belted bees these last few 
years.   Our place has always been wildly popular with honeybees in early 
spring as we have a lot of things blooming then, later on we don't tend to 
see nearly as many.  I'd say that there are at least close to as many bees 
as we have ever seen on our place.
   On the GM corn front, I have asked at the Farmer's Coop every couple of 
weeks whether the whole corn they had for sale was GM or not.  Nearly every 
time, with a little thought, one of the clerks would tell me it either 
definitely was not GM because he knew what the farmer had planted, or that 
he'd seen the cockleburs that showed it wasn't GM, or he had a pretty good 
idea that the farmer in question wouldn't grow the stuff.  Only maybe twice 
has he told me it was or probably was GM.  I've been told that the farmer 
who plants corn nearest us has his planting and harvest times down to such 
an art that he'll never change what he plants.  I was buying corn for our 
ducks, and avoiding the GM stuff as much as possible.  So that would go with 
the GM corn theory.
   There is another theory, that some new pesticides, including a group 
called " Neonicotinoids"  may be behind the bee disappearances.  These 
pesticides are used to make termites forget their way back to their nest, 
and may be doing the same thing to the bees.  (Have you heard about the 
Alzheimers epidemic?)   Again, we probably don't have all that many 
pesticides used in our area, and again, Tennesseans are mostly still of the 
opinion that Sevin dust is one of the four food groups, so I don't think 
they are going to be all that quick to change pesticides.  Herbicides yes, 
but not necessarily insecticides.
   Anyone else have any observations on their local bees?  I am curious. 
Donna