North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Ginda Fisher <list@ginda.us>]

I'd like to second Rivka's point.  I keep seeing that 'einstein' quote and 
it's getting on my nerves.  I haven't seen more than one or two wild 
honeybees in my yard in the 9 years I've lived in this propery, but I get 
excellent pollination of my crabapples, raspberries, apricot, blueberries, 
dandilions, and pretty much everything else.  That quote is ridiculous.

And yet, an unexplained die-off of honeybees is a serious problem for 
farmers (many of whom will need to actively invest in alternative 
pollenators if they can't rely on honeybees) and yes, it could signal a 
serious problem for our health, too.  Ridiculous exaggerations just lead 
people to assume the speaker is a fundamentalist 
extremist (the sort of person who cares more about bees than about people, 
for instance) and dismiss the factual description of the problem as 
probably exaggerated, too.  

it would be terrific if CCD was caused by contaminated bee feed.  I can't 
think of a cause with a simpler solution.  I hope the proper resources are 
in place to research that and other possible causes.  It might be worth 
lobbying your congresscritter to allocate funds for this investigation

Ginda

...... Original Message .......
On Wed, 18 Apr 2007 09:30:12 -0400 road's end farm <organic101@linkny.com> 
wrote:
>
>On Apr 17, 2007, at 11:42 PM, Dylan Ford wrote:
>
>>
>> Rivka - And everybody knows, canaries can't mine coal. Why's everybody
>> panicking?  dylan
>>
>
>. . .
 
> attempting to impress the importance of an issue on others by 
>including exaggerated and clearly false information often doesn't have 
>that effect; it instead often has the effect of causing people to 
>dismiss the entire thing as nonsense, which is unwise. It's especially 
>unwise if the issue is genuinely important, as this one is.
>
>--Rivka
>Finger Lakes NY; zone 5 mostly
>_________________________________