I've been thinking a lot about the honey bee die-off. Until I get too freaked out. Then I have to stop. One of my trains of thought goes like this: If factory farming is leading to mad cow disease, e coli bacteria in organic spinach, bird flu, melamine in pet food, etc. etc., does it have anything to do with the honey bees dying?
And if it does, wouldn't part of the solution be for beekeepers to start spreading their hives over a larger geographical area, perhaps even keeping backyard beehives the way some people keep backyard chickens? (My husband was delighted when I told him I no longer wanted chickens in the backyard ... until I told him I wanted a honey bee hive.)
So I felt quite smug when I got the latest issue of The Hightower Lowdown and found this little piece. Nor was I surprised to see that, as is the case with so many other foods, agribusiness has been breeding "super bees" at the expense of biodiversity, so if a virulent strain of a virus comes along, the entire population collapses. Really smart when you're talking about a major link in the food chain.
Are humans (or should I say, Americans, as in the U.S. variety) going to learn or is it too late?
5 comments:
I read somewhere that this die-off thing has happened before, and seems to go in cycles.
But.
Not here. It won't be learned here. Of that I am convinced. Profit will always be more important than anything else.
I'd be curious to know what you believe about this. Do you think the culture here can change?
I'm not certain about the bees but have no trouble believing they've been altered.
Peace,
~Chani
Chani, no I don't have a lot of hope, at least on a large scale. Ordinary people's thinking is too dominated by TV and consumerism. Sometimes I wish we had become expatriates back when we were younger, before our roots were so deep here. But now, I'm in it for the long haul, and I just try to "be the change I want to see."
The honey bees dying off is so alarming, and there have been so many "reasons." Not surprising that profit is the culprit. In our greedy quest for more, more, more we will, by interfering with nature, ultimately have les, less, less.
Perhaps the bees have decided they've simply had enough of us humans and our messy ways and have left to go to some hidden bee paradise where we won't bother them.....
I've heard the same thing as Quaker Dave. Also there are something like six viruses that kill off bees. But as a bee-keeeping F/friend pointed out, why don't you find hives full of dead bees, if that were the case?
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