Re: Bee Colony Collapse - 'a trainwreck' 'worse than ever'

Bear in mind however that the bee colonies profiled in these stories are the insect equivalent to monocropping -- they're inherently vulnerable for the same reasons that food crops are vulnerable when they're bred to be too uniform and cultivated under increasingly artificial conditions. So we're really seeing the inevitable consequences of unbalanced bee husbandry -- similar consequences to that wheat rust that is now wiping out crops in the ME

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=25859&Cr=cereal&Cr1=


OTOH guys like Kirk Webster
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/175/

use breeding to strengthen their bee colonies. He works with nature instead of trying to manipulate it. Who woulda thunk it.

He's not alone. Here's a beekeeper who uses things like a smaller comb cell size -- also smaller bees (commercial bees today are actually oversized):

http://www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm


See this page on the above site for a list of the ways beekeepers interfere with bees -- which stresses them:
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesunnatural.htm


I'm not saying that CCD is not real or not potentially going to disrupt human food supplies, but I do believe there's a good chance it's not an insurmountable problem -- the know-how is out there -- yes it might take a paradigm shift to get ourselves out of this mess but isn't that what we're all working toward on all fronts?

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