"I'm beginning to smell a big fat Commie rat."
Posted on 05/12/2007 10:36:36 AM PDT by Clintonfatigued
Bees are big business. They are crucial to pollination of $14 billion in food crops and a third of the food we eat. If bees have a problem, we all have a problem. And bees have a big problem.
The chief apiary inspector for the state of Texas calls it "a hell of a problem." As many as a quarter of the nation's commercially kept bees went missing last year, presumed dead, in a phenomenon now called colony collapse disorder. Inspector Paul Jackson said it is as much a mystery in Texas as it is in 24 other states and half a dozen nations. He said it happens overnight without warning signs of distress and with no evidence left behind. The bees simply disappear.
Jackson has yet to find a pattern in this worrisome phenomenon. One beekeeper may lose 5,000 hives in a day's time while another down the road 10 miles loses none. In Texas, as elsewhere, it is the large commercial colonies that are most affected.
A threat of this magnitude to such a fundamental element in food production prompted congressional hearings last week. A specially appointed, nationwide task force of scientists will conduct research to try to pinpoint the cause and find solutions.
Pollination is the name of the game. Beekeepers in Texas and several other states send thousands of hives to pollinate crops around the country, moving them from state to state and crop to crop. Texas hives are deployed as many as four or five times a year, carried about the country on 18-wheeler trucks.
This constant mobility has been cited as a possible cause for the disappearing hives. The resulting stress depresses bees' immune systems, making bees vulnerable to a host of diseases and parasites.
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
Bush’s fault
It must be the lefty objective of the day............Our local fish wrapper (The Milwaukee Urinal Sentinel) posted a similar story today.....
Still, this is a development that bears close watching.
"I'm beginning to smell a big fat Commie rat."
This may be a real concern, unlike the bogus global warming scare. Bees are crucial to agriculture, and they are mysteriously dying at an alarming rate. Of course, since it’s real, and the left hasn’t yet figured out a way to blame it on Republicans, it hasn’t been talked about much in the Left-Stream Media.
Enviromental Wackism, the new Secular Religion. All regions have their wacko doomsday cults, “Environmentalism” is our secular version of them.
We’re next.
I'll beekeeping a close eye on this problem.
It would bee a good time for the guys who sell bees.
Fellow I know of who lost his, got a new batch UPS.
Are the bears killing the bees?
The bees are showing up here even though there is nothing for them to do yet.
Actually, this is very true! We just had a field trip (homeschool group) to visit with a beekeeper, last week, here in GA. We learned that beekeepers “rent” their hives to farmers during pollination seasons, and having the bees augment the pollination process increases crop yield by approximately 80%, which as you can imagine is a significant profit for the farmer, and a significant increase in the supply of fresh produce to US markets, thus decreasing our prices as consumers.
One of the mothers asked the beekeeper if he himself had experienced this hive loss, and if so did he have any explanations for it. He said he had had some hive loss, and that it specifically occurred at farms where either the crops were GMO (genetically modified), or where they had recently been sprayed with any kind of chemical (such as fertilizer, or bug repellent). It seems the honeybees only feel inclined to pollinate natural plants, and if they didn’t find such plants near the hives, they would fly as far as, IIRC, 45 miles away from it to find something suitable as food. As you can imagine, they don’t all make it back to the hive, either through disorientation, or through being slammed on someone’s windshield, etc.
It was actually quite fascinating to learn how strongly our economy leans on honeybees! Here is a link to his website:
(BTW, the honey he brought with him for us to taste was the tastiest I have ever had!)
|
“Beekeepers in Texas and several other states send thousands of hives to pollinate crops around the country, moving them from state to state and crop to crop.”
What FOOD crops are dependent on bees? I thought most food crops are grown from seeds.
Do flowering-plant crops - fruit orchards - depend on bees, or do fruit trees make their fruit whether or not bees pollinate their flowers? I thought the only difference was whether or not the seed produced would be fertile or not.
Nature’s bees are dying too I suppose. Why would it effect just commercial bees?
” “I’m beginning to smell a big fat Commie rat.”
It’s the flouride in the water..
We used to have bees in our yard. Haven’t noticed any this year.
Commercial bee hives support agriculture, which of course is not natural habitat. If you want to grow high concentrations of crops, you need high concentrations of bees. The natural environment doesn’t produce enough food to sustain a civilization. Assuming that any enviromental concern is leftist BS is just as foolish and knee-jerk as the environuts hysteria.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.