I just emailed politician/activist Sharon Labchuk to confirm that she wrote the email which follows below. Parts of this text are from my draft of an article on the subject of CCD and the necessity of an ecological perspective to address this truly scary problem. I will publish the article within a day or two, but I want to reproduce Sharon's email in full right now. She informed me that she wrote it giving full permission to be spread far and wide.
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Sharon Labchuk is a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper from Prince Edward Island. She has twice run for a seat in Ottawa’s House of Commons, making a strong showings around 5% for the fledgling Green Party. She is also the leader of the provincial wing of her party. In a widely circulated email, she wrote:
I'm an organic beekeeper.
Two things here. One, we would not be so dependent on commercial non-native factory farmed honey bees if we were not killing off native pollinators. Organic agriculture does not use chemicals or crops toxic to bees and, done properly, preserves wildlife habitat in the vicinity, recognizing the intimate relationship between cultivated fields and natural areas.
Two, factory farmed honey bees are more susceptible to stress from environmental sources than organic or feral honey bees. I know alot of people think beekeeping is all natural but in commercial operations the bees are treated just like livestock on factory farms.
I’m on an organic beekeeping list list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services which stresses the colonies.
Bees have been bred for the past 100 years to be much larger than they would be if left to their own devices. If you find a feral honeybee colony in a tree, for example, the cells they lay eggs in are about 4.9 mm wide. This is the size they want to build, the natural size.
The foundation wax that beekeepers buy have cells that are 5.4 mm wide so eggs laid in these cells produce much bigger bees. It’s the same factory farm mentality we’ve used to produce other livestock – bigger is better. But the bigger bees, for a lot of easy to understand reasons, do not fare as well as natural sized bees. It’s now possible to buy foundation with these smaller sized cells but most beekeepers in Canada don’t have a clue, or aren’t willing to put the effort into going organic this way. Certified organic honey, as in the President’s Choice brand, still allows chemicals to be put in the hive.
So the factory farm aspects of beekeeping, combined with all sorts of negative environmental factors, puts enough stress on the colonies that they are more susceptible to dying out.
More info on this:
Organic Beekeeper list
http://pets.groups.yahoo.com/group/Organicbeekeepers/
Michael Bush’s site:
http://www.bushfarms.com/bees.htm
Also BeeSource:
http://www.beesource.com/pov/lusby/index.htm
Sharon Labchuk
Earth Action
—————————————————Please visit the Beyond Factory Farming Coalition’s website at www.beyondfactoryfarming.org
The Beyond Factory Farming Coalition is a national organization promoting socially responsible livestock production in Canada. Our vision is “Livestock production for health and social justice”. BFF staff can be reached via email:
info -AT- beyondfactoryfarming.org
Her email recommends a visit to the Bush Bees Web site at bushfarms.com. Here, Michael Bush felt compelled to put a message to the beekeeping world on his top page:
Most of us beekeepers are fighting with the Varroa mites. I'm happy to say my biggest problems are things like trying to get nucs through the winter and coming up with hives that won't hurt my back from lifting or better ways to feed the bees.
This change from fighting the mites is mostly because I've gone to natural sized cells. In case you weren't aware, and I wasn't for a long time, the foundation in common usage results in much larger bees than what you would find in a natural hive. I've measured sections of natural worker brood comb that are 4.6mm in diameter. …What most people use for worker brood is foundation that is 5.4mm in diameter. If you translate that into three dimensions, instead of one, that produces a bee that is about half again as large as is natural. By letting the bees build natural sized cells, I have virtually eliminated my Varroa and Tracheal mite problems. One cause of this is shorter capping times by one day and shorter post capping times by one day. This means less Varroa get into the cells and less Varroa reproduce in the cells.
So, the dying bees are hyper-bred varieties actually coaxed into bearing a larger body size than is healthy. It sounds just like the beef industry. Have we here a solution to the vanishing bees problem? Is it one that the CCD Working Group, or indeed, the scientific world at large, will support? Will media coverage affect government action in dealing with this issue?