Why not? Because, bottom line, bees produce honey for themselves and their community. Not for us.
And now we've created this bee crisis. Tough to get your head around? I've done the homework and laid it out in simplest terms, what it means and what we can do.
See, bees are a keystone species, ensuring the continued reporduction and survival not only of plants, but other organisms that depend on those plants for survival. Once a keystone species disappears, other species begin to disappear too.
Albert Einstein wrote 'If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man." The ol' domino effect.
This Is Just How Bees Are
Bees are sensitive, social creatures that have achieved a high degree of harmony and productivity in their colonies - each of which can house up to 60,000 individual bees. Their social structure is both productive and ordered. They are intelligent, and become more so with age. They learn and remember; they can use visual orientation to accurately estimate the distance from a nectar source while in flight. They construct colonies that are warm in the winter and cool in the summer. They also suffer from occupational diseases, just like we do.
The Problem
Bees are dying in record numbers. The recent disappearance of catastrophic numbers of bees from their colonies, especially in North America is called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) - a disease where bees die away from the hive. They fly away and never return. Virtually every known bee virus can be found in the bodies of those few left behind in that nest.
Normally abandoned bees nests are taken over by other creatures looking for food and shelter. But hives suffering CCD remain empty, suggesting that there may be something toxic in the colony itself.
Having been co-opted into industrial farming, commercial bees have become just another type of farm machinery. Ironicall, the giant farms that destroy natural habitats and use large quantities of pesticides are the ones that need bees the most, and are at the same time important contibutors to their decline.
One Pesticides
Pesiticides used on food crops and other crops affect bees, even at sub-lethal doses. Some insecticides gain popularity in the united States in spite of having been banned in other countries. Like imidacloprin, the effects of which French beekeepers call "mad bee disease. It is made by Spectra Chemical, a Shanghai-based global supplier of chemicals and was benned by the French government in 1999.
Two Mobile colonies
As the number of crops we grow increases, the need for pollinators grows too, and these days beekeepers can make mor money renting out bees to pollinate food crops than they ever could selling home-made honey. Transporting bees huge distances in giant 18-wheel juggernauts with the hives stacked on top of each other, known as migratory pollination, is a multi-million dollare industry. Studies show that CCD is most prevelant in transported bees, with losses of up to 90 percent of the colony.
Three Overcrowding
Industrial-size colonies may have a bigger market value but they also bring the same problems to bees that industrial poulty farmers have visited on their chickens and turkeys: the easy spread of disease.
Four Unnatural diets
The natural diet of a bee is pollen and honey - a mixture rich in enzymes, antioxidants and other helth supporting nutrients. But commercial beekeeprs feed them on artificial supplements with glucose/fructose and corn syrups.
The artificial diets are in part a response to the decline of the bees' natural forage areas. Fewer plants means less natural bee food. But, taking any living creature off its natural diet and forcef-eeding it junk food will, inevitably, result in poor immunity. Bees in particular have a much loess adaptive immune system than twe do.
Five Intensive Farming
In a normal coloby the queen can live and produce eggs for several years. In commercial beekeeping, queens are regularly killed and replaced - sometimes every six months - in order to breed better queens.
In a normal colony the queen can live and produce eggs for several years. In commercial beekeeping, breeding better queens is a profitable business and queens are regularly killed and replaced - sometimes as often as every six months.
To ensure that colonies express the genetic qualities that beekeepers value, some virgin queens are artificially inseminated with sperm from crushed males. This practice, while not universal, is gaining in popularity as it becomes more difficult for honeybees to survive naturally.
What we can do
I have looked high and low for information about letter writing campaigns to State and Federal Congressional and Agricultural committee members or other actions and found precious little except for an article printed in April of this year in the New York Times.
This is how the article ends:
"You can help native bees by building them shelters. Bundle sticks of sumac and bamboo, with the open ends all going one way and the closed ends going the other. Then place the bundle where it is sheltered from the rain.
Two excellent guides to bee gardening are the Xerces Society's Pollinator Conservation Handbook and The Wildlife Gardener's Guide from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
As luck would have it, the plants bees love are pleasing to humas, too: trees and shrubs like dogwoods, sweet pepperbush, elderberries, blueberries and viburnums, especially viburnum denattum, V. cassionoides and V. lentago.
Flowers that bees like include monkshood, aster, indigo, buckwheat, great blue lobelia, blazingstar, lupine, Virginia bluebells, penstemon and salvia.
As for herbs, try anise hyssop, borage, marjoram, oregano and rosemary. Bees will nuzzle some exotics too, especially the old-fashioned single-dlowered snapdragons, lavendeers, catmints, Russian sage and speedwell."
So Ladies and Gents, it seems that what we can do to support imperiled bees will also bring us mental health and well-being. Goddess bless us all.
GO VEGAN. WHY NOT?
Information for this post was gathered from:
The Ecologist environmental affairs magazine.
