The Bee Sting

I got the rare and much enjoyed opportunity to talk to my younger brother David and a very good friend of ours on the telephone last night. Zechariah and I both like honeybees so of course the topic of conversation turned in that direction. I haven’t been keeping up on the bee news in a long time so I was surprised to hear that there are some major problems appearing in the last year or so. I was thinking about it this morning after church so I thought I would do some searching on the subject while I had access to internet. I’ll give some thoughts and opinions on the matter.

"The sudden and unexplained loss of honeybee populations is an early warning sign for coming disruptions in modern agriculture," explained Mike Adams, executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center non-profit group (www.ConsumerWellness.org). "If we continue to lose honeybees at this rate, we may find ourselves in a dire food supply emergency that will not be easily solved," Adams said.

"During the last three months of 2006, we began to receive reports from commercial beekeepers of an alarming number of honey bee colonies dying in the eastern United States," said Maryann Frazier, a senior extension associate in the Department of Entomology at Pennsylvania State University's College of Agricultural Sciences.

"Since the beginning of the year, beekeepers from all over the country have been reporting unprecedented losses. This has become a highly significant yet poorly understood problem that threatens the pollination industry and the production of commercial honey in the United States," she said.

“Reports of similar losses to the honeybee population have been documented before in beekeeping literature, but are widely believed to have occurred at this scale previously only at a regional level. With outbreaks recorded as far back as 1896, this is regarded as the first national honeybee epidemic in U.S. history.”

Ok, so what is going on? I already knew that the Varroa mites were taking their devastating toll on the honeybee population but this is new, this is just in the past year or less! My friend the honeybee has a large arsenal of weapons aimed against it already so a new problem is not welcome at all in my opinion. They already have the mites (introduced to this country by man by the way) and other diseases that attack, and then they have to fight being fed white sugar water instead of real honey. That has got to reduce their health and immunity tremendously. They already have to face a barrage of antibiotics that the beekeepers feed like there’s no tomorrow. We know what antibiotics do to people and other animals and it’s doing the same thing to the bees. Resistant strains of the thing we were trying to get rid of in the first place! Wow, what genius on our part, we make super bugs in our efforts to eradicate them. Great work guys! Another stroke of genius is the way people spray pesticides and insecticides all over everything like it’s just good old water. Have we remembered that these things are made to KILL and they will kill the good bugs as well as the bad bugs? Maybe we should stop trying to ban, register and control killer guns and start banning, registering and controlling killer chemicals?

"There is no question that the extremely irresponsible use of synthetic chemicals in modern farming practices is significantly contributing to this devastating drop in honeybee populations," said Mike Adams. "The more chemicals we spray on the crops, the more poisoned the pollinators become. And the fact that honeybees are now simply disappearing in huge numbers is a strong indicator that a key chemical burden threshold has been crossed. We may have unwittingly unleashed an agricultural Chernobyl."

Oh, I guess I am not the only one thinking like this!

Another quote. “Pesticides, specifically neonicotinioid pesticides, including imidacloprid, clothianiden and thiamethoxam, poison the bee while it is in the process of collecting nectar and pollen. The poisoning may occur when the material is ingested, or it may be transported to the hive where it poisons other bees in the colony.”
Oh please just come out and say it plain instead of trying to sound like a professor. Instead of saying that the chemical “may be transported back to the hive where it poisons the other bees” how about saying the truth. It most certainly IS transported back to the hive where it poisons the other bees. Cut the nonsense and say it like it is. They don’t sit out on the lovely flower eating themselves sick, they collect it and bring it all back to the hive to be used by everyone. There’s no “May be” about it, it is a for sure thing. You spray a pesticide pr insecticide and the bee that comes in contact with it WILL carry it back to the hive, unless the bee dies before it can get back home. They say that they use chemicals that are not harmful to honeybees. Hogswill, if it kills bugs it kills bugs and if it even slightly lowers the immunity or strength of my honeybees it will have an effect on them such as opening them up to infection from other sources that the bee would have been able to withstand without the onslaught of chemical. The bees have enough to deal with without us adding to the trouble by dousing everything with chemical. Now I am not entirely against the use of chemical, I am against the indiscriminate use of it. If rats infest my barn you can bet your boots that I am going to use some poison!
According to the CCD report, "If bees are eating fresh or stored pollen contaminated with these chemicals at low levels, they may not cause mortality but may impact the bee's ability to learn or make memories. This could cause the colonies to dwindle and eventually die." Hmmm, sounds like old people who are losing their memory. I wonder if it’s from the same cause?
Another almost universal practice among beekeepers is to take all of the honey away from the bees and feed them the much less valuable corn syrup (genetically modified of course) or white sugar. HELLO GUYS!! Wake up and smell the chemicals!! What do you think this does to the bee’s immunity and strength? What does white sugar and corn syrup do to you? They make you SICK! They KILL YOU. They WIPE OUT your immune system! In hospitals they inject a solution of sugar water along with a certain dye into cancer patients, this sugar water travels directly to the cancer and FEEDS IT, carrying with it the dye, which enables the doctor to view the cancer on his/her fancy machine. Anybody interested in eating white sugar? How about feeding it to your children? Or how about feeding it to your bees? Why do they feed it to bees? Because it is cheap. Why else? See, it all goes right back to greed and money. There may be times when you have no other way of feeding your bees and you have to feed sugar water in order for them to get started. Ok fine, but figure something else out in a hurry. Think about it. God made bees to eat honey and pollen. If anyone tries to tell you that white sugar water and pollen substitute makes a perfectly acceptable substitute for the real thing, just walk away because they are so dumb they probably still think the world is flat and that the FDA and Monsanto have their best interests in mind.

Another really weird thing is artificially inseminating the bees. Now I’ve done cows that way and yes it works but let’s get real here, bees? Come on guys! Isn’t that getting a little out of hand? God created certain things certain ways and to work in a certain manner. Let’s not try our hand at being better than God. Give it up right now because your needles and test tubes cannot compete with God!

I think what could be the biggest bombshell yet is the GMO crops that are quickly spreading over this country like a blanket of fog. You cannot convince me that a plant that has been designed to kill insects will not harm the bee that comes to pollinate it and eats the pollen and nectar. It’s going to have an effect on the bee! Anyone remember the birth control GMO corn? How about honeybeacide canola? Now the well spoken, white cloaked (or black suited) Monsanto stooges with long lists of letters after their names and Swiss bank accounts for their payoffs will arrogantly and loudly proclaim that this is all nonsense and GMO’s never hurt anything. Just ask who paid for that Armani suit and equally Italian sports car they are driving. I guess the best liars drive the Ferrari’s and the regular liars drive a BMW. I don’t have a lot of hard facts on this issue, if I did I would be sure to paste them up here. My idea on the GMO and honeybee issue is that the GMO pollen is not what is natural (what a surprise) and this confuses the bees to the point where they have trouble finding their way around. Evidence is pointing to this but I haven’t found a real good study other than the ones done by big corporate funded clones and the outcome of those “studies” is more than predictable. Regardless, you can’t tell me that an insecticidal plant has no negative effect on my bees! A German study did find that when bees were released in a GMO canola crop, then fed the pollen to younger bees, scientists discovered the bacteria in the guts of the larvae mirrored the same genetic traits as ones found in the GMO crop. I am not too worried about the nectar from GMO crops, the GMO trait is almost always in the proteins, which is found in the pollen, not the nectar. Unfortunately for the bees, the GMO traits are carried in the pollen of the plant and the bees are eating that GMO gene/trait/whatever when they eat the pollen. That of course has got to have an effect on the bee, though you know who would love for us to forget that simple fact. What makes this even more interesting is that the pollen is the male fertilizing component of flowering plants so naturally is a concentrated source of genetic material. Of no condolence is the fact that the pollen is passing through the air that we breathe in clouds so we are getting a concentrated dose of GMO genetic material every time we take a breath on a warm spring day. “But it’s so small of an amount” you might think. No, it isn’t. A colony of bees will consume about 75 pounds of pollen per season, that’s a lot of concentrated GMO genetic material they are eating! The big GMO crops are corn, canola, soybeans and cotton. Bees don’t pollinate corn so why should we worry about it? Because that corn pollen is covering everything within miles of the cornfield and for sure that pollen is being collected by the bees as they go about their daily forage. Another problem with GMO is the fact that the bacteria used in the making of Roundup Ready gene happens to be a bacteria that is resistant to tetracycline antibiotic. That antibiotic is, or was, the drug of choice in combating one of the worst honeybee diseases-foulbrood. Interestingly enough, when they mass introduced the Roundup Ready crops in two countries (the good old USA and Argentina) the bees in both of those countries came down with, you guessed it, tetracycline resistant foulbrood! Amazing! Remember what I mentioned earlier about the study in Germany where they found that the GMO genetic material transferred from pollen to the bacteria in the bee gut? Well, I wonder if that had anything to do with the tetracycline resistant foulbrood?

If the pollinators of food crops are not around, large crop failure will occur; unless of course you are Monsanto’s PR firm, arguing that is why self propagating seed (gmo), that they only sell, is needed. Maybe the bees are already under 'hit contracts' for termination, by Monsanto and the other biotech giants, to hike their profits? No doubt called, as one guy put it, 'Operation Double Sting'... Of course, Monsanto will say they have everything completely under control. Yeah right, just like Enron was completely honest! I wish we had done a Samson or Joab job on the first GMO crop fields at the universities. You know, tie burning torches to the tails of several hundred foxes and let them loose in the field. That would have given the multinationals a few clues. It’s even Biblical!

Who knows, maybe the bees are just the canary in the coal mine. In that case we had better take notice and do something fast!

Of course, for anyone really reading this you’ll immediately see that it’s all nothing more than the old humanism again. Man trying to play God and failing miserably. We will always fail miserably if we try to play God. It’s because we are not God, God is God and the sooner we acknowledge that and accept it the better for everything. Proverbs says, “He who digs a pit will fall therein.” Monsanto is going to fall really hard because they have this huge pit that they have dug, sometimes I would like to give them a little push to topple them over the edge, but that’s not needed. We know who will pull the rug out from under them at the perfect time!

I would like to have a natural beekeeping group or club or connection or whatever the appropriate title would be. Just a way that more natural minded beekeepers, especially up here in the north, can get together and swap ideas and pointers, equipment and maybe even breeding stock. I don’t know how to go about organizing such a thing, nor do I think that I am qualified to do so; maybe one of you would be better equipped than I? At any rate, I would really like to see how many people out there are interested in natural beekeeping and maybe we can do something more than sit in our cozy chairs surfing the internet. Just send me an email or comment here; hopefully something will come of it.