I have wanted to write in for a while now, because I am one of the thousands who listen to you every week. You put a bee into my bonnet today when I listened to, the first podcast that I listen to if given a choice, your show. Colony collapse. It is a myth, but it is a helpful myth. Let me explain, people get upset at the thought that bees are all dying and they get interested in the environment in a way that all the bats dying and fishing stocks being depleted don't.
Did you see that? I pointed out some a couple of real crisis in the world today. I am not an entomologist nor am I into bee keeping, but I pay attention to everything in the environment and I paid attention to the bees until I determined what was the wrong with them. There are the pesticides and the other pesticides and a lot of different causes, but the end of everything is that there is no honey bee colony collapse problem. What we may have is the same thing that is affecting the world over, that humans are removing the natural habitat of native species and filling it up with exotic ones. Native bees are suffering. Bumble Bees, wasps, and all the rest are losing their habitat and their populations are suffering.
But here let's get back to colony collapse.
Colony collapse has multiple causes that have added up to the death of some colonies. There are mites, there are pesticides, there are Neonicotinoids, there are cold winters and there are Human Practices in Horticulture. There is no single cause far loss of bee colonies. Cold weather kills bees here in Canada every winter, really cold winters can kill off entire colonies and that won't change. Mites are a fact of life, there are things that will always feed off other things and that won't change, if it is not mites it will be something else. What is true is that the denser we pack bee hives the more likely that bee pests will spread. Pesticides kill bugs dead, Neonicotinoids are pesticides that affect bees, but all the others affect them too. If they are not applied when the plants are flowering, then they are fine. It is funny that a lot of the people who cry fowl when insecticides kill bees are the ones that say people should go Organic, because they think Organic pesticides don't kill bees too. GMO is the way to go on this, but I digress.
The biggest cause of Colony collapse is human agricultural practices. There are companies out there that exist to pollinate crops, Big Bee. They have transport trucks that are loaded with hives and they move through the countryside stopping to release the bees and to pollinate crops. They drive to California to pollinate Almonds, they drive to the orange orchards to pollinate them, they go to the rapeseed crops and then they go to all the other crops that they need to pollinate. They feed them sugar water in the long dark trips, they are traveling regularly and that is stressful. Stressed bees get sick, stressed bees suffer from mites. Stressed bees suffer from low level neonicotinoid poisoning. Stressed bees die.
You know what would help bees? A scattering of perennial flowers under the crops that they pollinate. When I was a garden centre worker, I told customers that they needed two different varieties of apples to get fruit, unless they were sure that there was another apple tree within 400m (1/4 mile) because that was the distance that bees would travel. It is the same thing that many people have been saying for years, people need to work with nature.
Here is a link with other links.
An episode of my second favourite podcast that talks about the myth of colony collapse. http://www.trcpodcast.com/trc-419-are-bees-endangered-peanut-butter-deadly-to-dogs-transcendental-meditation/
I realize that the lack of links makes it appear that this is just an opinion.
Now I can get back to listening to your words.
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