[ExI] bees

spike spike66 at att.net
Sat Apr 1 21:32:46 UTC 2017


 

 

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace
Sent: Saturday, April 01, 2017 2:06 PM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: [ExI] bees

 

Apparently the second most common cause of the problems with bee decline is the use of neonicotinoids.

 

I have Googled this, of course, but have not found the answers I seek:  just what companies, such as Walmart, etc. use this insecticide on the flowers they sell?

 

Thanks!

bill w

 

 

If only it were that simple BillW.

 

The neonicotinoids are a huge class of chemicals generally agreed to be a bad thing for bugs, but… even that isn’t simple.  Just as its famous predecessor in the nicotine debate, it turned out the answer was not nearly as simple as it appeared as one study after another showed a clear link between smoking at lung cancer.  After all the debate died away, we discovered long after the fact that nicotine was innocent!  Well sorta.  The cancer was being caused by other stuff in tobacco.  The nicotine merely caused an addiction, which arranged for the other chemicals in tobacco to slay proles.

 

The punchline is that now after all the skerjillions spent on research, nicotine not only doesn’t cause cancer, it is the only medication even vaguely effective against Alzheimers.  If given in patch form, the stuff isn’t even addictive.  But plenty of patients refuse it because they associate it with lung cancer.  Sigh.

 

The research on smoking/cancer was hopelessly mired in politics, with the tobacco companies funding studies, the government funding studies, this and that special interest funding studies, so many of which produced conflicting results (well, imagine that.)  

 

Now we are seeing all that same chaos with neonicotinoids and bees, perhaps worse this time.  We have pesticide companies funding this and that, we have crusader politicians trying to make a name for themselves without a trace of the scientific background to even know what is the right thing, we have intentional obscuration, we have it all, but do let me insert this one thing which is my unique perspective please.

 

If one goes around with beehives taking them place to place to devour the local pollen, there is a time of year when so little is blooming, one must take one’s bees where the climate is mild and find blooms if possible.  Mexico is the best bet for that, and the Mexicans welcome the American bee guy, for their crops need cross-polinating as much as ours do.  So plenty of commercial beekeepers spend December and January in Mexico before returning to California for the February clover blooms and the fruit trees shortly thereafter (my trees are a riot of color now.)  

 

OK then, if one is making one’s living at beekeeping, she can make more money hauling one load of grass from Mexico to the states, just one load, than she can in a lifetime of back-breaking labor.  So it is easy enough to imagine a flatbed truck with the middle hives removed and replaced with dope.  When one travels, the beehive opening faces inboard (to minimize bee loss) so all those bees spend the trip crawling all over that dope and picking up whatever that stuff was sprayed with (any guesses (there are zero point nada restrictions on it (hell it’s already illegal (so how could it be controlled (even if the Mexican government had any interest in controlling what Trump’s citizens are smoking?))))  Conclusion: plenty of beekeepers do succumb to the temptation to haul a load of dope north at some point, knowing the chances of getting caught are very low (the border agent doesn’t have a bee suit (and doesn’t want to mess with billions of flying stingers (imagine that.)))  The bees get into whatever Jose and Maria sprayed on their dope.  We have no way of even figuring out what it is.  Bees get weakened, catch Varroa mites, things go badly but the beekeeper already made more money on that one load than a lifetime of beekeeping would have paid, so… here we are.

 

The neonicotinoids are probably bad, but we are eager to find any easy solution to bee death, and that one is certainly easy: just ban neonics.  But… how do we stop the Mexican dope growers from using it?  And DDT?  And anything else they want, imported from Africa or who knows where?  And if so, how can we be sure the neonics were a major cause of the problem?

 

Moral of the story: lets keep our hopes up, but if banning neonics is a failure, let us not be shocked, and let us not give up.  In the meantime, here’s what you can do: DON’T BUY HONEY, jump at ever opportunity to not devour it even in a restaurant, because bees have a hard enough time without the additional hive stress of extraction.  Don’t eat it, encourage friends to not eat it, do your part in reducing the market so that beekeepers will focus on renting their bees to nut and fruit growers.

 

spike

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