Some Bees Are NOT Dying. Organic? Africanized? Why?
Fri Mar 30, 2007 at 04:47:18 PM PDT
I found an interesting hypothesis for the bee problem here..
A beekeeper in Tucson has not seen the levels of die-off that has hit commercial growers.
Dee Lusby's bees are doing fine. Actually, they're doing better than that, says the owner of Lusby Apiaries & Arizona Rangeland Honey of Arivaca.
Lusby has 900 hives of "free range" organic bees spread out over ranches from Benson to Sasabe.
"I've only lost one or two, maybe three (hives) out of every 30 or 40 hives," said Lusby.
Contrast that with up to 50% mortality in some commercial hives.
She speculates that
the use of pesticides, bee-growth formulas, artificial food supplements, breeding for size, inbreeding — all or some of which may make them susceptible to mites, viruses and fungi — and maybe even some strange side effects from feeding on genetically modified crops.
So the hives that are pushed to their limits by artificial means are dying off, but the organic ones are fine. In other words, don't push the bees so hard, and they'll do better. Don't use monoculture in your hive so you are not susceptible to colony collapse. Use a genetically diverse group of bees and you have stronger bees.
Or could it be because they are Africanized killer bees, and somehow genetically superior? Africanized killer bees have pushed out the honeybee population here in Arizona. Reed Booth has some killer bee hives. He thinks they are more resistant to all perils.
"The Africanized bees are somewhat more resistant" than the European honeybees, he says of the aggressive, slightly smaller wild bees that produce bumper crops of honey and bad press. "But they're somewhat resistant to anything, probably including nuclear war."
If this is the case, then killer bees might become the bee of choice for commercial hives. The impact of using more aggressive bees will need to be dealt with. Or will the problem only return if killer bee hives are pushed to the same extent as today's European Bee hives? For example, the article also quotes Gloria DeGrandi-Hoffman, research leader of the USDA's Carl Hayden Bee Research Center in Tucson, on the subject of our European Bee commercial hives:
"We're putting them on trucks and taking them halfway across the country. We're stressing them in almost a feedlot situation, feeding them protein supplements. We're stressing them pretty good. And that doesn't happen with Africans."
Maybe it's the ruthless exploitation of bees using technology that may be compromising their robustness. Maybe organic bees are the way to go. Maybe that's what the bees are telling us. So let's see if there are any organic European Honeybee hives that are doing better than the non-organic ones. That would tell us something.
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