To save the bees
A 13-year-old’s award-winning essay suggests the die-off comes from feeding them too much corn syrup and trucking them long distances to pollinate crops.
By john darling
for the Mail Tribune
June 19, 2007If the prize-winning 4-H essay of an Applegate boy is anywhere near the mark, the die-off of bees in the Rogue Valley and across the world may have a simple, common-sense solution.
Kelton Shockey, 13, says the bees are tuckered out and stressed from too much feeding on corn syrup and too much trucking around the country to pollinate orchards.
In his 1,300-word essay, which won him a $250 prize and publication in Beeline, a beekeeper’s magazine, Kelton argues that harvesting all the bees’ honey and feeding them corn or sugar syrup is weakening their immunity to natural pests and diseases.
“Is feeding the bees sugar the equivalent of feeding them ‘junk food?’ ” Shockey asks in his essay. “… Corn syrup does not have any minerals in it, whereas honey is very high in minerals.
“Could our bees be becoming weakened from lack of minerals, making them prone to diseases and pests?”
Colony collapse disorder — in which bees leave the hive and don’t come back — has been reported in the last two years in 35 states, Europe, Brazil and India and has wiped out the majority of hives belonging to several Rogue Valley beekeepers. The issue is especially threatening to humans because at least a third of our food requires pollinating by bees.
The home-schooled resident of Thompson Creek Road acknowledges the usual suspects in colony collapse disorder — pesticides, herbicides, loss of plant diversity and increase in diseases and parasites, especially the varroa mite — but makes a plea for the common-sense solution that bees were meant to live on honey and thrive in a familiar ecological niche.
“In nature, honey bees are a home-based society,” he says. “For years a hive is one location. The colony lives on year after year like a well-functioning village. … This ‘village’ idea does not exist in contemporary practice. Bees from other colonies can be introduced, swarms are discouraged and queens come from elsewhere. The colony is moved sometimes hundreds of miles.
“Does turning a very home-based agricultural species into a nomadic-based one contribute to spreading disease? Can the stress factor of movement from original location as well as mixing the populations of colonies cause the weakening of the hive?”
—– snip
Read the whole report here.
A PDF of Kelton’s paper: PollinatorCoservation.pdf
permalink | Jock Gill | Uncategorized
I would guess that feeding corn syrup (most of which is probably genetically modified/engineered) may be similar to junk food for bees, but corn syrup was being fed to bees for a while before this CCD manifestation. I personally would lean more towards a chemical (pesticide/herbicide) or GMO basis for the source. I know there is some research that shows that if sterilized hives that were once collapsed and were not being robbed were found to be visited again by other bees, etc., but do we know what effects the sterilization method has on the chemicals that may also have been present? Possibly it breaks down the chemical or changes it somehow? Or possibly whatever pathogen/disease that was also present once killed no longer affected the hive and made it more conducive to other bees and insects, even though the chemicals may still have been present. It still doesn’t rule out that there could be something else going on in addition to disease. We do not know what comes first, the disease or something else that is causing the bees to leave or get lost or die before they get back to the hive. And once the hive is infected we do not know if that is why they leave and don’t return or if they are getting lost due to some neurological toxicity side affect. I know the state agency building that I work in had been applying Imidacloprid. When I found this out and they were scheduled to apply it again, I made a big fuss and contacted our state environmental department (who more or less said they couldn’t do anything unless they were caught misapplying it and that would be very unlikely do to the limited number of inspectors) it really amazed me that there was really nothing that could be legally done to stop them from using this chemical. I know that my comment that I was going to contact the state environmental department may have stopped the application that one time but they then turned around and applied it the next time. It plainly stated it should not be applied when plants were in bloom and bees were foraging in the area. To me, when plants are in bloom and bees are known to be foraging is practically most of the growing season. At the time, the clover was in bloom and had been for weeks, and the bees were seen there regularly. But unless you are paying attention to them, most people aren’t going to even notice, and many probably can’t tell a yellow jacket from a honey bee anyway. And if they were going to misapply it at a state agency building, you know they are using it inappropriately everywhere else as well.
Then to top that off, I found out through the grapevine that my neighbors across the street had sprayed some sort of bee killing pesticide (my guess would be that it probably was a homeowners version of Imidacloprid) to some type of supposed ground bees. I can only hope that they weren’t my honey bees that they were spraying while foraging! My one hive wasn’t doing as well as the 2nd hive that was started later and I still wonder if it could have been exposed to whatever they had sprayed. I only saw them spraying it once, which led to my grapevine investigation, but who knows how many other times they sprayed it and where.
In my opinion, I think we need to somehow stop the chemical companies from exposing us and the environment to their toxic products! But how can we do this? It is corporate America and money talks and rules…..