Wednesday, March 3, 2010

A personal commentary -

California Bee Keeping – is a Year Round adventure with nature – a crapshoot / expensive and frustrating, rewarding and enjoyable, hard labourious days and short nights.

The honey flow is NOT year round as many think – the honey ONLY flows IF there has been rain. One may see an abundance of flowers everywhere and think HONEY but without water there is none. RAIN = NECTAR = HONEY. It is that simple. No nectar NO HONEY>

Bee keeping techniques haven’t really changed all that much – the pests, the diseases, the travel, the expenses, and the return on the work – all that has changed. With the oncoming of the Africanized bee and the lack of understanding of the situation – the fear that caused so many ‘city fathers’ to ‘dissuade’ local bee keepers from keeping hives in backyards cut the control factor of marauding bees which could have been eradicated in part by informed bee keepers…. So instead we are inundated with this very territorial creature – one never quite knows when one’s hive has been ‘taken over’ as it were. The once backyard beekeeper without proper clothing no longer exists. Gloves, boots, suits one cannot do without here in California.

And importation issues of bringing in European bees (a milder creature) has stifled the gene pool expansion, which has diminished at an alarming rate here in the United States. Nature seems to be fighting back with the issue of sterility in males – both animal/insect and human with a rise of 18% in humans – something that is already seen in the queen bee who has to be replaced 2 and 3 times a year as she is continually superseded, or killed on sight/site or simply flies away.

The lack of education in schools of basic agriculture has created a widespread ignorance of just how important the bee is to pollination – no bee to pollinate the almond = no almond; strawberries would be white and hard…. (THE SILENCE OF THE BEE – video) ought to be a source of information for both the media and the layman as without the bee man is no long on this planet. Over population has put an impossible increase on food output, causing agriculture to change its focus to meet demand resulting in mono-crops (where once there was diversification ie. cotton, alfalfa etc there is either one or the other or none; hence nothing for the bee to live on - cotton is genetically altered and is deadly to the bee while alfalfa is slowly, though in some parts, all too quickly being replaced by switch grass, originally planted as bio fuel but replaced by corn, another genetic food deadly to bees so switch grass is now fed to cattle - there is no flower it is simply a fast growing grass with health benefit for animals still up for debate. Pesticides whether currently used or not have caused systemic damage to ground and water supply, genetically engineered product, an increase in air and noise pollution, viruses, pests, mites, transportation issues….. An endless array of living in the 21st Century.

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