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May 16, 2007
Organic Bees Surviving Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)
I was actually surprised to read this headline. First because I assumed there was an organic movement in Bees since there is an organic movement for everything these days, I'd just never really come across it in any shape, form or fashion.
I guess I should back up with a bit of explanation, I got spoiled on desert honey as a child when I lived in Arizona, it's probably some the best honey on Earth. So when I moved back to the east coast, I haven't eaten much honey at all because, well no polite way to say it, it tastes funny. I don't the reasons why, I just know it's not as good as I remember from my childhood. Anyway, Dianne uses honey in a lot of her recipes, but her father is a bee keeper, so we get a pretty much unlimited supply of honey, so I don't have to buy it, so the details of it never cross my mind. There was a lot of information that you probably weren't interested in, that was required to support a single comment that is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
So the story at hand, for those of you that haven't been keeping up with bees over the last decade or so, there has been two major problems facing bee keepers. First being the killer bees taking over hives and turning them into dangerous tools. That problem was solved by closer monitoring of the hives and the placement of queen guards to keep the killer bees from being able to actually get into take over the hive. The second major problem has been the Varroa mites. Nasty little bugs that basically eat bees from the inside out. They infect the cells that the bee eggs are placed in and then swell up the bee's throat as they grow. A terrible way to die really.
Now if the organic bee keepers are saying they haven't been devastated by the CCD, which brings us to two different approaches to the previous problem. The Organic bee keepers evidently instead of depending on chemicals to bring the Varroa mites under control approached the problem by shrinking the size of the cells that hold the bee eggs. Now I know what you're thinking...How does that solve the problem? Well it appears that the size of bee is a function of the size of the cell that it's egg is placed in. So when you have a smaller bee, and therefore a smaller throat making the environment for them, Varroa mites are smaller making them less successful, and basically the problem disappears over time and attrition. Which is how bees have beat most of their competitors for years. It's an absolutely fascinating solution to the problem, if you want to read more about it I definitely recommend dropping by Bush Bees.
So it would appear that this deviation points to an interesting possibility that the commercial bee farmers may have taken a wrong turn with their chemical treatments for the bees and accidentally done serious damage to their bee population. I expect that the counter argument they will make is that there isn't a large enough cross section of organic bee farmers to get a comparable cross section of hive types, but that seems a bit suspect to me. This is definitely an avenue that needs to be explored. It may be that the commercial bee folks are going to have to stop some of their industrial bee keeping practices to help secure of food supply going forward. It appears that this is just another place where the quest for profits have gotten ahead of best practices for the nation as a whole.
Read more over at Celsias.
Posted by Jamison at May 16, 2007 4:11 PM
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