Patty Kennedy via Alex Lightman ~ I highly recommend watching the Swiss documentary More Than Honey. This is the movie that many people have been waiting for. It shows clearly why domesticated bee populations are collapsing, and what the consequences will be. To summarize, humans have been able to domesticate exactly one type of insect: the honey bee. And we have been relentlessly changing, for the worse, the way that we manage them. A scene of a bee keeper talking to an obese guy in a fungicide sprayer, in which he asks him to spray at night, but is refused, followed by a bee being sprayed, looking like its covered with snow of poison, then slows, falls, and dies, shows how the claim that what kills bees is a mystery is just silly. Whats killing domesticated bees is fungus, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, parasites, aphids, and being stuck into boxes and airsick trucks, and driven across the country because of flower deserts caused by, for instance, almonds that cover many square miles, but once theyve bloomed, theres no food. As it turns out, bees dont like to go potty while they are in their own hives, so driving them across the country (California to North Dakota, for instance) causes them great stress and toxicity. The section on China is interesting. Mao said the sparrows were eating grain, and that the sparrows should be killed. The peasants dutifully killed the sparrows. This led to an explosion of insect populations. So Mao said to kill all the insects with lots of pesticides and insecticides. The peasants dutifully sprayed China with a dense fog of insecticides…killing all the bees. Because China has so many migrant workers, they are cheap. A person actually says its cheaper to pay migrant workers to do pollination with Q-tips than to drive bees around. Its pretty clear from watching the movie that the domestic bees are doomed to extinction. So what comes next? Someone in Sao Paulo, Brazil, let loose 26 swarms (with queens that had been artificially inseminated) because he (or she) didnt want the bees to suffer from being imprisoned, and they have spread 500 miles a year and come to the US. Unlike the inbred, weak, dying domesticated bees, the Africanized hybrids cannot be domesticated, but they are also much more resilient and not killed by the same things that kill the domesticated bees. So the good news is that warm and hot areas will still have bees. The bad news is that they dont take any crap from humans or horses or other animals, and will not be used like domesticated bees. I talked to the director about this, and pointed out that human brain size has shrunk about 20%, as has wolf brain capacity in the process of domestication to become dogs. I hypothesized that wild bees had 20% bigger brains than domestic bees. ~Alex Lightman Let me know what you think once youve seen it.
Posted on: Thu, 07 Nov 2013 14:52:23 +0000
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