Alarm and optimism
Sharon Labchuck, a native of Canada's Prince Edward Island, is a part-time organic beekeeper and leader of the provincial wing of the Canadian Green Party. She wrote recently in a widely circulated email: "I'm on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies."
If Labchuck and Adamis (who seem generally in agreement) are correct in their assessment of what is causing, or not causing, Colony Collapse Disorder, then maybe we can breathe easier for the world's bee population. Maybe the US die-offs can then be addressed effectively so that bees can grow back in robust numbers in the near future.
On the other hand, maybe there is something sinister afoot that science and agriculture can't yet properly identify, and maybe we should worry. The bee and nature have coexisted for some 50 million years, but the threat of bee colony extinction is a not-so-subtle reminder of our fragile connection to life on Earth.
