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No, the article is just putting forth very misleading and cherry-picked data. It's a little bit amazing that he actually mentions splitting and higher hive cou
by Beltiras 11y ago
No, the article is just putting forth very misleading and cherry-picked data. It's a little bit amazing that he actually mentions splitting and higher hive count close to each other without realizing that this will not increase the pollinator count by twofold. A real beefarmer has a comment on the article that everyone should read, it's illuminating.
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Mr Ingraham---do not assume you can read a few papers on CCD and bees and make cogent, authoritative remarks in a newspaper piece----this piece fails miserably.
I AM a beekeeper, in Los Angeles, using feral honey bees, making public presentations, teaching beekeeping and selling honey. I am going to fill in your ignorance here with a few salient points. Making splits causes a yield of TWO WEAK hives, which is not the same as having the vigorous, healthy original hive. And just so you know, the splits the commercial folks are making from the survivors of pesticide, fungicide, herbicide exposure on industrial crops are the already weakened colonies that happen to make it. So, the splits are not especially fated to thrive, either. Your little tables showing statistics does not tell the real story of the insults being suffered by ALL pollinators from monocrop, industrial agriculture. The typical Consumerist answer to a problem---"just buy more" bees and queens is not addressing the real problems which are decline in clean forage from toxic chemical exposure, lack of forage diversity, trucking bees all over the country, narrow in-bred genetics. The loss of all pollinators, as well as decline in overall ecosystem diversity from the same insults, is the REAL issue.
Your piece is also old ground previously plowed over by that corporate apologist and booster at Forbes, Jon Entine, another geek behind a computer who writes about beekeeping with a singularly narrow and uniformed arrogance. Like your ballyhooed Tucker and Thurman, the "economists" (never far from pontificating for the beauties of the "free market") the people weighing in on the loss of pollinators and trying to urge us not to be concerned are akin to Climate Change denialists.
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- tptacek 11y agoThis beekeeper's comment doesn't appear to contain any testable arguments. They don't like the fact that maintenance of honey bee stock will require aggressive colony creation, but they don't appear to have an argument to back that up that isn't essentially an appeal to the naturalist fallacy. This is also a beekeeper attempting to husband honey bees using feral bee populations, 98+% of which were annihilated by the varroa mite a long time ago (there are people who dispute whether "feral honey bees" really still exist at all in the US). I'm not especially moved by arguments that attempt to tar people asking reasonable questions about insects to climate change denialists.
- stonemetal 11y agoIt contains several testable points. Does splitting a hive create two weak hives? How do you characterize this weakness and do they recover from it? What is the genetic diversity of the bee population? Is it growing or shrinking? Toxic chemical free forage is it growing or shrinking? Forage diversity should also be easy to measure and track changes over time. Other than the personal attacks what did you find not testable?
- tedunangst 11y agoI'm not sure that comments from "beekeeper in Los Angeles" sprinkled with phrases like "corporate apologist" are especially authoritative either.
- Beltiras 11y agoI'm more willing to listen to an anecdote from someone in the trenches than flimsy misrepresentations that are internally inconsistent.