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Radical Bees: Alternative Notions About "Colony Collaspe Disorder"

by Judith Lewis

May 23, 2007 6:05 AM

From London, where she's on tour, my singer-songwriter friend Simone White sends an article about the bees, by Earth Action's Sharon Labchuk:

I'm on an organic beekeeping email 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 commercial operations is pesticides used in hives to fumigate for varroa mites and antibiotics are fed to the bees to prevent disease. Hives are hauled long distances by truck, often several times during the growing season, to provide pollination services to industrial agriculture crops, which further stresses the colonies and exposes them to agricultural pesticides and GMOs.

It originally ran on the Guerilla News Network's web site; it's also on Organic Consumers.

There's also a book by Ross Conrad that proposes a solution to CCD; it's called Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Agriculture. And if you Google "organic bees" you come up with a slew of links on how organic bees are thriving.

But when I do a Nexis search for "ross w/2 conrad and organic and bees and colony" I come up with nothing. Replacing Conrad with Sharon Labchuk yields the same empty result. Even a broader search, eliminating the names, yields only a handful of articles, most from places such as Greenwire.

Why the big secret? Is it just too far-fetched a theory? Do we believe it?

In Europe, they seem to be thinking about it more seriously. An article in Der Spiegel suggests that genetically modified crops may be killing bees; France has suspended the use of a sunflower-seed pesticide called "Gaucho" while it investigates its effect on bees (and boy, Bayer -- the manufacturer -- is pissed). But here in the U.S. there's been little official action on the pesticide front vis-a-vis the bees, despite accumulating evidence that CCD has a chemical cause. Here, we're stuck on the mobile-phone meme -- a sure misdirect if there ever was one. (And if you talk to somebody like Bill Maher, he'd probably tell you that the pesticide companies planted that story. This time I might not think he's crazy.)

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