Poisoning the Bees?
There’s a possibility that the mysterious bee deaths may be linked to the tainted pet food. To recap the individual stories, many bees have been dying mysteriously, which is a troubling development because if the bees die, who’s going to pollinate the flowers; and if the flowers aren’t pollinated, how will our crops grow? Meanwhile, pets have been getting sick, and in some cases dying because a Chinese pet food manufacturer included melamine in with its wares in an effort to make the protein content of the pet food appear to be higher than it actually was.
The intersection: the bees may be dying because their feed has perhaps been tainted, too. From the front page of today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/s_508326.html
Sometimes, a fast buck just isn’t worth its price. There’s no money to be made on a dead planet.
May 18th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
I’m waiting for a bit before I start believing the pet food/dead bee connection. Especially since a couple of weeks ago, experts were certain it was radiation from cellphone towers and a week after that the experts said parasites and then the experts said it was just the genetically modified bees that were dying from weak breeding practices and then they said…
I’m going to sit tight for a bit and see which expert wins the arm wrestling match.
May 19th, 2007 at 9:20 am
I find that link preposterous . . . although I do think that tainted food has PROBABLY been coming from China for many years now, I doubt that any of it has made its way into the diet of the bees. We lost our three hives of wild bees over the Winter (They were very happy and healthy last year, and even split off two new swarms last season that we gave to a local beekeeper) and I can practically guarantee they never came into contact with any food products that may have been tainted.
My personal theory is that they are dying off from the collection of genetically-modified pollens that are being transferred from roundup-ready corn crops into other grasses and plants. I have no proof, that’s just a hunch.
Something is wrong in the world, and the bees just may be our “Canary in the coal mine”.
May 21st, 2007 at 6:21 am
Another theory/observation making the rounds is that colony collapse is largely caused by commercial hive-keeping practices, including “super-sizing” bees for more production. See http://www.informationliberation.com/index.php?id=21912 for that perspective.
May 23rd, 2007 at 9:55 am
I’m glad to hear that melamine is an unlikely culprit, but still find it disturbing that the trend is occurring; especially if it’s as a result of GM crops, which are also (to my opinion) an entity motivated by greed and irresponsibility, designed both to be more resistant to pesticides/herbicides and to not be self-perpetuating: pure shortsighted foolishness, the best I can tell.