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<P class=storyheadline><STRONG><FONT size=5>from Alternet</FONT></STRONG></P>
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<P class=storyheadline><STRONG><FONT size=5>Are the Bees Dying off Because
They're Too Busy?</FONT></STRONG></P><!-- end: headline --><!-- start: byline -->
<P class=storybyline><B>By <A title="View all stories by Susan Kuchinskas"
href="http://www.alternet.org/authors/8549/">Susan Kuchinskas</A>, <A
href="http://www.eastbayexpress.com/">East Bay Express</A>. Posted <A
title="View all stories published on August 11, 2007"
href="http://www.alternet.org/ts/archives/?date[F]=08&date[Y]=2007&date[d]=11&act=Go/">August
11, 2007</A>.</B></P><BR><!-- end: byline --><!-- end: headline and byline --><!-- start: teaser -->
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<DIV class=teaserleft>Are bees dying because factory farms are "overworking"
them? California bee farmers who let their hives take it easy find their
colonies are thriving. </DIV>
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<P>All across America, a mysterious disease is wiping out bee colonies. This
malady causes all the bees in a hive to seemingly vanish overnight, abandoning
their brood in the nursery, as well as their stores of honey and pollen. Other
bees and pests, which normally plunder deserted honey, shun these hives. This
baffling die-off dealt a financial blow to commercial beekeepers this season and
raised fears of environmental and economic disaster. For farmers, no bees means
no pollination.
<P>But pollination is happening like mad in Leah Fortin's tiny yard in North
Oakland, Calif. Busy little bee bodies cover the clumps of lavender, salvia and
roses that line her driveway. More bees work the malaleucas on the parking
strip, those trees with shaggy bark that look like giant Q-tips when they're in
bloom.</P>
<P>A lot of these bees -- although surely not all -- come from the hive on
Fortin's roof. The unobtrusive wooden box, barely 20 inches by 16, and 13 inches
high, sits on the tar-and-gravel roof of her stucco bungalow, sheltered by the
chimney. Honeybees bustle in and out of the narrow slit along the bottom,
delivering bundles of pollen and droplets of nectar, then hurrying out again for
more.</P>
<P>"The neighbors call us 'The Little House on the Prairie,'" Fortin said on a
recent summer afternoon. "They think I'm a kook."</P>
<P>Fortin, who administers after-school programs, captured this wild swarm in
early May, and so far it's thriving. "My book said to take two pieces of
cardboard and scoop them into a five-gallon paint can, so that's what I did,"
she said. "I was scared shitless. I had no idea what I was doing." She covered
the can with a net and drove home. "It worked, and there they are."</P>
<P>Fortin put out a small jar of honey to make the new colony feel at home;
since then, she's done nothing except peek at them once in a while. "It doesn't
matter what you know and what you don't know," she said. "The bees know what
they're doing." And what they do is pollinate.</P>
<P>Honeybees aren't native to North America, so indigenous plants don't need
them for pollination. If all the honeybees disappeared, we'd still have corn and
wheat. But most of the imported fruit and vegetable species commonly thought of
as quintessentially Californian -- almonds, grapes, plums, cucumbers,
cantaloupe, asparagus -- need the help of bees to wed male pollen to female
pistil. Without bees, there would be no apples, no cherries, no tomatoes, no
zucchini. Even tofu would be scarcer -- soybeans depend partly on the honeybee
for pollination.</P>
<P>Most of these crops are no longer pollinated by wild honeybees. Like many
indigenous insects and plants, feral honeybees have been nearly wiped out by
pesticides, loss of habitat and parasites like the varroa mite.</P>
<P>Meanwhile, commercial beekeeping has come to resemble other kinds of factory
farming. While the bees themselves retain more freedom of movement than almost
any other living creature raised by man, a commercial bee lot is more like a
cattle feed lot than a wild meadow.</P>
<P>Beehives are crammed close together in rows just a few feet apart; in the
wild, a square mile supports at the most three or four hives. A wild colony's
diet is diverse, comprising pollen and nectar from myriad plants. To compensate
for the lack of forage around bee lots, bees are typically fed high-fructose
corn syrup, the same stuff that's contributing to a human health crisis. And
just like other agricultural livestock, bees become stressed when you crowd them
together. They're more susceptible to diseases and parasites, less able to
function naturally.</P>
<P>It's all making some bee scientists wonder: Is the epidemic known as Colony
Collapse Disorder real, or are the bees simply being worked to death?</P>
<P><B>Big beesness</B></P>
<P>If you want to put bees' value into dollars and cents, just look at
California's almond industry. Almonds are the state's second-largest crop, with
farmers raking in $2.34 billion in 2005. This year's yield, grown on 615,000
acres, is expected to be a record 1.310 billion pounds, up 18 percent from last
year -- despite the dire statistics about Colony Collapse Disorder.</P>
<P>If you drive through the heart of California's agriculture industry, the
Central Valley, watching the miles of orchards in bloom, they look natural. In
fact, the California almond industry depends on a herculean human effort to
subvert the natural order of things. In nature, most flowers don't get
pollinated. But you don't get a billion-pound harvest by letting nature take its
course. In the old days, an orchard owner might invite a beekeeper to keep hives
on his land in a mutually beneficial arrangement. The agribusiness way is to
rent hives for the two-week almond pollination season. This year, growers paid
$150 per hive, placing three to five hives per acre.</P><BR>
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<P><I>Freelance journalist Susan Kuchinskas covers business, technology and
science. Her book, </I>Love Chemistry: How Oxytocin Lets Us Love, Trust and
Mate<I>, will be published in May 2008. She tracks oxytocin research on her
blog, <A href="http://www.hugthemonkey.com/">Hug the
Monkey</A>.</I></P></DIV></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>