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<DIV><EM>Thanks to <SPAN
style="COLOR: #1f497d; FONT-FAMILY: 'Comic Sans MS'">Catherine Wissner for
sending this in.</SPAN></EM></DIV>
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<DIV><SPAN
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size=4>Notes from the Beeyard One of Every Three American Cattle
Dead?</FONT></STRONG></DIV>
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<DIV class=byline>Tom Theobald, Niwot, Colorado</DIV>
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<P class=MsoNormal><SPAN
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title=http://www.thefencepost.com/article/20080714/MISC07/681821019&parentprofile=search
href="http://www.thefencepost.com/article/20080714/MISC07/681821019&parentprofile=search">http://www.thefencepost.com/article/20080714/MISC07/681821019&parentprofile=search</A><o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<P class=MsoNormal style="BACKGROUND: white"><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; COLOR: #333333; FONT-FAMILY: 'Trebuchet MS','sans-serif'">That
headline would grab your attention wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t have to be a
rancher or a farmer to understand the seriousness, and your acquaintance with
cattle wouldn’t have to be any more intimate than a hamburger for you to get it.
<BR>On June 26 the Agriculture Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives
held its second public hearing on The Status of Pollinator Health and Colony
Collapse Disorder. It was both encouraging and discouraging, mostly the
latter.<BR><BR>Several people testified before the Committee, all apparently
knowledgeable in their respective parts of the question. They were divided into
three panels; the first was government and academia, the second consisted of two
commercial beekeepers and two farmers dependent on pollination, and the third,
corporate representatives whose companies may be dramatically effected by a loss
of pollinators. <BR><BR>I’ll try to touch on the testimony of two or three of
them, but understand that I’m not completely unbiased here. I believe that this
crisis we are in is the consequence of government and institutional failures of
monumental proportions, that the Bee Crisis is a dramatic warning of much more
fundamental problems with the way government is conducting the affairs of the
country. I encourage any of you who have a deeper interest in the matter, and
particularly any beekeepers among you, to go to <A
title=http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings/statements.html
href="http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings/statements.html" target=_blank><SPAN
style="COLOR: #266eb7; TEXT-DECORATION: none">http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings/statements.html</SPAN></A>.
Read the testimony of North Carolina farmer Robert Edwards who cut his cucumber
acreage in half, in part because of lack of dependable pollination, of Haagen
Daz Ice Cream, which has contributed several hundred thousand dollars for
research. The testimonies are short and understandable. Read them and draw your
own conclusions.<BR><BR>The encouraging part of all this is that at least some
members of Congress haven’t lost sight of the problem. While the Bee Crisis may
not be on the front burner, at least it’s still on the stove. On the downside it
doesn’t seem that anything of any real consequence has been done since the
House’s first hearing well over a year ago, in March of 2007. <BR><BR>What is
now called Colony Collapse Disorder, CCD, broke on the national scene in October
of 2006, although it had been simmering along with other problems for several
years prior to that. Nationally, the colony losses in the winter of 2006-2007
were over 30 percent, and last winter 35 to 40 percent. Now we are nearly two
years into the problem and what has been done? Apparently very
little.<BR><BR>One of the beekeepers who testified was David Mendes, a bright,
well-educated man who has been a commercial beekeeper since high school. Dave’s
beekeeping operation consists of over 7,000 colonies and in addition he is vice
president of the American Beekeeping Federation. From his base in Florida he
moves his bees up the east coast for blueberry pollination in Maine and
cranberry pollination in Massachusetts, then back to Florida. Last year he sent
15 semi-loads of bees to California for almond pollination.<BR><BR>Supposedly 80
to 100 million dollars has been allocated in the 2008 Farm Bill, but none of it
has trickled out of the bureaucratic pipeline and there doesn’t seem to be any
real sense of urgency on the part of Congress to see that it does. Mendes
reflects the concern of many beekeepers when he laments that “Much of the
frustration felt by beekeepers is directed at the lack of any concrete actions
taken to address the causes of CCD ... actual research money spent in the field
has been very little.” <BR><BR>Along with two other commercial beekeepers on the
east coast, Mendes selected 18 of his colonies to be tracked by Dennis
VanEnglsdorp of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture from March of 2007 to
January, 2008. These colonies were sampled at the outset in Florida, each time
they were moved to a new location and again when they returned to Florida, a
total of seven times.The hope was that by analyzing these samples some answers
to the CCD problem would begin to emerge.<BR><BR>Unfortunately, as Mendes told
the Committee “... only a few of the samples collected have been analyzed so
far. The balance are in storage awaiting funding for the analyses.” <BR><BR>At
the end of 10 months only four of the Mendes’s 18 test colonies still survived,
and only one of those was strong enough to be sent west for almond pollination,
by that measure “a 95 percent loss,” Mendes testified. Whatever millions may be
shelved in the Farm Bill might as well not exist if we don’t have money for even
the most basic research.<BR><BR>One of the researchers to testify was Ms.
Maryann Frazier. Ms. Frazier is with the Department of Entomology at
Pennsylvania State University. She is a member of the CCD Working Group and has
done some significant fact finding on one aspect of the problem, the role
agricultural chemicals may be playing in CCD. Her preliminary results are cause
for concern. In 108 pollen samples she identified 46 different pesticides, as
high as 17 in a single sample and an average of five pesticides per sample. Only
three samples had no pesticides. <BR><BR>Understandably, researchers and
academics who work in the public sector have to be diplomatic lest they offend
those people who ultimately support them and who make decisions that might
affect their careers and their livelihoods. Ms. Frazier is cautious in her
comments to the Committee, but her frustration is clear when she says, “I
believe the magnitude and timeliness of the response has not matched the scale
and the urgency needed to save an industry valued at more than $14 billion.”
<BR>Ms. Frazier goes on to quote one of her colleagues from the CCD Working
Group, who said “How would our government respond if one of every three cows was
dying?” <BR><BR>How indeed? Why does it seem so difficult for the decision
makers to grasp the magnitude of this? Why do they continue to sit on their
thumbs? What is the government’s response to the loss of more than a third of
the country’s bees? <BR>The House had a Hearing, but was there any Listening
going on? Sadly, in the end, despite the words, the hand wringing and
expressions of concern, the government response seems to be “Let them eat
cake.”<BR><BR>In his closing remarks, David Mendes sums it up simply. “While in
the long run honey bees will survive, our beekeepers may not.” <BR><BR>I hope
that doesn’t happen, but it looks like time is running out. And it looks like
there will be dead cows all over the place. <o:p></o:p></SPAN></P>
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<DIV><FONT lang=0 face="Gill Sans MT" size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="10">Laurie Davies Adams<BR>Executive Director<BR><B>Pollinator
Partnership </B><BR>423 Washington Street, 5th floor<BR>San Francisco, CA
94111<BR>415-362-1137<BR>LDA@pollinator.org</FONT><FONT lang=0 face=Arial
color=#000000 size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="10"><BR><BR></FONT><FONT lang=0
face="Gill Sans MT" color=#0000ff size=4 FAMILY="SANSSERIF" PTSIZE="14"><B><A
href="http://www.pollinator.org/">www.pollinator.org</A></B></FONT><FONT lang=0
face="Gill Sans MT" color=#000000 size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="10"></B><BR><A
href="http://www.nappc.org/">www.nappc.org</A><BR><BR></FONT><FONT lang=0
face="Gill Sans MT" color=#000000 size=3 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="12"><B><I>National Pollinator Week is June 22-28, 2008. <BR>Beecome
involved at <A
href="http://www.pollinator.org/">www.pollinator.org</A></I></FONT></B></DIV></FONT><BR><BR><BR><DIV><FONT style="color: black; font: normal 10pt ARIAL, SAN-SERIF;"><HR style="MARGIN-TOP: 10px">Get the scoop on last night's hottest shows and the live music scene in your area - <A title="http://www.tourtracker.com?NCID=aolmus00050000000112" href="http://www.tourtracker.com?NCID=aolmus00050000000112" target="_blank">Check out TourTracker.com</A>!</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>