[Pollinator] Notes from the Beeyard One of Every Three American Cattle Dead?

[Ladadams at aol.com]

Thanks to Catherine Wissner for  sending this in.
 
Notes from the Beeyard One of Every Three American Cattle  Dead?
 
Tom Theobald, Niwot, Colorado
 
 
 
_http://www.thefencepost.com/article/20080714/MISC07/681821019&parentprofile=s
earch_ 
(http://www.thefencepost.com/article/20080714/MISC07/681821019&parentprofile=search)  
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.  
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.

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. 

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 
_http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings/statements.html_ (http://agriculture.house.gov/hearings/statements.html) .  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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.” 

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.

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.” 

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.

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. 

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.”  
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?” 

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? 
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.”

In his closing remarks, David Mendes sums it up simply. “While in  the long 
run honey bees will survive, our beekeepers may not.” 

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.  
 

























Laurie Davies Adams
Executive Director
Pollinator  Partnership 
423 Washington Street, 5th floor
San Francisco, CA  94111
415-362-1137
LDA at pollinator.org

_www.pollinator.org_ (http://www.pollinator.org/) 

_www.nappc.org_ (http://www.nappc.org/) 

National Pollinator Week is June 22-28, 2008. 
Beecome  involved at _www.pollinator.org_ (http://www.pollinator.org/) 



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