Subject: National News of BEES

From: [email-masked] (Andy Nachbaur)
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 1996 02:01:00 GMT

WOW, a double dose of press PR on beekeeping problems used to draw the
viewers attention from the Presidential problems with the FBI files found
at the White house and into the bee yards of America's beekeepers.

According to CNN all that is left for us beekeepers is to hear the
fat lady singing as we are losing the battle to the vampire mite and the
T mites. Our civilization is being threatened because of all that value
added to the food chain by our bees is sure to be soon lost. Wild honey
bees are gone, and beekeepers are following their lead and fleeing the
bee industry with little but the shirts on our backs. But not to worry
the USDA is hard at work designing a honeybee that fights back and is
not affected by the mites. Funny thought went through my mind as I
watched these programs, and that is that the bees that are not surviving
the winter or what ever stress puts them down are for the most part
mite free because of the chemicals the beekeeping are using according
to the regulations, labels's and best advice of the USDA. I can't explain
the loss of feral honeybee populations but only to say they are only a
reflection of the managed or hive bee populations and have been reduced
in at least this area way before any mites were know to bee in the US
and I know that in total there has been very little long term study done
on the feral honeybees to support their disappearance or the cause which
could be from any number of environmental changes temporary or long
term.

Now NBC takes a different approach with the good news that the so called
"killer" bees are not the killers they were made out to be, and better
then that in Texas they have become hard to find (for over the last two
years) because they must have all been integrated by our good bee gene
pool or some such waco babble. I would suggest that maybe the reason
they are hard to find is that "they were never there in the first
place", and maybe it could be when the USDA brought in a real geneticist
who was not swayed by the so called BS (bee science) from those in the
USDA and elsewhere who would stoup so low as to do everything they could
to show a real aggressive and dangerous bee problem for the public
cameras, including if you have not noticed not using smoke when pulling
hives apart, and this neophyte bee scientist went out on a search for
the so called TEX-MEX bee and did not find any...Two years later the
press is telling us something which could be a preview of a 60 Minutes
special down the road or maybe just Night Line, and for sure many local
news outlets will give this story legs for a day or so in the farm belt
if nothing else.

                        ttul, the OLd Drone

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