Bees play a significant role in
agriculture both for the honey they produce and the fruit trees they
pollinate.
Organic Bees Are Thriving While Pesticide Intensive Conventional Bee Hive Colonies Are Collapsing
"I'm on an organic beekeeping email list of about 1,000 people, mostly
Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including
commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list.
Bees have been bred for the past 100 years to be much larger than they
would be if left to their own devices. If you find a feral honeybee
colony in a tree, for example, the cells bees use for egg-laying will be
about 4.9 mm wide. This is the size they want to build the natural size.
The foundation wax that beekeepers buy have cells that are 5.4 mm wide
so eggs laid in these cells produce much bigger bees. It's the same
factory farm mentality we've used to produce other livestock bigger is
better. But the bigger bees do not fare as well as natural-size bees.
Varroa mites, a relatively new problem in North America, will multiply
and gradually weaken a colony of large bees so that it dies within a few
years. Mites enter a cell containing larvae just before the cell is
capped over with wax. While the cell is capped, the bee transforms into
an adult and varroa mites breed and multiply while feeding on the larvae.
The larvae of natural bees spend less time in this capped over stage,
resulting in a significant decrease in the number of varroa mites
produced. In fact, very low levels of mites are tolerated by the bees
and do not affect the health of the colony. Natural-size bees, unlike
large bees, detect the presence of varroa mites in capped over cells and
can be observed chewing off the wax cap and killing the mites. Colonies
of natural-size bees are healthier in the absence mites, which are
vectors for many diseases."
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_5194.cfm
