How U.S. honey beekeepers averted a bee-pocalypse from FOTM

How U.S. honey beekeepers averted a bee-pocalypse

Posted on July 31, 2017 by Dr. Eowyn | 18 comments

Beginning in 2006, we began hearing/reading frighterning news about a Bee-pocalypse — the (bee) colony collapse disorder.
Beekeepers reported mysteriously large losses to their honeybee hives: The bees weren’t just dying—they were abandoning their hives altogether.

Given the importance of bees to agriculture — they pollinate about a third of our  food crops,
accounting for $15 billion in annual value to the U.S. economy, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture — the media swiftly declared the dying and disappearing bees an apocalyptic disaster.
National Public Radio declared “a crisis point for crops”; Time called it a “bee-pocalypse” and foretold “a world without bees”; Quartz called it “beemageddon”. The colony collapse disorder was blamed on everything from genetically modified crops, pesticides, and global warming to cellphones and high-voltage electric transmission lines.
What the MSM haven’t told you is the rest of the story.
Shawn Regan writes for Reason.com, August/September 2017:

“But here’s what you might not have heard. Despite the increased mortality rates, there has been no downward trend in the total number of honeybee colonies in the United States over the past 10 years. Indeed, there are more honeybee colonies in the country today than when colony collapse disorder began.
Beekeepers have proven incredibly adept at responding to this challenge. Thanks to a robust market for pollination services, they have addressed the increasing mortality rates by rapidly rebuilding their hives, and they have done so with virtually no economic effects passed on to consumers. It’s a remarkable story of adaptation and resilience, and the media has almost entirely ignored it.
The chief reason commercial beekeeping exists is to help plants have sex. Some crops, such as corn and wheat, can rely on the wind to transfer pollen from stamen to pistil. But others, including a variety of fruits and nuts, need assistance. And since farmers can’t always depend solely on bats, birds, and other wild pollinators to get the job done, they turn to honeybees for help with artificial insemination. Unleashed by the thousands, the bees improve the quality and quantity of the farms’ yields; in return, the plants provide nectar, which the bees use to produce honey.
Honeybees are essentially livestock. Their owners breed them, rear them, and provide proper nutrition and veterinary care to them. Unlike bumblebees and wasps, honeybees are not native to North America; the primary commercial species, the European honeybee, is thought to have been introduced by English settlers in the 17th century.
Commercial beekeepers are migratory. They truck their hives across the country in tractor trailers on a journey to “follow the bloom,” stacking their hives on semis and moving at night while the bees are at rest. Most travel to California in the early spring to pollinate almonds. After that, they take their own routes. Some go to Oregon and Washington for apples, pears, and cherries; others to the apple orchards of New York. Some pollinate fruits and vegetables in Florida in the early spring, followed by blueberries in Maine….
After blooming season, beekeepers shift their focus from pollinating crops to making honey. Many commercial crops that require honeybee pollination, such as almonds and apples, do not provide enough nectar for the bees to produce surplus honey. So in the summer, beekeepers often head to the Midwest, where they essentially pasture the bees, turning their hives loose in fields near sunflower, clover, or wildflowers, which supply large amounts of nectar and allow the bees to make plenty of honey. When summer ends, the beekeepers truck their bees back south to spend the winter in warmer climates.
Some observers claim that this annual migration is contributing to colony collapse. As the food writer Michael Pollan put it in The New York Times in 2007, “the lifestyle of the modern honeybee leaves the insects so stressed out and their immune systems so compromised that, much like livestock on factory farms, they’ve become vulnerable to whatever new infectious agent happens to come along.” But it is precisely this modern-livestock lifestyle and the active markets for pollination services that have allowed non-native honeybees to flourish on our continent. They are the reason honeybee populations have remained steady even in the face of disease and other afflictions.“

In other words, without government intervention, capitalism — in the form of commercial beekeepers — is successfully dealing with the colony collapse disorder by restocking and rebuilding bee hives. The result is that there are more honeybee colonies in America today than when colony collapse disorder began in 2006.
The only thing different is that the MSM are not reporting the good news.
~Eowyn