Bees

So everyone's talking about the bees disappearing... This is obviously a bad thing. Why are they disappearing, no one seems to really have an answer, at least not yet. But there are a number of possibilities...

The Chinese could be getting rid of them somehow in their efforts to monopolize the American honey market. This is highly unlikely, I think, simply because if they got caught could you imagine the outrage from the American public, even if I could believe that our government might be willing to be complacent to such a thing given the proper motivation and well-placed yen in the pockets of certain individuals.

The bees could be responding to very subtle shifts in weather, climate or environment. I've heard that bees are known to evacuate an area before a natural disaster like a earthquake or volcanic eruption, as well as major storms.

Or there's another possibility... One which Walter Jeffries suggested on nonais.org. He thinks the bees might be running away or dying because of genetically modified crops and pesticides. GM crops which produce their own pesticides "naturally" are being planted now. Others do not produce their own pollen in their modified state. Either could impact the bees. Obviously, crops that the bees might frequent which now produce pesticides would probably kill bees. A lot of crops that have no pollen would starve the hives, forcing them to move elsewhere. A commenter on nonais mentioned that a friend of theirs had their hives in a soybean field a few years ago, not knowing that the beans were GM and didn't produce pollen. They didn't realize that that was the case until their hives started dying because they didn't have anything to eat, and of course they immediately moved their hives elsewhere and have made sure not to place them in fields of GM crops since then. As GM crops have become more and more prevalent on "conventional" farms in the last year or so, there may be fewer and fewer places for the bees to find pollen, depending on the area... It's a theory anyway. I've yet to hear a better one...

In any case, it's all the more reason to buy local and buy organic...