Bee Keepers Adapt or Die!

 

 

Progress' Purpose?

Progress does not honor the old way of doing things.
It abhors the restrictions of old previously perfected systems and machinery.
Progress seeks out new and untried.
It is a friend to that which is known as  impossible even insanely irrational and builds with them.

Jet planes replaced perfectly good propellor driven aircraft.
This was a violent step forward, which meant doing away with all the time honored wisdom of flight science up to that time.
From jet science’s trashing of what had been came today’s system of fast safe transportation.

This kind of approach required new eyes and attitudes before it could succeed.
Today as beekeepers we are in such a time with the keeping and culture of the honey bee.

The old ways no longer work.
Where once 15% losses of overwintered bees were considered high, now it is looked back upon as a desirable level in the face of fatality rates in the 30 to 40% realm.

And yet, we as a community attack and fight at every turn any change, except permutations of the same system and sciences which have brought us to our current plight.

More of the Same.
This is our solution as individuals. As a community. As a agricultural community.

The propeller driven airplane was relatively safe for its time. It was fairly fast too.
But the levels of fatalities while flying in those planes which could never climb above the weather were high and increasing, and would have continued to had we tried to expand their service to what are today’s levels. And those planes would have necessarily have been far slower than today’s jet aircraft.

Time for a Change?

 
Orville Wright first flew the Kitty Hawk flier in 1908. The first Langstroth hives designed in 1850 came into wide acceptance among farmers in the early 1900's.

The farm community is known to be loyal to things that have proven to work. It took close to fifty years for the motor driven tractor to replace the horses and ox in front of the plow. This loyalty remains today, and underlies most of our current practices and use of the Langstroth hive and related methods.

Bee Hives began to fail in the 1980s because of farmers.

Naturally enough when modern concerned modern city folk environmentalists heard that honey bees were in a state of decline, they made a critical mistake. They went to the farmers who were keeping bees, and asked them to teach them the old methods of beekeeping. This on the theory that with tender loving care at an individual level, the trend could be reversed.

Blissful Ignorance.

Then these newly farm trained acolytes went forth, tried their hand, organized classes and clubs to bring along those who dumbly followed. Creating the urban farm system of beekeeping.

What soon happened was that thousands of modern pampered hives simply failed as were their country cousins. Meanwhile to counter this trend, the beekeeping community enlisted “science” to try to turn back whatever the malady which was afflicting bee hives and restore previous halcyon days of hundred pound per hive harvests once or twice a year.

Sadly, those few individuals who proposed new ideas about the approved treatment patterns, or about the designs of the approved hive system were shouted down, or driven from the conversation. And the consensus that the old system is okay, it just needs to be tweeked until we get it right continues to rule.

Just as aviation had to put aside, biplanes, straight wings, propellers and gas dirigibles to move into the jet age, beekeepers will have to shed their allegiance to the Langstroth hive system, and the pseudo-science of chemical and medical baths, sprays, traps, and powders which are currently dumped into bee hives by the millions of pounds and gallons at huge waste of money and what is worse the acceleration of the degradation of the Environment.

Adapt or Die!
The Red Queen doesn’t take prisoners.

(next, What To Look At.)