Wik-Bee Leaks: EPA Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Honey Bees(fastcompany.com) |
Wik-Bee Leaks: EPA Knowingly Allowed Pesticide That Kills Honey Bees(fastcompany.com) |
The same honeybees that are providing us with 1 in 3 meals every single friggin day! Maybe big-pharma is confident that it can feed the humanity - but I see it as an incredibly shortsighted strategy that WILL cause us our lives - before global warming or nukes - since we're apparently trying extremely hard to exterminate the little critters.
citation needed
In old days every farmer in our village had a beehive - the honey and pollination services were both much appreciated. My father has always taught me that killing a bee is a horrible crime.
http://www.grist.org/article/food-2010-12-10-leaked-document...
http://money.cnn.com/2010/10/08/news/honey_bees_ny_times.for...
Bayer gets sued all the time and they are probably pretty good at working the legal system.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1774592
The timing seems incredible.
>Back in 1983, approximately 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States. Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/who-owns-the-med...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/politicaljunkie/2010/01/court_rulin...
With this level of abstraction, the final shareholders usually are not (or don't want to be) aware of things done in their name. The situation makes it very easy to look the other way.
IMHO, Adam Smith would be disgusted about this.
People don't like the gov't but believe that it's a matter of who is in charge rather than the structure of the system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Elec...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
kb
Can you support those claims?
Which is to say: they're so important that local populations of pollinators are inadequate to requirements, so they have to be supplemented by these mobile colonies.
Oh... Another reference: http://www.pnas.org/content/99/26/16812.full - you can check references [6,7] yourself.
Edit: I apologize - since I did limit my rant to honeybees initially.
The 2nd reference is the best so far, it provides some quantitative information about how dominant the honey bee is as a pollinator of commercial crops.
Personally I think bees are hugely important and it's quite sad the way bee populations have been mistreated, but it doesn't help to overstate the case (the case for being kind to bees is already very strong).
Bees are actively used for guided pollination, which is not possible with most other insects (not withstanding some experiments with bumblebees in greenhouses). Interesting fact is that you will often find the phrase "crop xxx requires yyy hives" while describing the role of bees in pollination.
hth.
For instance I had pancakes for breakfast this morning. The eggs were from non-native chickens, the milk from non-native cows, the flour from non-native wheat, the canola oil I cooked it in from non-native rapeseed, and the butter I put on it from non-native cows. However all is not lost, I used maple syrup from native maple trees, and put blackberries in it that might have been native. (The baking powder and salt are chemicals that to the best of my knowledge do not come from animals or plants, native or otherwise.)
Edit: When I looked up blackberries I found out that there are several hundred species, and some of the popular ones for cultivation are not native. So I don't know whether that was a native berry.
My ancestors managed to create arguably the best bee btw :) [http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Apis_mellifera_carnica]