Ah spring! The break in the in cold, the flowers are blooming, and the bee keepers getting the hives out to the orchards.
Today I went to my local beekeeping group's meeting. They discussed all of those external forces that affects the honey bees and their keepers.
To back up here a little, a bit of context. The honey bee is a pollinator. A very important pollinator. And the honey bee is endanger of becoming extinct due to human activity. http://endangeredspeciesinternational.org/insects6.html
With out pollinators like the honey bee our crops do not produce and we do not have food to eat. Oh No! Given that the bees are endangered, you can infer that there are none to few wild bees out there to pollinate the crops. Which is where the bee keeping industry comes into play.
In the continental US bee keepers will move hives around the country to where bees are needed. Because this is a big continent, some parts are in bloom at slightly different times from other parts.
In addition to pollinating, the bees produce, you guessed it - Honey! Which is in competition with imported honey. What??? According to today's speaker American's love love love their honey and we can't make enough to meet the demand. And some of that honey coming in isn't honey - it's fructose or rice sugar or some other phony.
So to help out with environmental health, agriculture, and the honey industry - President Obama signed an executive order saying government land such as wildlife preserves shall be made into bee friendly habitats. Hurrah! But we have a new administration - or as I call it - the Fascist Regime and they are epically environmentally unfriendly. Booo!
So there we are with the context. Now today's meeting highlighted even more pressure from the outside world onto the bee keepers. Like, the Department of Transportation, in an effort to protect the safety of truck drivers, will be requiring digital record keeping of their time spent driving. This could translate to the bees which are being hauled around the country spending more time en-route and exposed to heat stress that could kill them. Mind you, bees have to be moved at night when everyone is tucked in at home. Hanging out at truck stops during the day could kill them. So this could translate into higher shipping costs. Man that sucks. But then, what truly sucks is the fact we have to truck around bees in the first place.
Then there is the pressure to have less anti-biotics in our foods. This way public health is addressed because the over exposure to anti-biotics creates super biotics which there is not treatment for. Well, bees get sick and need anti-biotics. So now there is this rule about only getting certain anti-biotics for the bees through a veterinarian. But what veterinarian has a working knowledge of insects? Not many at all. So this also puts bee keepers in a bind.
There were several other points of interest, but I think you get the drift.
All in all, I would love to be an amature bee keeper. But I am definitely not going to make the mistake that this an easy, goldfish taking care of sceneria. Bees are high maintenance - yo! Ah but the honey and pollinating - so worth it I think.
Up next month is the beginner bee keeping class where I will be learning all of the basics including how to split a hive.
Wish me luck. Cheers!