How the Big Six Cover Tracks in Murder of the Honeybee

[G_j]

http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20540-the-administration-of-the-honey-bee

How the Big Six Cover Tracks in Murder of the Honeybee

Tuesday, 10 December 2013 12:41
By Jennifer Sonntag, Truthout | Op-Ed

The Big Six agrochemical companies have turned the honeybee into a factory animal, a workhorse that cannot exist without antibiotics, and are using the term "Colony Collapse Disorder" to cover the poisoning of pollinators vital to agriculture.

It is only by fiat of a corporate-captured EPA, a bought press and willed ignorance that colony collapse continues to be known as a bee "disorder."

Neonics, systemic pesticides that work through a neurotoxin, which is applied to the seed of a plant and taken up into all its tissue so that the insect is exposed at every turn to a new vehicle bearing the same poison, work in a very orderly manner indeed. Poisoned food crops and the honeybees that pollinate them are perfectly efficient bearers of the values of the Big 6 - Monsanto, Dow, BASF, Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont. The empty beehive isn't mysterious. It is no magician's cabinet. The bees aren't disordered - they are designed. There is, that is, no Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

But CCD is something. It is a vocabulary of power that sets down rules regarding who may speak, what we speak about, and the conditions of that speech. Power is not "about" objects such as wooden boxes; it concerns, more precisely, their very possibility. In service to power, CCD-speak has naturalized the biases of Big 6, helping to consolidate its hegemony over our food web. As a discourse, it has created the conceptual ground for a wholly privatized and administered creature, existing only by the arbitrary whim of the market.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno called this kind of world, where the profit motive pervades every level of society, the administered world. To a great extent, honeybees are already an administered creature. Man has turned the bee into a factory animal, a workhorse that cannot exist without antibiotics and careful breeding. This reduction of honeybees to migratory worker has enfeebled them. The unmitigated use of neonicotinoids over the last 15 years is rendering them extinct.

..more..

[Benton D Struckcheon]

1. I don't get this argument

1 - Link, so I can read the whole thing?
2 - Honeybees were always workhorses for agriculture. They didn't even exist in the New World until Europeans brought them over. ("No Apis species existed in the New World during human times before the introduction of Apis mellifera by Europeans. There is only one fossil species documented from the New World, Apis nearctica, known from a single 14-million-year old specimen from Nevada.[3]" - from Wikipedia's entry on honeybees). Native to North America are bumblebees and of course others, but not honeybees. Honeybees were known by the Indians as "the white man's fly". So the argument that using them as workhorses for agriculture enfeebles them seems, on first glance, ahistorical. But I'd like to be able to read the whole thing to know for sure what the arguments are the author is making.

[G_j]

4. Added,

sorry about that..
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20540-the-administration-of-the-honey-bee

[Benton D Struckcheon]

5. Thanks.

…but not much more there. I have no doubt those pesticides are harming the bees, but claiming they're being impacted by inbreeding and being used as agricultural workhorses is a bit much. They've been bred and used in agriculture for a long long time. It's a domesticated species, like dogs and cats and cows and mules and horses and all the rest.

[G_j]

10. good points

I just learned a lot more about bees than I knew before.

[appal_jack]

2. k&r, but please add the link! (nt)

[G_j]

3. oops .. done

[mike_c]

6. as an entomologist, and insect ecologist, I have to disagree with some of the statements...

...in the OP, or at least with the overall tone. Apis mellifera is an introduced, domesticated animal. There seems to be this idyllic, pastoral version of A. mellifera's history that romanticizes their role in agriculture, but they exist in North America ONLY to be the sort of pollinator workhorse that the OP seems to lament. They have been used to almost entirely displace native pollinators because they possess characteristics that are ideal for precisely the large scale agriculture the OP complains about-- at least the animal pollinated components of big ag would likely not exist in their present form if not for the honey bee, which is social, docile, can be transported for pollination on site wherever needed, and which produces honey, traditionally an expensive luxury product that originally made A. mellifera the imported species of choice for North American bee keepers.

The conspiracy theory part of the OP, the notion that big ag and big science are somehow colluding to hide the real causes of CCD, or whatever the CT is, is just ridiculous. Scientists are a congenitally contrary bunch-- if you think herding democrats is hard, try enforcing some external consensus on a bunch of independent scientists. It just isn't possible. The disagreements among the entomological and other scientific communities about CCD and other challenges facing honey bees stem from there being no good evidence yet to rule out several competing perspectives, not because of competing policy or other loyalties, and Bayer, Monsanto, etc have very little practical input into the discussion in scientific circles. No one distrusts big ag as much as academic science distrusts big ag, IMO. Yet we're accused of conspiring with them because the evidence linking neonicotinoids to CCD is tenuous at best.

The OP states unequivocally that "CCD is something" but there simply is no consensus about that outside of the lay press and the usual cast of anti-science types. There really have been numerous other instances of CCD like hive collapse during the past, long before neonics came into use, and there really are multiple stressors acting upon honey bee colonies that have been narrowly bred for one primary purpose: industrial scale managed pollination on demand in habitats from which native pollinators are excluded, and honey production to sweeten the pot.

[Drahthaardogs]

7. As a hobby keeper, might I add

tracheal and varroa mites sure do not help anything either...

[G_j]

9. thanks for your input

I appreciate your taking the time to further the conversation. I am not knowledgeable in the subject of bees, other than knowing they have been dying.
I am more familiar with Monsanto, and have been astonished to realize just how amoral they can be. I think you, and the poster above, make some solid points.

The bottom line, of course, is understanding how to help/save the bees.
And, of course, it will most likely be scientists who are their hope.

[FarCenter]

8. Neonicotinoids are produced by Bayer, Syngenta, Sumitomo, Nippon Soda, and Mitsui

Monsanto, Dow, BASF, and DuPont do not produce them.

[mdbl]

11. I keep eating organic

maybe a few bees might live.