TROUBLE WITH BEES
I came across a video the other day, a botanist in the US who tracks down pockets of native habitat via google maps and goes to check it out to see what he can find and see if it’s protectable. Anyway, he got to an area and found a local guy had heard about the rare plant species that grew there and decided he should keep a few of his bee-hives on the site to help with pollination. Botanist guy was explaining how this mis-informed act had probably eradicated most of the native bee populations from the site and potentially led to the collapse in some other plant community numbers, due to any specialised pollination that might be required that honeybees aren’t equipped for.
This got me thinking about our own views towards honeybee keeping. I know Irish bee-keepers are clued in and are VERY keen to encourage the keeping of our native honeybee and not introduce any other species/strains. BUT, is there still a potential problem simply arising from concentrations of numbers, leading to competition with “unfarmed” species? As far as I know keeping bees doesn’t come with a requirement to ensure “x” amount of land per hive is planted with native plants to ensure there is enough food to go round?
Doing a loose bit of reading it seems environmental groups are already on this, pointing out that in areas where there is a concentration of bee-hives, local bee species variety and number are drastically reduced and farmed bees were the main source of ideas outbreaks in wild populations, yet you don’t really hear much about the detrimental effects of honey-bee farming, it is only ever sold as a wholesome thing, which of course, it is! But like anything as soon as it’s scaled up it’s going to lead to problems that don’t get talked about until a “situation” has been created.
I have no idea how many bee-hives might be too many bee-hives for an area, not being an ecologist, but it’s something to think about surely! As usual it’s like we’re all trying to educate ourselves while being skewered on the horns of a dilemma (ecosystem collapse), none of us can say for sure what way all this is going to go, very few of us have ecological degrees and those that do are trying to shout into the void, while corporate bastards have the money to keep pushing greenwashed agendas at us to push us off track for a while. The “honeybee good” narrative has been pushed hard, because god forbid we might ban the use of fucking herbicides, pesticides and the eradication of natural hedges, ditches, scrubland and meadow so that native populations of pollinators might actually be able to pollinate things!
Imagine a world where organic was the norm. Good land management, was the norm. Every town and village had its own farm,that supplied jobs, food, education, space and enrichment for its community. How have we been bullied into this quagmire of shite!? Where even honeybees have been manipulated into the bullshit narrative…
