Honey bees go for yellow, violet, blue flowered heavy nectar producers. Corn, grasses, etc. aren't on their menu.

I used to own a farm and have several farms in my extended family. One is a beekeeper.

You can try to raise specific honey blends, but if there is a closer field of a different type of plant, the bees will deplete their favored plants first and, instead of traveling miles, they will hit up the next best thing... leading to a cross-contaminated honey that is not pure clover, buckwheat, etc.

Please see the list of plants bees are attracted in my other reply.

Almost ALL Commercial Bee Keepers, and most small scale Bee Keepers feed their bees Corn Syrup.


Scientists Link Bee Deaths to Pesticide in Corn Syrup
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/320-80/10878-scientists-link-bee-deaths-to-pesticide-in-corn-syrup

Maybe the same is true of honey bees.

Besides, we do not know everything about bees, nor do we know everything about what kind of cross contamination happens due to winds, birds and even the bees themselves.

There was a recent correlation between Corn Syrup, which is nearly all GMO,
and problems with Honey Bee Colonies.

Is Corn Syrup killing our Bees?-- Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0406/Is-corn-syrup-killing-the-honeybees-video


Harvard Study Links Pesticide-Laced Corn Syrup to Bee Colony Collapse
http://inhabitat.com/new-harvard-study-gives-convincing-evidence-that-pesticides-are-linked-to-bee-colony-collapse/

Scientists Link Bee Deaths to Pesticide in Corn Syrup
http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/320-80/10878-scientists-link-bee-deaths-to-pesticide-in-corn-syrup


My Wife & I started Keeping European Honey Bees in 2007.
We refused to feed our Bees Corn Syrup, opting for the more expensive Cane Sugar solutions.
We are very isolated, far from any agriculture or other sources of pesticides,
and all non-natural pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides, and GMOs are banned from our place.
We haven't had an incidence of CCD.


http://www.democraticunderground.com/1182412

From your link:

Lu's study, released April 5 and scheduled for publication in the June Bulletin of Insectology, attempts to replicate the life history of commercial bees, which are often fed dietary supplements of high-fructose corn syrup that may contain neonicotinoid residues that survive processing.

"We tried to mimic commercial beekeepers' practices. I believe one reason that commercial beekeepers are experiencing the most severe colony collapse disorder is because of the link between high-fructose corn syrup and neonicotinoids," Lu said.

---------
Commercial beekeepers had better change their practices...apparently cane sugar doesn't have the problem

---I guess people are ingesting the same pesticides in HFCS.

That is a reasonable assumption!

One of the reasons we moved here (Rural Ouachita Mountains of West Arkansas) in 2006 was our growing distrust in the US Factory Food Production, Packaging, Transportation, and Distribution system.

Living here among supposed "Organic" Farmers and BeeKeepers has opened our eyes.
Feeding Corn Syrup to Honey Bees is widespread,
even among "Organic" Bee Keepers.
Even worse it that some/many "all natural" Small Scale "Local" BeeKeepers
continue to feed their Bees Corn Syrup even during the "Honey Flow".
Some of the product they are selling as "Pure Natural Flower Honey" is nothing more than Corn Syrup
that has been re-processed through a bee.

I use some organic local honey. Guess I better ask them about their practices. I don't want to support this.

Thanks for the tip.

For instance: The corn earworm.
But, that doesn't make GMO corn resistant to grasshoppers.

The odds are that pesticides such as Imidicloprid are the culprit.

Even if a crop is insect resistant, it doesn't mean that pesticides are not used on the crop.

Sure they might target one specific type of insect, or several (as broad spectrum killers affect various insects differently).

The GMOs are found now to actually make certain insects rsistant to them and their insecticide counterparts.

Also, the bees might not be directly dying from the plants, they might have behavioral changes that lead to collony collapse.

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/04/09/mystery-of-the-disappearing-bees-solved/

Mystery of the disappearing bees: Solved!
By Richard Schiffman
April 9, 2012

---------------------------

If it were a novel, people would criticize the plot for being too far-fetched – thriving colonies disappear overnight without leaving a trace, the bodies of the victims are never found. Only in this case, it’s not fiction: It’s what’s happening to fully a third of commercial beehives, over a million colonies every year. Seemingly healthy communities fly off never to return. The queen bee and mother of the hive is abandoned to starve and die.

Thousands of scientific sleuths have been on this case for the last 15 years trying to determine why our honey bees are disappearing in such alarming numbers. “This is the biggest general threat to our food supply,” according to Kevin Hackett, the national program leader for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s bee and pollination program.

Until recently, the evidence was inconclusive on the cause of the mysterious “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) that threatens the future of beekeeping worldwide. But three new studies point an accusing finger at a culprit that many have suspected all along, a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids.

In the U.S. alone, these pesticides, produced primarily by the German chemical giant Bayer and known as “neonics” for short, coat a massive 142 million acres of corn, wheat, soy and cotton seeds. They are also a common ingredient in home gardening products.

Research published last month in the prestigious journal Science shows that neonics are absorbed by the plants’ vascular system and contaminate the pollen and nectar that bees encounter on their rounds. They are a nerve poison that disorient their insect victims and appear to damage the homing ability of bees, which may help to account for their mysterious failure to make it back to the hive.

Another study published in the American Chemical Society’s Environmental Science and Technology journal implicated neonic-containing dust released into the air at planting time with “lethal effects compatible with colony losses phenomena observed by beekeepers.”

Purdue University entomologists observed bees at infected hives exhibiting tremors, uncoordinated movement and convulsions, all signs of acute insecticide poisoning. And yet another study conducted by scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health actually re-created colony collapse disorder in several honeybee hives simply by administering small doses of a popular neonic, imidacloprid.

Last edited Sat Mar 30, 2013, 02:16 PM - Edit history (1)

The mites are one factor, pesticides another, but not the entire cause of colony collapse.

that are known to disrupt hives, maybe we'd have a hope of figuring that out. Let's limit a known cause.

Bees don't pollinate corn, for example, so they'd not be exposed to anything there. While honeybees do visit soybean plants, soybeans are primarily self-pollinators. Bees don't pollinate grains.

Bees also don't eat plants. They consume nectar and pollen from nectar-bearing plants. So they don't spend much time in corn, grain, or soybean fields and prefer other plants.

So, I'm not really sure which plants you're talking about.

Papaya is already GMO, bananas are being tested along with the cocoa plant (70% of chocolate will soon be GMO).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crop_plants_pollinated_by_bees

Very few indeed. Development of most of those crops is primarily done through traditional methods. In the US, the following crops are GMO modified: Soybean, Maize, Cotton, Canola, Squash, Papaya, Alfalfa, Sugarbeet.

to play with using normal cross-breeding technology, and aren't a valuable enough crop to invest in for the big GMO companies.

Flower varieties on the market come from traditional techniques.

Since my parents have a citrus and avocado farm, I'm very concerned with bee health. Both are dependent on pollination by bees. Neither are GMO, either.

If not, that might explain why theirs are still thriving.

have bees brought in. I'm not sure how much that costs, but it is offset by the honey production, so it's not much. Apiaries in Southern California are a big business, since both citrus honeys and avocado honey are high-value products. When the trees are in bloom, hives are brought to the orchards and left there through the blooming season.

I don't know how the California commercial apiaries are doing with the current problems with bees. I don't live near my parent's farm any longer. At 88 years of age, they've contracted out most of the farming now, and are getting ready to sell the place and move into a different living environment.

on a google image search of "homey bee"

but the main story had a cute misspell of 'homey bee'.

And frankly, we don't know what GMO crops do.

We do know that the promise of GMO crops, like higher yields, are a myth.

Folks will never find the answer if they remain with blinders on, trying to use the data that many times are funded by the same company's doing the GMO engineering, instead of asking the question. Too many bee colonies are collapsing that are not attributed to a mite infestation -- all within the past 5-7 years.

It's a question that needs to be asked.

cattle around here now they have nurseries. Her bees started dying off when they would spray the trees. They never did come back til this day. Nothing more to say without starting a war with your neighbors.

your neighbor is free to douse his/her yard with whatever legal pesticides they can find - as many times as they want and in whatever quantities they want and too bad for you. Also too bad for your children or children to be - your neighbor decides at least some of their fate.

They do when they remember. They have a business going and we are surrounded. I am not rich there is no way I can fight them. Money talks and stuff shit on me and my family. This goes on everywhere. Look at the fracking shit that is going on. People try to fight but they don't win on that either. Money talks, period. I am a little pea in a hugh pond. They don't care what happens to me and my family. I am not rich to fight them. I am a realist.

I was making the point that there really is nothing you can do. When it comes to chemicals we just have to take it.
Once I was called by an elderly man. He and his wife had both had heart surgery and were recuperating in their home. On a really hot summer day the commercial pesticide sprayer sprayed pesticides/herbicides on the large lots on either side of them. They were sick as dogs. They could only get medical help because there is no way to legally stop someone from getting their spray all over your home.

I have worked on chemical issues for years and there are lots of victims that are just thrown overboard when they get sick. Chemical companies are essentially first cousins of oil companies.

you can put sarcasm in ().

I was in effect agreeing with your post and enlarging the point to demonstrate how the use of broadcast chemicals affects others - sometimes for their entire lives.

Pollen and nectar are part of the plant, after all, and the cumulative effects could be deadly on a small critter that gathers them.