To our coworkers - 3 bee colonies through Heifer Intl through donation, then everyone gets Fair Trade tea, honey sticks and a box of homemade Israeli honey cookies. My boss, secretary and the 4 girls in my immediate group are also getting some beeswax hand cream and a small beeswax candle. So either it's homemade, fair trade, local business, and/or sustainable. Xmas xmas cards are UNICEF designs with a non-denominational verse inside. My daughter helped me pull it all together and suggested the UNICEF cards.

Notice how Ingraham just waves off the issue of colony collapse? "It's a major victory for the capitalistic system!" he crows. "All the beekeepers need to do is -- buy more bees! Wooo hoooo!"

You betcha. Problem solved.

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Sure, production is rising, in territorial areas in the country, but spread out on a state-by-state basis, major pockets of blight exist.

New Jersey is suffering major colony collapse, having owned a small farm, my ex owns a large farm and they beekeep. As members of their state's beekeeping associations, they would look at this post and just laugh! And, contrary to density, NJ is a major crop producing state.


You've gotta love those massive 'one chart says all' posts, when micro-research is required.



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Where WaPo spins it as "a victory for the free market." Shows their bias which makes the entire article suspect to me, makes me wonder what they're leaving out. Is it healthy for the environment for the majority of healthy hives to be man-maintained instead of in the wild? I suspect not.

The number of managed colonies shows businesses filling a need, it doesn't show the overall condition of honeybees.

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I'm out raking leaves and thought about the non-managed 'natural' colonies, that do most of the pollination.

Sure, honey production is on the increase in controlled sections of the country, and I'm waiting for the reply that the beekeepers in many states are too stupid to use the methods described to rebuild their hives. Which would be a completely bullshit claim, as these guys are plugged into every best practices and experimental reclamation techniques out there. They are not just demonstrating the state-of-the-art in methodologies, but are struggling to find newer, yet developed means to reclaim their farms.


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Which is not the same as saying they aren't dying off in record numbers.

It's not the total number of colonies. It's how many die each year.

Not the same. At all.

What happens if the hives producing these queens collapse ?

Are they taken from wild hives ? How is the wild population coping with that ?

Nothing wrong with upbeat news, as long as it considers all the facts.

At the end of the article, WaPo spins it as "a victory for the free market." I guess it's ok for the price of honey to double in 9 years, the poor have other options (like doing without).

Both are probably important for a healthy biospere. Plus, the graph shows numbers are still down substantially fro the late 1980's.

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Beekeepers in that article and around the web are trashing this writer as being a moron.


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