It’s been bad news for domesticated species this month. First we had the news about melamine tainted pet food. Next we had news that honeybees are disappearing, possibly because of cellular phone signals.
But now there’s a bold suggestion from the Safe Pet Food blog that links these two stories, speculating that melamine might be tainting apiary nutritional supplements. It’s an interesting idea, particularly in light of the New York Times’ article today pointing to nutritional supplements as one of a number of factors that could be causing an AIDS-like immune response disorder among bee colonies. But as my friend Brian used to say, “for every complex problem there’s always a simple solution…and it’s usually wrong.”
In the “it’s never as simple as you’d hope” file I found that:
In 2004 it seemed that wild bees might reduce the impact of domestic bee decline because wild bees make domestic bees work harder. The problem is that wild bees don’t like genetically modified crops. Wild bees much prefer organic crops. Which is a little bit of a dead-end anyhow, because wild bees face extinction. Plus there are a whole bunch of other things putting stress on honeybees.
I’m wondering if this isn’t so much an environmental disaster as it is an agro-industrial failure, the sort that we’ve seen before.