Bees teach us how to live our life in a way that by taking what
we need from the world around us, we leave the world better than
we found it.
Beekeeping is rising in popularity -- from urban rooftops to
backyard hives, the world is abuzz with interest in homemade
honey. And who better to comment on the nature of bees than the
former president of the Vermont Beekeepers Association, Ross
Conrad. He's led bee-related presentations and taught organic
beekeeping workshops and classes throughout North America for
many years, and Conrad's small beekeeping business supplies
friends, neighbors, and local stores with honey and candles
among other bee related products, not to mention provides bees
for Vermont apple pollination in spring. I talked to Conrad
about organic beekeeping, the state of pollination, and tips for
aspiring bee farmers.
Makenna Goodman: Your book, Natural Beekeeping: Organic
Approaches to Modern Apiculture, offers up a program of natural
beehive management, and an alternative to conventional
chemical-based approaches. So -- why organic beekeeping?
Ross Conrad: History has shown us that the industrialized
"economy of scale" approach does not work when applied to
agriculture because we are dealing with living biological
systems, not an inert assembly line food production system where
the economy of scale approach can be applied across the board.
One of the biggest issues is the large number of chemical
contaminants that are being found in beeswax and pollen, often
at very high concentrations. Toxic chemical contamination has
been implicated in Colony Collapse and the reality is that there
is no effective regulation of chemicals in Western society. Let
me tell you why:
When the EPA was created in 1970 and sanctioned with the task of
regulating chemicals, all the chemicals that were already used
in commerce up to that time were grandfathered in. Additionally,
since the EPA is given very limited personnel and financial
resources, the agency ends up relying on the chemical
manufacturers for the majority of the scientific data that is
used to evaluate the safety of the regulated toxins a serious
conflict of interest. When chemicals are evaluated for toxicity,
they are studied in isolation. Little thought is given to the
chemical's break down products which can prove to be more toxic
and longer lasting than the original chemical itself, such as in
the case of Imidacloprid Olefin, which is produced as the
neonicotinoid, Imidacloprid degrades. Once in use and released
into the environment, chemicals, and their breakdown products,
will combine with other chemicals already in the environment to
form new compounds. The synergistic effects of some of these
combinations have proven themselves to be hundreds of times more
toxic than either compound on its own.