It would make more sense for growers to maintain their own hives for pollination. Sure it's a whole new thing and expense you have to deal with, but it's not like pollination is optional for food production.

Then we can get back to the old problem of the mites that were killing off all the honeybees 5 years or so ago.

This is from Santa Cruz, California, I should note, I guess, hehe.

That certainly makes sense - in theory. But I wonder, with the evident consolidation of stocks, are there in fact any bees out there "available" to local growers, or, have the corporate beekeepers essentially cornered the market as it were, and locked up the supply?

I mean, even if a California almond grower for example, wanted to develop their own bee stocks, where would they go to get their initial colonies? It sounds like the only place TO go would be the commercial keepers, and they would seem to have a vested interest in restricting access to their own stocks, so as to continue to maintain their effective near-monopolies.

The whole thing will probably mean that local small beekeepers either pick up the slack or that the larger corps will regionalize their bees.

but thanks!

I echo the sentiments at the top (Good story! THIS IS SERIOUSLY BAD NEWS.) It seems though, that to have resonance with a large amount of blog readers, you have to BLAME someone. Corporations and Global Warming are likely causes, but unfortunately they are also vague abstracts. You could pick an "evil idiot" like other posters do - Prayer Warrior, Nickels, Bush, Gregoire, Joel Connely, etc.
On the other hand, I really enjoyed the way you conveyed your research. Maybe you're not blood-thirsty ambitious and just want to help out with good science and good reporting.

p.s. My favorite "evil idiot" is Hitler. Did you know his dad was a beekeeper?

I know that here in California, at least, there are still wild honeybees that one could develop as alternative lines if one had a need to do so. But it is my understanding that getting a bee starter kit is still pretty easy, and there are -- at least here in the Santa Cruz area -- local, organic beekeepers with healthy stocks.

While the honeybee is a very useful agricultural commodity, the several thousand native species of bee would be much better off without this massive source of artificial competition. A complete removal of honeybees from North America would be an environmental plus, not a minus, in terms of native biodiversity.

As pollinators, native bees are more effective, per animal, due to their tendency in most species to gather pollen by just letting it stick to their fuzzy bellies, rather than packing it into those tidy pods on their legs. Most species are only active for a few weeks each year, so you have to have diverse populations to get coverage of all flowering periods, or even of one crop since it's flowers might not open during the same bee's activities each year.

Honeybees are just a hell of a lot more convenient, since somebody can bring a truck with 100,000 or so bees on it and drop them in an orchard. But, if the farmers arranged to have a fraction of the land covered in suitable habitat for a few natvie species (even engineered nesting sites) AND avoided insecticides (at least when the desired species are active and vulnerable), adequate pollination should be possible with native bees. When the entire California Central Valley is treated like a gigantic, sterile petri dish scraped clean for almond trees and sprayed like mad, duh, you don't have any natives.

Thanks you Sage for your contribution and support to this serious issue.

Great point about the native bees! I didn't have room to fit this in the post, but some orchards in Walla Walla use Alkali Bees- the native ground-nesting bees. A few also use native Blue Orchard bees. Neither of these are considered particularly economically viable, but this is largely due to pesticide use (you can't move the ground nests when you want to spray), so there is some hope that the growth of the organic movement will also see increased usage of native bees.

Love bees.

Love bees.

I wish we could go back to the era of the Mammoth and Big Tooth Tiger, now that would be a pure/purist era for all the city enviro rather fixated hippies.

Nice post... less rantings about City Hall trivia, yeah.

Or obsessing on child abuse....misfortune as ego boost.