Subject: The Bee's story from a bees perspective

From: [email-masked] (Andy Nachbaur)
Date: Tue, 17 Jan 1995 06:42:00 GMT

[email-masked] (bob "another Beer, Please" Christ)refer#
>Rosemary Waigh ([email-masked]) wrote:
>
>: Some honey producers disable the queen bee by blinding her or clipping
>: her wings.

Well Bob, pass this on to your friend Rosemary, she could turn it
into a long running tread and become one of the internets infamous
environmentalists. "Give em what they want and let em foul their own
nest." Abe Linclon Brown.

        Yes, beekeeping as practiced by some is very barbaric to say
the least. Poor defenseless queen bees do have their wings clipped to
prevent them from flying off to better conditions then offered by their
keepers. They are also marked with paint which must cause them a great
deal of discomfort and pain as the other bees spend much time chewing it
off her body. Even worse then that are those who get some perverse
pleasure out of artificially breeding virgin queen bees. These are
usually the intellectual class found hanging out in the dark rooms and
halls of out social institutes of higher learning, mostly paid for by
someone else. In the sleazy countries of South America there are clubs
made up of hundreds of these warped people, and video tapes have been
made that they will send you in a plain package for a small price.

Anyway some of these sadists take the poor completely defenseless fuzzy
loveable drone bees and crush their poor bodies between their thumb and
forefinger until they explode their sexual organs, and collect the
suffering, dying bees sperm in a micro syringe which is forced into the
sexual receptacle of a virgin queen that has been put to sleep. If ever
there was a more unnatural sexual act, I have never done it, but then my
only trips to university was to educate and entertain others. Many times
they miss the small target and the queen dies soon after, or does not
wake up, and many poor defenseless virgin queens are killed for the
practice and fun of doing it. The one's that live are put in a match
box size cage, with a screen top the size to allow other bees to feed
her, and also other nasty tempered type bees to rip off a leg or two
and inflect damage to any part of her body they can grab. If she lives
through all of this and the trip to a new hive without a queen she may
live another 6 months or so, if the new hives bees don't detect she is
damaged and dismantle her piece by piece, after stinging her many times.

>Will someone shed some light <hee> on this issue.  Do 'some' honey
>producers do this?  What would be gained by doing so, if true?

        It used to be the practice of many beekeepers in the colder
regions of the US and other places to suffocate their bees using the
same gas we use to kill people who offend us in the California judicial
system, but only after we cage them for ten years, and treat them to
a good life of no work, free food, education, health care and cable
TV. This barbaric practice is not used as much as in the past as 500,000
hives that were once gassed off are now moved to California to pollinate
almonds. I am sure this is a fluke and the 24+ million in silver paid
the beekeepers to move the bees has nothing much at all to do with the
need for them. Kind of an act of charity on the part of the almond
farmers for the good sales job done on them by the state educational
system, brain washing them into thinking they need bees and should
compensate the grubby old men, seldom seen in daylight, in coveralls
who brings them to them for a month or so from as far away as 1,000 to
2,000 miles away on the northern and southeastern boarders of the US.

>Anyone know if 'some' kill their bees "rather than help them survive
>the winter"?

Some in the Canadian beekeeper tribe still gas off their bees, but they
are looking for more humane methods of keeping them alive over the
winter so they can work them to death the next season.

   Bees are treated like the lazy socialists they are. They work
themselves a few weeks during the summer so as to have enough food
for the winter. Some dirty old capitalist beekeepers take all the honey
they made for food during the summer and kill them off so they won't eat
more. A lot of other more democratic like beekeepers only take most of
it, and feed the bees a little sugar water if they start to starve to
death when the little food they are left runs out. Not to mention the
confinement of these wild creatures of nature who would just as soon
live in a cave, the under side of a freeway overpass, high in a spacious
warm cavity of a 1,000 year old tree, or the eves of a barn, to a small
restricted over crowded space of a man make bee hive, premeditated
with the fumes of paint and dust from well traveled roads. And then
their is the drugs, you name it and some beekeeper has tried it on his
bees. Smoke them with it, sprayed them, fed them and gas them, to the
point that when a beehive dies most beekeepers can only guess at what
killed them. Mites are the most popular cause of the year. Yeh, big ugly
harry vampire mites, with sharp tools to stab the poor bee and like a
vampire suck out the warm blood from the living bees. And if thats not
enough little ones that will crawl inside the bees and work all the way
to the micro size brain and feed some more. Then the eggs of the mites
hatch out in the crowded capped bee brood cell and feed on the
developing bee, two, three, maybe six or more at a time.

>This sounds a little bogus to me.  Then again, Rosemary is the one that
>tried to 'live trap' cockroachs in her apartment rather than allow the
>landlord to exterminate them. (true fact!)
>>There are thousands of varieties of pollinating bees.  It seems very
>>unlikely that "most fruit" in this country (or any other) is
>>pollinated by honey bees. Sue has made this rather odd claim in the
past - always without support. >

  Much in life is not what it seems. True beekeepers and bees are not
native to America, most of us came from European stock, and we brought
our bees with us. Orchards planted in the land once in pristine
condition are in such numbers, millions of acres, that wild pollinators
can not do the job. Many of the verities of trees were introduced from
regions of the world that do have native honeybees, so have a natural
relationship with honeybees as pollinators. The effort beekeepers put
into rearing bees to produce honey is taken advantage of by the farmer
who does not want to put the same effort into rearing honeybees or other
wild bees. This may not be the way nature intended it, but it is the way
it is. If anyone knows of a better way, that will produce the billion
dollars of almonds produced in California last year, the door is wide
open. Most beekeepers have long ago realized they they were
indispensable, but expendable just like the bees that are killed by
licensed, regulated, and the legal use of pesticides. And few of us make
a better living then what most would call the working poor...and for
sure not the kind of living one would expect who is attending collage,
or has a degree.

Increase or eliminate the minimum wage, or welfare, would not make
any difference to us, we never got it anyway.

  In defence of those who keep bees, the beekeepers. In times of war
they have always been among the first to go, real gun fodder. Even in
WW II, a plan was made to take all the beehives and salvage the wax
>from  them to keep our guns from rusting on the sea voyage to the battle
front. This idea was scraped when it was discovered how much work it
would be and a substitute was found in the oil fields. In the time of
the great finical crisis in the US called the national debt, the
beekeepers honey price support was the first government support program
to be eliminated. First in War, first in peace, beekeepers are there
to serve or give up. Not only our government support programs, but
slowly we are lousing all bee research funds, and educational funds.
Show me a cow sapper, or cotton striper who can say the same. We gave
our blood at the front and gave our money at the USDA crop support
office.

   The future of the beekeeper in the fast approaching next century may
well be in the information age society. The beekeepers who can produce
the most interesting books on how it was to be the last beekeepers may
do OK, as even trashy books sell for more then beehives now.

                                ttul Andy-

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From: [email-masked] (Adam Finkelstein)
Date: 17 Jan 1995 22:01:31 GMT

>do OK, as even trashy books sell for more then beehives now.

 Nice!

 Adam

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____________________________________________________________________________ 
Adam Finkelstein                     Price Hall 
Entomology                   VA Tech, Blacksburg, VA  24001-0325 
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