Shifting the Paradigm Toward More Natural Beekeeping

Reader Contribution by Christy Hemenway
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Remember when bees weren’t in the news? When they were just a normal part of daily life on the farm? There they were, lazily buzzing in and out of their hives, doing their bee thing … virtually ignored by beekeepers until time to rob the hives for honey …

What’s happened? What changed that we now have problems with acronyms like CCD, which stands for Colony Collapse Disorder, and documentaries about this mysterious bee disease that scientists can’t even study effectively because the primary symptom of the problem is that the bees just disappear?

Bees lived for millions of years with no help or intervention from beekeepers, and now beekeepers can barely keep their bees alive. What on earth have we done?

Think back over our short agricultural history for just a second … and yep, a second is about all the longer it takes to realize …
We’ve been on the fast track to “Bigger, Better, Faster, More” for awhile now. We’ve “improved” some things in agriculture to such an extent that the use of chemicals is now considered normal, even required. We’ve created an entire industrial food system that depends upon them.

And now, there’s some sort of problem with honeybees, everybody’s heard that — but nobody knows what it is, or why. Science is looking for the cause of course, but some folks might be tempted to say that the reason(s) is(are) obvious.

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