Oh no! The honey bees are dying! Well, not so much

“The trouble all began in 2006 or so, when beekeepers first began noticing mysterious die-offs. It was soon christened ‘colony collapse disorder,’ and has been responsible for the loss of 20 to 40 percent of managed honeybee colonies each winter over the past decade.”

(What caused the sudden bee die off? The usual suspects, if you believe in the usual suspects – pesticides, global warming for starters. Not pesticides, said national pesticide organizations. Mites were offered for a time.

(Whatever the cause, honeybee deaths indicated we (humans) were doing bad things, and the White Buffalo was punishing us.

(And well it might, since, like smallpox, guns and whiskey, honey bees were brought to the Americas by white Europeans.)

“These bees probably came from England and arrived in Virginia in 1622. By 1639 colonies of honey bees were found throughout the woods in Massachusetts. Some of the colonists who arrived at Plymouth likely brought bees, as well as sheep, cows and chickens on the trip across the Atlantic.”

https://www.agriculture.purdue.edu/agcomm/newscolumns/archives/OSL/1999/November/111199OSL.html

Okay, so what caused the horrific colony collapse disorder beginning in 2006?

Well, “the number of honeybee colonies has actually risen since 2006, from 2.4 million to 2.7 million in 2014, according to data tracked by the USDA. The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies -- that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers -- is now the highest it's been in 20 years.”

(The sky did not fall, nor have polar bears all died from heat exhaustion.)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/23/call-off-the-bee-pocalypse-u-s-honeybee-colonies-hit-a-20-year-high/

Link at http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/


If U.S. agriculture cannot survive without honey bees to pollinate plants and such, what pollinated the farms of Eastern Indians before European bees arrived?