Re: [CH] "artificial" pollination with brush
Doug Irvine (dirvin@bc.sympatico.ca)
Sun, 30 Aug 1998 07:55:51 -0700
=Mark wrote:
>
> At 05:20 PM 8/28/98 +0000, Celeste or Dave Anderson wrote:
> >
> >
> >> I was just told about pollenation, by a friend, to glue a dead honey bee to
> >> a wooden stick and use the bee to hold the pollen. Makes sense to me,
> >> 'cause that's the way Nature does it, well, sort of.
> >>
> >> I am going to try this next spring.
>
> If you can find one. The wild honeybee population has been decimated by a
> mite infestation. I've not seen a honeybee in over 2 years, and I've been
> looking!
Just finished reading an article in the Globe & Mail, Canada's national
newspaper regarding these mites that are decimating, not only the wild
honey bee population, but also is creating havoc for the commercial
honey producers...there are two mites, one from Europe and one from
Asia...one gets into the digestive tract of the bee and the other feeds
on the hatching eggs, the pupa and kills them off...this is a very
serious problem that will affect the production of honey for as long as
it takes to control it, and unfortunately, not much is working well at
present. I have a bee keeper living in my building and he is gravely
concerned.Never mind the production of honey, we COULD live without
that, but could the human race live without all of the other things that
the bees polinate, including chile peppers? This is becoming a very
serious problem, which is only now being actively dealt with, and the
commercial bee keepers, who make as much money from placing their bees
for pollination in orchards, etc., as they do from the by-product are
perhaps partially to blame, for they transport their bees all over the
US with no controls to assess those bees with regard to disease or
parasites in their colonies...scary problem for a Sunday morning, and
sorta on topic...Cheers, Doug in BC