
'Like sending bees to war': the deadly truth behind your almond-milk obsession - vanusa
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/07/honeybees-deaths-almonds-hives-aoe
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jelliclesfarm
The writing is on the wall. It IS a war on bees. We are spraying them to
extinction. You WILL be gagged and tarred and feathered if you say anything
about Monsanto(now Bayer)..and Other companies as they are not the only ones.

Bees need diverse habitat. We are destroying habitat and growing food in open
air factories. They are not farms. They are factories.

Round and round we can go and talk about consumption, but the root cause of
over consumption, destruction of our natural resources and ecology and habitat
is the insatiable demand for cheap food. Key word being cheap. For 8 billion
mouths and growing. We have gone way beyond carrying capacity of the planet.

Most of the almonds goes Asia and China and rest of the world. How is even
remotely possible that our current population is sustainable for the planet?

Do all of us ABSOLUTELY need almond milk? It’s expensive to grow food and why
can’t we pay for food? Cheap food is not a right. The externalities will
eventually do us in...because there is no price or number on nature that we
have destroyed.

Forget about honey bees(they are not even native to California, btw. Most of
them are Italian bees)..there are hundreds of thousands of insects that have
gone extinct..or endangered. Bees are not the only pollinators.

If there are no pollinators and have given trucked in, what does it really
mean?

This..this below...I am not a generational farmer and I am not an almond
farmer but I consider myself a steward of the land and nature..that’s why I
came to farming. This is reality. There is nothing natural about farming
anymore. It’s cut throat.

[..] Beekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure,
diseases from parasites and habitat loss. However, environmentalists and
organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic:
America’s reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by
the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of
nature’s most delicate natural processes.

Honeybees thrive in a biodiverse landscape. But California’s almond industry
places them in a monoculture where growers expect the bees to be predictably
productive year after year.

Commercial honeybees are considered livestock by the US Department of
Agriculture because of the creature’s vital role in food production. But no
other class of livestock comes close to the scorched-earth circumstances that
commercial honeybees face. More bees die every year in the US than all other
fish and animals raised for slaughter combined.

“The high mortality rate creates a sad business model for beekeepers,” says
Nate Donley, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s
like sending the bees to war. Many don’t come back.”[..]

