neonic's were first used widespread as seed soaks (2000), so that when the farmers planted the seeds, the birds didn't carry them off. such a use did not affect the bees. however, after a while they started using the neonic's as pesticide sprays (2003 and 2004). this expansion of use of neonic's correpsonds exactly with the beginning of bee colony collapse.

so i think its a real good guess that the neonic's are the culprit here. lets pray we move fast enough to save our bees and our own asses!

Just a little over 24 months ago, as I was preparing to relocate away from the greater Pittsburgh area, there was a local "news story" that told of a bee farm, roughly 20 miles north of downtown Pittsburgh, forced - via political/government channels, to either shut down their bee farm/operation, or move it else where. Where the farm had been located at that time was in an already partly rural area of Butler County, a county to the immediate north of Allegheny County, the latter being the seat of Pittsburgh. The greater Pittsburgh area is considered, roughly, a 4 to 5 counties that surround the city with a radius of about 10 to 20 (maybe 30 )miles. Just using these facts & figures to portray the collective demographics in play here. As is the case with these 4 to 5 surrounding counties, the further back in time one goes, like a decade, two or three, the closer one gets to the time when these counties were more rural and less "developed" from a commercial/political perspective.

The justification behind the local people and their politicians moving to force the hands of this particular bee farmer? In a word, fear. Fear that, even though the farm and it's bees had never before been warned, cited, accused, nor convicted of being the cause of any bee-related terror, they were nonetheless put under the political/governmente microscope and treated as though they were the veritable "predator" who just moved in to a neighborhood in Anywhere, USA, quietly and unannounced, to plot their evil deeds. It seems that enough locals - having started with a literal handfull of people living within a few miles of the bee farm, had been advertized enough, and hyped enough through various kinds of "news reports" (grape vine, conventional gossip/widsom, and MSM) to have become aware that this farm was raising bees - honey bees. It was only a short hop, skip and a jump for these few poeple to ignite this alleged "problem stemming from fear factor mentality" into the eventual hue & cry of the people moaning, whining and ultimately demanding their local leaders "do something". After all, in this day and age, how many people are not aware that bees can kill?. How many people are not aware that one only needs to "pay their fair share of taxes"(sic) and complain to a politician in order to get politicians on the track of legislating away whatever killing boogiemen it is we fear in our lives, bees, guns, herbs, truth, whatever? This was all that was required to set in motion the wheels of politics & justice that eventually brought the ultimatum of the local government's solution to this fabricated drama - for the greater good of the many (the supposed democratic "majority" IE> the relatively bigger mob in this instance), at the expense of the non-majority (any smaller mob), the bees must go!

The sincere question I have is, with respect to the present, greater and seemingly evolving/worsening bee problem, what rational reason is there for any genuinely concerned person to be realistically hopeful that "it" (name/cite your serious local/regional/national/global problem of choice, there are so many to choose from and literally more each and every damn day) will be "saved" or "corrected" any time soon? Plus or minus the big-agri insecticide influence/factor as being the cause behind this problem worsening on the local or larger scale (the bee problem appears to have already gone global) there seems to be ample proof that nothing - zero, zilch, nada, is happening on the socio/political front to give hope for those of us who may nonetheless be hoping against all odds that this kind of problem will be resolved in a genuinely appropriate fashion. Personally, I am the kind of person that believes hope & prayer are the kinds of actions people pursue when most other courses of action have already been shown to be, effectively, useless. More often than not, problems reaching a global scale started off down at the local or regional level, in the small neighborhoods where real people live, work and try to exist. This is where, after much concerted tending, attention and care given by those who's job it is to farm such political issues, they eventually grow into a subsequent generation's widescale and or global calamity for which there seems nothing or nobody left in the political/government process to genuinely attempt to correct, thus we are left with the proverbial hope and or a prayer.