Hi tejek; Re: "Uh............hay and cotton are not human food crops so why are you including them in your price figures?"
The ag department included them in their figures, I didn't. I pointed them out because any idiot knows that some types of hay and cotton are pollinated by bees, LOL. None of the other crops mentioned are pollinated by bees.
Re: "You need to take up your opinion with the Dept of Agriculture......they differ with your conclusion:"
Your post claims that "squash, avocado, blueberry, cranberry, strawberry, cantaloupe and melons" need honeybees for pollination. Therefore, in the absence of honeybees, none of these could be grown. But each of these are native to the Americas. Honeybees are not. So how do you think that the Native Americans grew squash before Europeans brought them the honeybee? Quite a trick wasn't it.
There's no way in hell that 1/3 of our food needs honeybees for pollination. At best you could say that 1/3 of our food is sometimes pollinated by honeybees, but I doubt even this is true. Certainly the people promulgating this factoid don't know crap about pollination.
Let this be a lesson to you. Just because someone quote an "authoritative" source it doesn't mean that it's a fact. Humans are full of crap.
-- Carl
P.S. I look down at the link at the bottom of your post and it's not the Dept of Agriculture. Instead, it's NBC news, LOL. I'm not a liberal so I don't get confused between the mainstream media and the government. NBC is not in the business of providing you with useful information. They're in the entertainment business. Fear is a good form of entertainment so that's how they push their news. They do the same thing with global warming, Y2K, etc. The Dept of Agriculture is in the business of providing you with useful information but they're actually a part of the government and get things wrong all the time.
The honeybee story has been going on for years now. The one crop that is most sensitive to honeybee die-off is almonds as they are the crop that needs the most pollination at the early part of the season. But if you look at the price of almonds you will discover that there is no sudden price rise and almond production keeps increasing. Therefore there is no problem with pollination, at least so far.
Crops that need pollination later in the season do not have a problem with honeybee die-off because honeybees are insects. They breed like crazy. So a few months into the season there's plenty of honeybees.
As of 2013, there is not a single US crop where production is limited by the availability of pollination.
So far in modern US history, no crop has ever been limited due to the unavailability of honeybees.
There is no crop where production is entirely dependent on honeybee pollination. Not one.
The honeybee scare is a non problem.
Any fool can drive through agricultural America and see for themselves that honeybees are not needed for the vast majority (far greater than 70%) of the food we grow.
If you doubt this, do the calculation. Look up how many hives are needed to pollinate an acre. Look up how many acres of food is grown in the US. Look up how many hives are in the US. Do some long division. The people who are telling you that 1/3 of our food needs honeybees are idiots. |
