Fashionable Fears Ignore the Facts

There is significant concern amongst US farmers about the die-off of large colonies of commercial honey bees and the potential impact this could have on pollination of fruit, nut and vegetable crops which rely on these bees.

It has been called a looming agricultural crisis and the syndrome named colony collapse disorder or CCD.

The US Department of Agriculture does not know what is causing the collapse of the bee colonies but this has not stopped various scientists and pseudo-scientists blaming everything we fear.

So we now have mobile phone towers, agricultural pesticides, genetically modified (GM) food crops and of course climate change all being implicated.

No doubt if the collapse of bee colonies was occurring in Australia, drought and salinity would be added to this list of possible causes, but in New South Wales honey bees are abundant and widely distributed.

However, I am waiting for the next activist keen to maintain the current moratorium on the growing of GM canola in NSW to conclude the reason bee colonies are collapsing in the US and not here is because of the presence of GM food crops only in the US.  After all, we also have mobile phone towers, agricultural pesticides and climate change in NSW.

Of course such a conclusion would be ridiculous.

But across the world it is increasingly fashionable to blame, for example, a change in the rainfall pattern or a change in the abundance of honey bees, on the latest issue -- the latest and most fashionable fear -- without considering history.

A review of the status of the North American honey bee published last year reported that it was not unusual for there to be concern about the status of honey bee colonies in the US.

In the 19th century it was reported that bees were not returning to their hives because of a lack of moral fibre!

Natural systems are complex and the distribution and abundance of organisms, both native and introduced, has always changed.

It is important we remember history and perhaps try better to distinguish between what we can and can't influence or control -- between a current phase and a real potential crisis.

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