I attended a positive town hall meeting after Seedy Saturday, Feb. 2, in which NDP candidate Barry Avis and NDP agriculture critic Lana Popham discussed viable initiatives to promote sustainable, local agriculture in B.C.
However, we didn’t have time to address something we were all concerned about: bees.
I am a blueberry farmer, currently learning to keep bees, and totally dependent on bees. But bees around the world are disappearing and dying.
Bee Colony Collapse Disorder is a serious threat globally. These small creatures have been our helpers since humanity’s beginning.
Our lives depend on them. Albert Einstein has been quoted as saying humanity could survive for four years if the bees disappear.
If we want to save the bees, and save ourselves, we must expand our conversation beyond agriculture, for bees are the victims of economics, commerce, development, communications, politics and personal lifestyle choices.
What is happening to the bees?
Our native bees need the wild places and diverse native wildflowers to thrive.
To ask bees to survive on a monoculture is like asking children to only eat one month a year.
Bees use their own internal radar to find their way to pollen and home again. But electromagnetic radiation from sources like smart meters, the smart grid and cell phone towers confuses them, and bees don’t find their way home.
Genetically Modified crops? Bee bodies — just like our own — were not designed over millennium to deal with strange genes and proteins entering their systems. Colony Collapse Disorder research shows bees suffer from severe digestive problems (and death) resulting from ingesting terminator GMO pollen.
Currently, Bayer has produced a pesticide using neonicotinoids shown to kill bees.
The European Parliament is calling for an outright ban, yet Bayer continues with its plans to produce this deadly pesticide.
Has humanity gone crazy? GMOs, global smart grid, deadly pesticides…
Bees can’t survive in a sea of invisible electromagnetic radiation, or bathed in pesticides and herbicides, or after ingesting GMO crops.
The struggle of the bees is warning us, too. We can’t survive in that environment either.
There are no aliens among us. It is only humans making short-sighted choices. Those who work for corporations like Bayer, BC Hydro, or developers and planners, could wake up and change things from within.
Those with political power, above all, you are responsible not to investors, but to your constituents’ well-being, your children’s children — and the creator of bees.
There is no happiness — and no food — without bees.
Joanne Sales
Qualicum Beach