Let's also not forget that queen bees are products of artificially inseminated queen bee breeders. Because of the amount of food our expanding population needs, we are using other living beings as objects for our survival while forgetting that animals and plants are not originally designed by man but by evolutionary forces.

So what we have now is really bad and incomplete and haphazard design..be it gmo food or artificially inseminated cows/sheep/bees/pets or 'sustainable hi density cities' or even our pharmaceutical and medical interventions which we have come up with as solutions for food, living and health respectively. They have regurgitated unforeseen problems and consequences for which we are scrambling for solutions because what we have done is REDESIGN of natural systems without understanding the original design of the initial templates perfected by evolution.

We see quantity and celebrate it as a success. Monocropping thousands of acres of almonds in a desert = success!

Artificially inseminated trucked in non native bees to pollinate above mentioned over planted almond orchards that bloom for a few weeks in a desert during a drought = we are geniuses!

But bee populations are dying because of colony collapse disorder = BUT..BUT...WE DONT KNOW WHY!!! (Doh!)

The way we have been running this planet gets a failing grade.

Back to queen bees artificial insemination..you have to know that in nature, around spring, the queen bee will split the colony and send out a swarm with her daughter queen to form another colony. The new queen and her colony are groggy from over eating ..and they are bound to her pheromones because where the queen goes, her colony will follow.

However, more queen bees are bred and purchased these days. Queen bees that are sold are themselves not artificially inseminated always but are almost always products of artificially inseminated queen bees.

Why is this relevant? In nature, a queen bee gets out one fine day and goes on a mating flight..she mates with 10-15 drone bees in mid air and after mating, all the drones die. It's beautiful..there is a poem somewhere there..and less gory than the praying mantis mating ritual. The semen from the various suicidal drones are combined and when the Queen returns to her hive, she starts making her family and she never leaves the hive again because from that moment on, her only job is to make more bees and the rest of the hive works for her.

In a lab, a queen bee is engulfed in CO2 and while unconscious, a mixture of semen collected from various drones and introduced into the unconscious queen bee.

The head and thorax of the drone bee is crushed which causes the abs to contract...its endophallus is now partially turned inside out. Then the bee is completely crushed to collect the semen from it's now over turned endophallus. Different semen is mixed and the queen bee is artificially inseminated.

In the agony and ecstasy of the suicidal drone bee, after ejaculation, his endophallus is ripped from his body and with organs damaged, he falls down. But mission accomplished because the only purpose of the drone bee is to mate with the queen.

When on a beautiful crisp fall day, they leave the hive, the queen bee seeks the strongest and the best drones..10-15..so that her brood can have the best evolutionary advantage.

Rather different from being raped in a lab with semen from dead and captive drone bees. Herein the bad design..

we have gmo crops, chemicals to spray on the gmo crops to keep them healthy, confused bees, gmo crop that farmers can't save seeds from..further confused bees cause the function of pollen is pollination..but most gmo are self pollinating anyways..can't save seeds..don't need pollination. Herbicides to kill weeds and weeds become resistant..but they also kill forage plants and bees themselves ..leading to CCD and hey! Now we have to artificially inseminate bees because we have to save the bees!! Save.The.Bees!!!! That rallying cry! What a tangled web we weave..

Regardless of whether gmo is 'safe or not' ..gmo disrupts natural systems and eventually, natural systems will disappear and we would have to replace it all with human design. And there is plenty of research going on..

the word research literally means that we are 'searching' for something again, yea? It is a quest for what is hidden or unknown. It does not mean that we are experts.

First step is to acknowledge that natural systems are perfected by evolution and it's stability is suspect unless evolution redesigns them again. There are too many moving and inter connected parts for us to take over and imagine that improvements will result in a stable system.