Reply from a beekeeper friend of mine in Atlanta, in response to the above. He's been keeping bees for about 5 years as a hobby.

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So, IMO this is about half true and a lot of it is conjecture or outright tin-foil-hatism….

What he/she says about the screwing around in the hive is at least partly true. But most experienced beekeepers don't go in the hives more than they need to (I've been in mine [I lost one over the winter] twice since like October). This is typically a new-beekeeper phenomenon (and more new beekeepers are not the problem).

The Langstroth hive does allow for more easily managed beekeeping. Top bar hives are en vogue among the hippie beekeeping crowd - they are more common in third world beekeeping. There are even some advantages to them (they are much easier to build, e.g.). Without the Langstroth, there would probably be very very few backyard beekeepers.

Copious fucking with the bees is definitely part of the problem. The largest issue, which the author points out, is all of the bee migration: going out to pollinate almonds in CA, and then blueberries in MI, etc. This is, as they point out, a MUCH bigger business than honey. Honey is a by-product of pollination business. This is only news to non-beekeepers.

Most of the pesticide issues with bees is from bee contact with things NOT used directly by the beekeeper. Bees are extremely sensitive to pesticides. If you are carrying bees all over the place, especially to farmland, you have a higher chance of them interacting with pesticides. But I have a similar risk if one of my neighbors within, say, a mile, decides to pesticide up a plant that is flowering and my bees happen to be using it for food.

Yes, the chemicals used on bees are much like the chemicals used in, say, poultry or beef production. Preventative and abused by overuse. FWIW, I have all the chemicals, but have never treated mine. Treating when it's appropriate is better than letting the bees get sick or overrun by parasites. There is something called IPM (Integrated Pest Management) advocating this kind of appropriate treatment when necessary, along with other non-chemical preventative management. Beekeeper certifications are based on these methods.

There are guidelines to when chemical treatments can occur to keep it out of the honey flow. I'm pretty sure no matter how poorly these treatments are done, any "poisoned" honey is much healthier than any produce you'd get that's ever had pesticides applied to it (or, say, spraying yourself with DEET). Remember bees are _extremely_ sensitive to toxins.

Varroa are the biggest bee pest since they came to the US in the 80s. Again this would only be news to non-beekeepers. They are here to stay and we're now in the business of managing them…there's no getting rid of them entirely and the statement about how humans are spreading them around is a bit disingenuous -- bees are spreading them around just as well. This is the same story as throughout the biological world where an invasive species is introduced via this new thing we call "global travel".

Cell size might be a contributing factor to some things (like mite populations), so I'll let the author have that one.

The hive I lost this winter was FULL of honey (> 10gal). The bees still froze/starved. They were just too weak eventually to maintain temperature and to get to the honey they did have. Bees, given the proper conditions will produce WAY WAY more honey than they need and in fact, leaving it all on there increases the size of the hive they have to maintain, and can weaken their ability to fight off cold, disease, and intruders. Sometimes nature gets the best of the bees. The long warm fall/winter we had left the bees in a more active mode for longer with less incoming food and then the erratic winter didn't help.

I do feed my bees syrup or pollen patties or a combination of the two maybe twice a year. Usually this is just pre-winter to keep them from eating into the valuable honey right next to the hive body before winter or to give them an easier/quick source of food coming out of winter. This is only a supplemental source of food, the bees are almost entirely eating pollen and honey.

The bit about store honey is fairly accurate. I would hesitate to buy honey from a store if I had a better source. I'm not sure about the whole "benefit" thing -- I tend to believe that honey is mostly a simple sugar that isn't all that good for us and I don't buy into the whole eating honey with pollen will stave off allergies claim. I eat it because I like how it tastes, not because it's a health food. So some of that is also granola/hippie handwringing IMO.

BUT HERE'S WHERE THE BIGGEST BS COMES IN: The author's pontification on the cause of CCD. Even if you know nothing about bees, just reading that paragraph sounds like conspiracy paranoia. There are a lot of stressors on bees: parasites, disease, pesticides, commercial migration, etc. CCD, however, is a very specific condition: In simplest terms, the colony just disappears entirely. The latest findings I read about were pointing to a combination of a fungal infection common in bees called Nosema with a secondary cause, perhaps a bacterial infection like Foulbrood or a viral one like Deformed Wing virus. But the truth is we don't know. It's not a conspiracy of government and big business. Newsflash: Also, the moon landing wasn't faked.

My $0.02. Or well this is long enough to be more like $0.10.