That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.
March 2, 2015 7:51 AM Subscribe
The Flow Hive, the 4 million dollar Indiegogo campaign is a brand new way of keeping bees. But did we need a brand new way? And if we did, is this the right one? Erik Knutzen, co-author with his wife Kelly Coyne of the Urban Homestead and Making It calls the Flow Hive, “A solution in search of a problem.” Bees are in trouble, but the FlowHive only solves problems for the beekeeper, not the bees.
Meanwhile the entire Midwest has become a “corn desert” without weeds or other diverse crops for bees to feed on due to glyphospate-resistant (aka, Roundup Ready crops and since bees don’t pollinate corn, they are not thriving in this environment. We are creating monoculture after monoculture in which bees find it difficult to thrive.
In California’s Central Valley, 1.7 million hives are trucked in every February to pollinate the almond groves. They arrive with the bloom still days away and there’s nothing for the bees to eat. The orchard floors have been flattened with giant rolling pins and mowed so that harvest machines can later scoop up the nuts after claw machines shake them from the branches.
Almond orchards cover almost a million acres in the Valley, which now produce four-fifths of all the almonds in the world. At the Beekeeping Federation conference last winter in Baton Rouge, Pettis (PDF) explained that even pollinating a crop like almonds, which provide abundant and nutritious pollen, is “like living on nothing but broccoli”—in other words, not a balanced diet.
The ecologist Ruth DeFries calls the last half-century of agricultural industrialization “the Big Ratchet.” It is the latest and most extreme example of a cycle of technological innovation that has allowed humanity to thrive in the face of constant ecological crises. For thousands of years people have been coming up with new ways to wring more food from nature, then running up against some ecological barrier—often a side effect of the original innovation—and engineering a way around it. Humans invented agriculture, which depleted the soil, which they replenished with animal and human manure, which allowed towns to grow, which caused septic disease, so sewers were invented, which diverted night soil from the fields, so fertilizer was invented, which made monocultures possible, which allowed pests to run rampant, so insecticides were invented; and so it went, accelerating exponentially as the population grew from a billion-and-a-half people to seven billion in the last century, more and more of them living in cities, where they’re fed by fewer people harnessing technology to manage ever larger crops. DeFries calls each innovation a ratchet, and the inevitable obstacle a hatchet. Technology ratchets up the population. Then the hatchet falls, and a new ratchet must be invented.
Meanwhile the entire Midwest has become a “corn desert” without weeds or other diverse crops for bees to feed on due to glyphospate-resistant (aka, Roundup Ready crops and since bees don’t pollinate corn, they are not thriving in this environment. We are creating monoculture after monoculture in which bees find it difficult to thrive.
In California’s Central Valley, 1.7 million hives are trucked in every February to pollinate the almond groves. They arrive with the bloom still days away and there’s nothing for the bees to eat. The orchard floors have been flattened with giant rolling pins and mowed so that harvest machines can later scoop up the nuts after claw machines shake them from the branches.
Almond orchards cover almost a million acres in the Valley, which now produce four-fifths of all the almonds in the world. At the Beekeeping Federation conference last winter in Baton Rouge, Pettis (PDF) explained that even pollinating a crop like almonds, which provide abundant and nutritious pollen, is “like living on nothing but broccoli”—in other words, not a balanced diet.
The ecologist Ruth DeFries calls the last half-century of agricultural industrialization “the Big Ratchet.” It is the latest and most extreme example of a cycle of technological innovation that has allowed humanity to thrive in the face of constant ecological crises. For thousands of years people have been coming up with new ways to wring more food from nature, then running up against some ecological barrier—often a side effect of the original innovation—and engineering a way around it. Humans invented agriculture, which depleted the soil, which they replenished with animal and human manure, which allowed towns to grow, which caused septic disease, so sewers were invented, which diverted night soil from the fields, so fertilizer was invented, which made monocultures possible, which allowed pests to run rampant, so insecticides were invented; and so it went, accelerating exponentially as the population grew from a billion-and-a-half people to seven billion in the last century, more and more of them living in cities, where they’re fed by fewer people harnessing technology to manage ever larger crops. DeFries calls each innovation a ratchet, and the inevitable obstacle a hatchet. Technology ratchets up the population. Then the hatchet falls, and a new ratchet must be invented.
This post was deleted for the following reason: Heya, we need to not have ongoing fundraising projects on the front page; totally fine to revisit this a month down the line once that indiegogo campaign is over, though. -- cortex
I miss the sound of the bees from my neighbor's hives in my weedy, overgrown field. She moved the hives and now I find myself over planting mowed areas with milkweed and clover and other pasture mixes trying to entice them back.
posted by annathea at 8:01 AM on March 2, 2015
posted by annathea at 8:01 AM on March 2, 2015
« Older It's Not Crazy, It's Sports | This story is about the guards. Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by Buttons Bellbottom at 7:58 AM on March 2, 2015