Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 17, 1993 TAG: 9303170397
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
WHY A STINGING ATTACK ON BEES?
I AM PUZZLED by the vitriolic nature of your attack (Feb. 26 editorial, "Swarming around the honey pots") on the $12 million subsidy requested by the bee-keeping lobby.Surely, the amount of money involved cannot be the source of your anger! After all, the subsidies paid to the wheat, corn and dairy farmers, just to pick a few of the more prominent ones, are in the billions, not the low millions.
Your editorial correctly recognizes that honey bees add $9.7 billion in value to 40 major commercial crops, because of the pollination service they perform as part of their honey gathering activity.
As far as I know, no other crop, subsidized or not, provides an uncompensated service of this type. Instead, many have hidden costs associated with them such as fertilizer run-off or degradation of soil quality. Granted that the value of this service can only be a rough approximation, why did you treat it as if it had no meaning?
Bee-keepers, with the invaluable assistance of their bees, create valuable products that would otherwise be completely wasted and with no damage whatsoever to the environment. Yet, as an industry, bee-keeping is in serious trouble because, as your editorial states, the invasion of two forms of mites are devastating the bee population.
Since these mites are more destructive to the feral bee population than to the bees maintained by bee-keepers, the feral bees available to pollinate such local crops as fruits, cucumbers and squash are disappearing. People who grow those crops are becoming increasingly dependant on bee-keepers to get adequate pollination of their fruits and vegetables.
This country needs more bee-keepers, not fewer, and if a $12 million subsidy helps to accomplish this, it is a very small price to pay for a very large benefit.
Perhaps I wouldn't object so strenuously to your thoroughly biased editorial if I thought it was just one of a series that you were planning to write. I'm sure you could be even more self-righteous if you were to write a companion editorial on the tobacco industry, but I won't hold my breath waiting for you to find the courage. SYDNEY B. SELF JR. BEDFORD