Police know that when a mysterious death of a married woman or man occurs, look at the spouse first. That apparently applies to beekeepers too.
A lot has been made of colony collapse disorder and despite science studies showing it can't be the modern neonicotinoids that were invented to replace pesticides the last time they were blamed for bee deaths, activist groups have made a lot of money and gotten a lot of press promoting that bees are dying due to chemical corporations.
'The ends justify the means' is a common refrain for eco-terrorists and political manipulators. Sometimes people are both. Or just clueless, like in the case of Dena Rash Guzman, who lives on something called a sustainable farm. I don't even know what that is, because I am not from Oregon. I grew up on a "sustainable" farm, it was an actual sustenance farm and it was not 60 acres, nor was it glamorous. It was called being poor. Beekeeping, like equestrian riding, was something rich people did.
Bob The Beekeeper recounts the idyllic tale of woe - how wholesome farmers living in touch with nature were ruined by pesticides, how activists and sympathetic newspaper journalists talked of "mounting scientific evidence" and "entire hives decimated" narratives except...
...it turns out this rookie beekeeper trying to be in harmony with nature was just clueless about how to raise bees. They starved to death. A new hive has to be manually fed for the first month. Who doesn't know that? Organic farmers, it seems.
The new bee hives got nothing, zilch. And so they died.
“That is beekeeper error, that’s what it is, 100 percent,” concluded an investigator. They just automatically blamed pesticides because...Oregon.
So the next time you see a whole lot of dead bees, look for evidence of Whole Foods purchases rather than evidence of pesticides.
Read more: Whodunit: Unwitting Oregon Bee Killer Turns Self In by Bob The-Beekeeper
