I've had this article sent to me by so many people lol. I have been harping for years about very accessible research done by local professionals that describe the honeybees gut biome, and why current nutritional supplements like pollen patties do not work and potentially even harm the bees more than having low natural pollen stores.
Just like us, they have a specific biome that can only process specific strains of healthy bacteria, macro and micronutrients. Just like us, anything they can't process gets flushed or sometimes stored. It's like eating empty calorie junk food. You have the calories for energy, but you get ill from malnutrition.
The majority of man made pollen substitutes, specifically the popular, accessible, main stream ones, do not bother to acknowledge these truths and provide the biologically correct and available strains of nutrients for bees in their products, so people are basically stuffing bees with empty calories and hoping they survive the winter/dearth, even if just barely and incredibly weak. It's no wonder bees are not surviving as long as they used to.
Yes, this is a multiple tiered problem; humans needs to completely overhaul their agricultural practices, pest control practices, environmental development practices, etc., to learn and utilize more natural and sustainable methods for each local ecosystem. But we also need to stop pretending like this info hasn't been out there for a while, and stuffing bees full of empty additives doesn't have a negative impact on them as a whole species, let alone as individual creatures. We're complicit in every step of the decline in environmental stability, pollinator survival, and climate change!!!
I hope every beekeeper on every level can learn to accept that the capitalist way of life is abusive and destructive and exists only to extract as much financial value out of every living being as possible regardless of the wellbeing or eventual outcome of said creatures, including bees and humans ourselves! It is unsustainable at every level to live as if extracting 'value' at any cost is normal and acceptable!! Stop just buying convenient prepackaged garbage in an attempt to temporarily smother the symptoms of a serious disease, and please learn practical, sustainable, supportive beekeeping!!!!!!!!!
Learning the basic biology of the bees has given me all the information I need to maintain natural beekeeping techniques that actually stewards my bees instead of dominating them. I am not a student or researcher at a university or lab. I'm just a normal person with access to the Internet. Please take the time and effort to actually give some care to yourselves and other living creatures! We NEED each other for survival!
I did not lose a single colony in my personal apiary with my sustainable, chemical and supplement free beekeeping techniques! I ensured all my colonies had more than adequate pollen stores going into fall and winter, so that if needed, I could supplement the bees with simple carbs if they ran out of honey stores to keep them fed and energized, but they never ran out of real pollen and all of its vital nutrients. Create an environment for your bees that actually supports them if you don't have one that still exists around you. That is the whole point! Rebuilding and renaturalizing your ecosystem with native plants for all seasons, stewarding the land and the creatures that help truly cultivate it in an effort to undo all the damage we've done!
snowghoul
kianamaiart
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
gracieabrams
