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One story making the rounds lately is of German 'refugee bees' fleeing
the countryside for a safe haven in the city. Is this 'public theater'
activism, hysteria, a sound bee-keeping practice, or a regulatory
nightmare?
Inter-Press Service reports <
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43557> that German bees are "fleeing insecticides and genetically modified crops to take refuge in
cities". That's not quite accurate. Actually, six German bee-keepers
moved their 30,000 bees into Munich, claiming a need to save the insects
from pesticides and GM crops.
This is not an isolated incident. Relocation of bees is taking place all
over Germany.
Peter Rozenkranz, entomologist at the University of Stuttgart, told IPS
that "practically all pesticides and insecticides are deadly for bees",
which makes it a good idea to move them away from the countryside.
Rozenkranz also spoke of monocultures 'depriving bees of their natural
habitat'. "After some good weeks in spring, bees are threatened by
famine, because later in the year, there are almost no more blooming
flowers."
So, moving the bees to town might be a sensible precaution, or it might
be simple necessity. Or it might be part of standard practice in
beekeeping: moving hives to where the flowers are.
"Today, it is easier for bees to live in the cities, because the
recreational green areas and courtyards have exuberant, varied
vegetation, which blossoms over several months, from early in the spring
to the end of the summer," Rosenkranz said. "In the cities, bees have
only a couple of hundred metres to fly, from a public garden to a
balcony to a courtyard to find luscious flowers, and mostly free of
insecticides".
Amid all this, do GM crops play a role in this flight of the bees?
Perhaps.
One of the beekeepers who moved is hives to town is Karl Heinz Bablok.
Earlier this year, he and several of his colleagues filed a lawsuit in
Augsburg, 60 km northwest of Munich, alleging that GM crops were
endangering their business. The court ruled in May that because the
crops were legal, it was the beekeepers' responsibility to move their
beehives somewhere else.
This may not be simply the result of beekeeper animus against GM crops.
Bablok says that the problem is regulatory. His explanation is that in
Germany, GM crops are legal, but their harvests are forbidden for human
consumption. "If our bees were to come in touch with the genetically
modified maize, and the honey was contaminated with it, we would not be
allowed to sell it", he says.
"I could get up to three years in prison," Bablok told a journalist from
news agency DDP, in an account carried by English-language TheLocal <
http://www.thelocal.de/12503/20080615/> . He said that was the penalty
for people found selling honey for human consumption with more than four
percent GM content. This is said to be part of the court's ruling
http://www.moraybeekeepers.co.uk
/N&Views/German_BK.htm , which told
Bablok to move his bees, but GMObelus has been unable to confirm this.
Manfred Hederer, president of the German Professional Beekeeper
Association, explained that shops will not take honey that does not come
with a signed paper to say it is under four percent GM.
There might be some legal sleight-of-hand involved this explanation. It
may well be that the four-percent tolerance limit is imposed by
shop-keepers, and that the penalty would be for falsely labeling a
product 'non-GM'.
If that's the case, the German situation may resemble that of Australian
beekeeper Graham Connell
<
http://www.macedonrangesleader.com.au/article/2008/07/07/38558_mrv_news.html> . He says GM crops could bankrupt his business because honey
sellers are asking beekeepers to sign declarations that their honey is
GM-free. Since there is no official registry in Australia of farms
planting GM crops, he says, he has no way of knowing if the bees have
feasted on GM canola.
So, should this article be filed under 'Business', or 'Legal', or
'Sci/Tech', or 'NGO Watch'?
