“We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,” Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. “We’re wanting them to function as a machine. . . . We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.”
From a Michael Pollan article in the NY Times Magazine. Sounds very similar to these criticisms of a mobile workforce.
is this in relation to bees v. global warming correlation?
The article is actually saying that commercial bees are heavily stressed due to modern industrial agricultural practices. Apparently they are shipped all over the country for different harvests and mingling with foreign bees, like from Australia, who have been shipped/stressed/unhealthy as well. Pollan is making a correlation (though not necessarily a causation) between bee die-offs and what could be considered perpetual bee jet-lag.
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