Yesterdays post on bees and the EU has turned into a much appreciated debate with Sam. He has responded generously. My reply/comment was long … almost a post, so I am reposting it here for the sake of archival continuity. My main point is that the EU subsidies are not really supporting Romanian farmers but enslaving them financially and mentally (the latter being the more potent price). I believe that is true for farming subsidies in general. However subsidies within a community/country shift energies within it … the EU subsidies are, I believe by design, stealing energy away from Romania.
So great to have a quality debate 🙂
As for the “science of bees” I believe it would come with more authority if I cited my source rather then regurgitated what I’ve learned from it: http://biobees.com/articles.php.
I would specifically refer you to two articles:
The future of natural beekeeping: http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Future-of-Natural-Beekeeping&id=7287954
Sustaining the honeybee: http://ezinearticles.com/?Sustaining-the-Honeybee&id=1450967
The people you are buying honey from in the market are most probably small local producers – they are the typical industrial producer. These are too busy running their operations to sell in the market. They sell their produce in bulk to large aggregators.
As for what Romanian industrial beekeepers actually do in regard to the bees – they only do what lines their pockets with most honey/money (not what any association defines as proper … you of all people should know what a wild-west this country is when it comes to regulations). With the risk of generalizing … traditional beekeeping (like traditional agriculture) is ignorant and destructive. It is easy to confuse love of honey-money with love of bees. Given what I know about bees I have witnessed very little love … though I have heard it spoken. I don’t buy it. I’ve witnessed honey-frames with brood (just born bees) emerging (literally) being inserted into those honey extraction spinners (you can also see brood being disturbed/injured in the beautifully produced movie – as a frame is cut open in preparation for extraction) … is that what they mean by love of the bees?
An issue unique to Romania I would like to address further is those “few Euros from the EU”. I will use milk to make my point. Most Romanian small-medium producers sell most of their milk to a milk truck that makes rounds every morning – they get ~80 bani per liter + if they meet agreed quotas they are supposed to get bonuses (though from what we’ve heard the bonuses are being delayed big time). We buy our milk directly from them – fresh and warm – for 2 lei per liter. The milk truck container is preloaded with chlorine as a preservative … so already the milk is compromised … the first step in a long process of deterioration until the poor substitute for milk arrives in the supermarkets for 4 or 5 lei.
This system has become standard. Producers don’t need to worry about sales and marketing (especially tricky with milk that can spoil) and everything they produce gets “purchased”. As a result they no longer produce any other higher-value products. We have not yet been able to find (in our and in neighboring villages) a local producer that makes butter or cream (smantana). They don’t bother anymore. Their world has been marginalized by those few EU Euros … which provides them a bare minimum. They cannot better their lives with it … they can at best be sustained where they are. Ironically their only chance at progress is by quantitative growth = more cows. The results is over-crowded and dying pastures (over grazed, over compacted…) and terribly diminished soil fertility.
Those few Euros are how a fantastic and diverse ecosystem of small producers have been reigned in. If they were a few large producers organized as corporations then they could have been taken over by standard market dynamics. However in this marvelous Romanian ecology that was not the situation. So they came up with a creative solution which appears in the form of “a few Euros from the EU” – a majestic system of control.
With Cutia Taranului we are trying to show milk-producers that they can produce and sell (reliably and consistently) added value products like cheese, cream and butter and make much more money and have much more control over their lives. I cannot begin to describe to you the huge mental barriers that are locked in place thanks to those “few Euros from the EU”.
And I am convinced that similar patterns, destructive to both nature and people, are in play with the bees and the honey. Money is being used to put in place misdirected motivations.
With natural bee-keeping we (=Andreea and I) don’t need a honey-extractor of any kind, we use inexpensive home-made top-bar hives (instead of the expensive, complicated system of standard beekeeping), we don’t injure any bees (after we’ve made the difficult transition from standard hives to top-bar hives), we only take honey that is left after the bees have made it through winter, our bees have an opportunity to fight-off potential varroa infestations on their own without us getting in the way and we will expand our apiary as we continue to develop our land providing us and the bees with more sustenance.
But, I may be crazy and wrong about this 🙂