6-25 IAT Hutch's Honey

 If I have done one story, I’ve done 100 on bees. Colony collapse disorder is killing our bees and it is becoming a huge headline.

 There is a statistic that says one of every three portions of food that we eat is a direct result of honeybee pollination. But they are undergoing a bee type of genocide. There are tons of theories: believe it or not they are being overworked, they are dying because of an amalgamate of pesticides, they are stressed for whatever reason, and a lot of people suspect that genetically modified crops might play a hand. Here is a huge irony. Guess who is getting into the fray? Bayer crop science and Monsanto. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch  “Missouri-based Monsanto Co., which two years ago bought an Israeli bee research company, hosts an industry conference on bee health at its headquarters in Creve Coeur this month. Bayer CropScience is building a 5,500-square-foot "bee health center" in North Carolina, and with fellow chemical giant, Syngenta, has developed a "comprehensive action plan" for bee health. John Hutchinson  is a close friend and has been raising bees in Boise for over 30 years: “It is a real issue for me but I have not had a problem in the past except for the last three or four years. Always in the past, and I have lived there for 25 years, it has only been in the last few years that it has been a struggle to retain my hives over the winter. This winter, it wasn’t even the winter. I took them in late September or early fall and they were gone. The winter wasn’t even a factor. It is scary.”