When I was younger, one of the things I noticed around my mother's flowerbeds were bees...sometimes many of them, but whenever her flowers were in bloom, there were usually a few bees - five or six, maybe ten - buzzing around from flower to flower.

Now, I see few, in fact, I am rather surprised if I see one during a week, buzzing around the rosebushes. And I'm not alone. People all over the world are noticing fewer and fewer bees buzzing around their blooms.

This is a very lengthy article, but I post it here because of two factors, which we'll get to in a moment:

Heart of the Matter

Now, if you've read all this, you'll get the picture that at the minimum, the Illinois Department of Agriculture may be at least incompetent, and if you haven't read the whole article, at the least the incompetence is evident in the following:

“CCD is a calamity that is affecting honeybee colonies across the nation. In fact, I had one queen, which had survived three summers of spraying and three winters. I was planning to raise daughters from that queen to see if she may have had some genetic resistance to Round-Up. But she and her hive were taken during the theft. I don’t even know where the bees and my equipment are. They ruined 15 years of my research. “When I asked when the best time was to inspect for foulbrood, the inspector said any time. I told her, ‘Lady you better not look in my hives when it’s 3 degrees! You do not disturb the bees at that time. That would be like inspecting for a child’s disease. Do you look for it when they are adults? She was looking for the brood when the brood was not there. She could not tell us that. The inspector did not understand that by the end of October my bees had quit brood rearing and were already getting into their winter cluster. They were moving slowly to conserve energy. She testified to the court that the bees were sick and lethargic, as if they were sick from foulbrood. She didn’t seem to know that foulbrood only affects the young bees, because there was no brood there. Adult honeybees are not affected by foulbrood.”

But beekeeper Ingram's suspicions lie elsewhere, and this, as the article avers, may be the actual heart of the matter. Ingram, an beekeeper with many decades' experience behind him, was also tracking, and apparently keeping detailed records of this:

"For the past 15 years, Ingram said he has been conducting research on the effects of Round-Up on honeybees. He feels he had accumulated the necessary data to document the fact that Round-Up was not only the cause of his bees dying, but also possibly the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)." “CCD is a calamity that is affecting honeybee colonies across the nation. In fact, I had one queen, which had survived three summers of spraying and three winters. I was planning to raise daughters from that queen to see if she may have had some genetic resistance to Round-Up. But she and her hive were taken during the theft. I don’t even know where the bees and my equipment are. They ruined 15 years of my research."

This prompted Ingram to ask the necessary and obvious questions:

“Is Illinois becoming a police state, where citizens do not have rights?” Ingram asked in desperation. “Knowing that Monsanto and the Dept. of Ag are in bed together, one has to wonder if Monsanto was behind the theft to ruin my research that may prove Round-Up was, and is, killing honeybees. Beekeepers across the state are being threatened that the same thing may be done to their hives and livelihood. I was not treated properly, I don’t want to see this happen to anyone else in this state, and I want this type of illegal action to end.” What is most disturbing to the Ingrams is that the State Department of Agriculture came in and inspected their hives when they were not home and without due process, took their bees and hives. At the time of the theft the Ingram’s had not yet had their day in court to prove that their hives did not have foulbrood. Ingram knew that the inspectors could not tell what they were seeing and had warned the Department that if any of them came back it would be considered a criminal trespass. Yet they came back when he was not home, stole his hives and ruined his 15 years of research. “What was the value of that 3-year-old queen?” Ingram asked. “It could have been that she would have a resistant trait that we could expand into the whole bee culture to help them survive this Round-Up thing. How can you place a dollar value on that potential?” Considering the fact that Ingram’s queens, bees, and hives were taken off his property on March 14, rather than being “abated,” as was the “requirement” stated in the notices from the IDofA, the dollar value of such a queen cannot be disregarded as a major motivation for such an act. Ingram said that during the hearing he asked “both the inspector and her boss to name one person in the state that is doing research on Round-Up and honeybees. They couldn’t name one. Of course, they didn’t know if I was doing it either . . . I sent him a copy of my results 2 years ago. Under oath, he can say no, he didn’t know about it. It burns me, it really burns me.”

There it is again folks: the bottom line, the "Heart of the Matter": resistance to a chemical, and a decade and a half of notes and research that might have made a connection between GMOs, and colony collapse disorder.

Not to worry though, because we'll soon have tiny little robot bee drones working for DARPA to replace them, and to spy on beekeepers doing research that may call into question the value and long-term impact of GMOs on the ecosystem...research, mind you, that could have, and should have been done, to begin with, but wasn't. The money that should have been spent doing it was spent on buying off "scientists" and politicians instead.

See you on the flip side.