Thanks Moots... Loosing 500 hives had to hurt... like, on your knees throwing up hurt.....
Part of my confusion stems from having talked with a couple of beekeepers in Maine while I was there.. They had a really wet year, but the bees seemed to do well considering. I know from when i lived there it is a good environment for bees... Then, when I learned how much they PAY to have their fields pollinated, I was dang near floored... The wild blueberry fields dont encompass several hundreds of acres like an orange grove.. Almonds etc... The fields are in patches spread about, One field may be 40 acres, one field may be 130 acres, so the bees will have other options, unlike those big plantations...
For the money they pay, they could LEARN to be beekeepers.. the loss of pollination in the first couple of years would hardly be as much as they paid for the traveling hive circus. I would like to say that I didnt harbor any grudge to those fellas making a living that way... but when they left, if they had damaged hives etc, they just left them... I kicked through the remains, and actually assembled four complete hives WITH bees at one of the sites.. much to the amazement of said friends... who remained back at the truck, with the windows rolled up..... I found half a dozen Empty, all plastic frames per hive.. the cheap ones, with not a spec of comb built on them... which tells me those hives werent anywhere near full strength, much less properly built up to be charging that kind of money... I didnt say anything, because I know too little about how it all works, but I just got this kind of gut feeling that they werent getting what they paid for..... Plus.. It galls me to see bees treated that way.