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#Beeghazi!: The conservative war on Obama, science, common sense, and bees

TBogg
June 23, 2014

On Friday the White House announced the formation of a task force charged with addressing the issue of rapidly diminishing colonies of honey bees and other pollinators.

President Barack Obama ordered the Environmental Protection Agency and United States Department of Agriculture to lead an effort to determine why honey bees, monarch butterflies and other pollinators are dying off, and then recommend ways to boost their conservation.

In announcing this initiative the White House released data explaining why this is an important thing to do:

  • The number of managed honey bee colonies in the United States has declined steadily over the past 60 years, from 6 million colonies (beehives) in 1947 to 4 million in 1970, 3 million in 1990, and just 2.5 million today. Given the heavy dependence of certain crops on commercial pollination, reduced honey bee populations pose a real threat to domestic agriculture.
  • Some crops, such as almonds, are almost exclusively pollinated by honey bees, and many crops rely on honey bees for more than 90% of their pollination. California’s almond industry alone requires the pollination services of approximately 1.4 million beehives annually—60% of all U.S. beehives—yielding 80% of the worldwide almond production worth 4.8 billion dollars each year.
  • Since 2006, commercial beekeepers in the United States have seen honey bee colony loss rates increase to an average of 30% each winter, compared to historical loss rates of 10 to 15%. In 2013–14, the overwintering loss rate was 23.2%, down from 30.5% the previous year but still greater than historical averages and the self-reported acceptable winter mortality rate.

If you're a libertarian, and you only care about money, there is also this:

  • Insect pollination is integral to food security in the United States. Honey bees enable the production of at least 90 commercially grown crops in North America. Globally, 87 of the leading 115 food crops evaluated are dependent on animal pollinators, contributing 35% of global food production.

So this is pretty serious stuff and nobody could possibly dispute the need to stem the loss of bee colonies and other pollinators, thereby helping to  ensure future food supplies not only in the U.S., but around the world, right?

Wrong. Guess again.

The good folks at Twitchy, which is a site run by people who move their lips when they read and is dedicated to taking 140-character tweets and dumbing them down even further for their meth-distracted readers, thinks the idea of saving bees and, therefore, the future of food, is the height of high-larity. Beez! OMG! LOL! Bee-rack O-bee-mer! Har har de-har.

‘Can’t make this up!’ Obama admin’s laser-like focus on this is beyond parody

Posted at 11:26 am on June 22, 2014 by Twitchy Staff

Okay, I'll bite. Give it your best shot, Twitchers:

As every good conservative knows, bees are only good for honey, and honey is for limp-wristed liberals to put in their herbal organic jasmine-kale tea. Real men use fistfuls of sugar to put in the only they like that is black: their coffee. Or they cut out the middle man and mainline high-fructose corn syrup directly to their flabby hearts. Asked where sugar or high-fructose corn syrup comes from they will tell you, "The store and in Mr. Pibb, duh."

This is where we stand where their reflexive hatred of Barack Obama causes them to sink to bathyspheric depths in their own swamp of stupidity and curse the man who keeps their food pyramid of Slim-Jims, Moonpies, and RC Cola cheap and plentiful....just like guns.

The bees maybe endangered but we will never ever face a shortage of racist idiots who would rather see their kids starve because bees, they're just bugs, what about Benghazi, hunh?

That's a real problem...

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