white man's fly...

bees threatened by species cleansing

I've maintained all along that most biological restorations are a scam...an unnecessary retooling of nature to fit a pre-conceived model...restorations ignore dispersal, the means by which species travel..by wind, by man, by whatever means...restoration companies spend big money removing all species they deem non-native..they do this by killing, poisoning, destroying...here's some more evidence that the efforts, some with taxpayer money, are causing more harm than good...and I just came across this piece of information about the Channel Island Restoration: they actually went after honey bees, too...it's called "bee hunting" and the Nature Conservancy (supporters of BP Oil) along with other entities, went about removing bee colonies, some hundreds of years old, because they were "introduced" from Europe...these feral bees they call the "white man's fly"..unbelievable..no wonder bees are disappearing with enemies like the Nature Con trying to kill them!!
excerpts from the web:
Margaret Palmer, a restoration ecologist at the University of Maryland, is worried about what might be missing from the literature, too—as well as what might be missing from Jones and Schmitz’s database hits. Studies without "resilience" or "recovery" may not have shown up. Palmer says reports of stream and river restoration in the past five years, for instance, have not documented much success in restoring either overall biodiversity or particular species. In her view, restoration of these ecosystems is failing because the techniques are not working and indeed "might be damaging." She recently published a review of 78 projects and found only eight showing evidence of positive recovery. (3) Palmer says she now leans toward taking a page from conservation: "The focus needs to be on preserving land and letting it go back to forest. Much more so than on restoration."
Angst is part and parcel of restoration science, despite its underlying hopefulness. Angst that restoration will justify destruction. Angst about what it means to "play God." Angst that no ecosystem can return to a self-sustaining, historically biodiverse state—or that those historical states will even be remembered.
Channel Islands
Several years ago we relied on earlier accounts of how one might find colonies by use of the "bee box" technique and embarked upon a formidable task (Wenner 1989). We agreed to help The Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service in their Northern Channel Islands conservation/restoration program by locating and removing all feral (wild) European honey bee colonies from Santa Cruz Island, off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. Preliminary results (unpublished) indicate that the European bees on the island visit primarily introduced European flora, while the more than a hundred species of solitary bees visit mostly native flora. We work under the assumption that removing the honey bees should help restore the island to a pre-European ecology...
of course, this is a false assumption..wasteful and criminal, these restorations and the people behind them must be stopped!!