After reading Lavon Fellenz's letter in your opinion column, I was moved to write about the plight of our global honeybees.

One major issue for bees is indeed lack of natural food, the disappearance of dandelions etc, destroyed by well-meaning homeowners who do not realize they are an essential part of our natural food system. But even more important to the health of our honeybees is the choices made by most beekeepers.

Many beekeepers, even organic ones, remove all honey, pollen and royal jelly, refilling their hives with glucose or corn syrup to feed their bees. With the very basics of human nutrition, most people now understand how unhealthy refined glucose is for the body; yet our top global scientists are still scratching their heads as to what might possibly be killing off our honeybees.

Glucose depresses the immune system, making us vulnerable to many diseases. It also contains no essential nutrients; vitamins and minerals are essential to fuel any organism. Likely this lack of nutrition and over abundance of simple sugar has a similar reaction in bees as it does in humans. We become depressed, lack energy and succumb to disease.

Couple this with an industrial food growing system which sprays nearly every bee flower with pesticide poisons and it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out what is killing our honey bees.

Ian Farber, from Westsyde in Kamloops, is one local beekeeper who does NOT feed glucose to his colonies. He is our source for healthy local honey and beeswax products.

Hopefully sharing this information will encourage more beekeepers to feed their bees their own healthy natural foods without supplementing glucose and will encourage more honey buyers to question the health of their bees' environment.

Bees work so hard for humans, pollinating almost every food crop we use; without them we cannot prosper. Maybe it is time to consider their needs on this shared earth as well as our own. 

ALEXANDRA PROCTOR

Kamloops