Joe...
I think survival of bees should be all our responsibility....
LOL! I love it....the nanny state extends to bees.
I guess that's the difference in a nutshell, then, isn't it?
I think that, first and foremost, the survival of each bee ought to be that individual bee's responsibility.
Tell me...does the nanny state's obligation to support bees extend to enemy combatant bees? Should we be closing all beehives immediately by executive order and releasing enemy combatant bees because their habeeous corpus rights have been violated?
Boy this is going to sound silly, but here goes...
About $15 billion worth of crops each year are pollinated by bees in the US. Beehives are leased to fruit growers in the south and California each year to carry out this task.
This task is becoming more important since the feral bee population is decreasing due to urbanization, pollution, pesticide use, etc. All relatively new phenomenon that arrived with us humans.
I guess what I'm saying is that the bee funding makes some sense to me as there is a bigger (15 billion) picture here. Or is agriculture, like manufacturing, not important anymore either?