By: Stephen Bishop
As an expert in cryptozoological species, like Bigfoot, I would like to take some time to discuss cryptocurrency, which is what cryptozoological species use to pay for everyday expenses of living, like when the Loch Ness Monster needs to pay for dry cleaning. Just kidding, I suspect Nessie wouldn’t conduct commerce with cryptocurrency; even a pea-brained dinosaur would have more sense than to use a currency that only gives you ten guesses at your password before it locks away your fortune permanently (really, millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin have been lost forever because people can’t remember their password.)
But people are gullible, especially smart people. Think about all the really smart people who thought Sam Bankman Fried was the second-coming of Warren Buffet, when really he was just the second-coming of Bernie Madoff.
And think about all the normally sensible folks who bought emus several decades ago. Emus, yes, emus were supposed to compete with cows as the other red meat. At one point during the emu craze, breeding emus cost $25,000 apiece. I’m not an expert in math, but if a bird costs $25,000, then the drumstick is going to be price-prohibitive at the grocery store. I guess that explains why a feral emu once roamed the woods in the upper end of my county; some say it escaped but most likely it was set loose when the emu market went bust. Apparently, Americans didn’t like paying $1,000 per pound for poultry, even if it was red meat.
Recently, over in India, some major breakthroughs in the art of swindling occurred when enterprising con men combined a Ponzi scheme with old-fashioned emu hype. Two men were sentenced to twenty years in jail for scamming aspiring emu farmers out of six million dollars. For a mere $500,000 they would give farmers twenty emu chicks for breeding purposes, in exchange for the promise of buying back future chicks at astronomical prices. Of course, the only way that scam works is by finding more gullible people to invest in chicks, meaning it’s a tried-and-true Ponzi scheme dressed up in emu feathers.
But this is my point: sometimes I wonder if beekeeping is a Ponzi scheme dressed up in a bee suit. If you think about the revolving door of new beekeepers who invest in bees and beekeeping each year, who fork over hundreds if not thousands of dollars, often because they want to do their part to “save the bees,” only to have their bees promptly and predictably die—it sure seems like a Ponzi scheme. Certainly, the varroa mite has helped sustain the scheme. When varroa kills a colony, the dead bees perpetuate the myth that bees “need saving” luring in a new round of philanthropic investors (a.k.a aspiring beekeepers) and causing some of the previous investors (a.k.a new beekeepers) who lost bees in their first year to double-down and reinvest.
I guess the one difference between a Ponzi scheme and beekeeping is that nobody is promising a rate or return, or really any return. In fact, these days I feel like most bee schools are more like scared-straight sessions, where experienced, varroa-hardened beekeepers are pleading with new beekeepers to either treat for mites or turn back now. It’s a tricky balance because you don’t want to dishearten an aspiring beekeeper before they even start, but not emphasizing the importance of varroa control would certainly be a dereliction of duty, if not a fraudulent representation of the state of modern beekeeping—and any beekeeping guru who doesn’t teach varroa control probably has a lot in common with an emu huckster.
