STOCKENBOI, Austria — Sandro Huter’s bees were facing a death sentence.
“My bees were too dark,” Huter, a beekeeper, recalled being told by the Carinthian state bee inspector in 2018.
Huter would have to replace his dark queens with light gray ones. He said no. “It’s racial bigotry,” she said.
Around the world, pesticides, diseases, climate change and habitat loss are killing bees and other pollinators, which play a vital role in agriculture. But since 2007, Carinthia has insisted that all its honey bees be of the carniola subspecies, with its characteristic light gray abdominal rings.
Carniolans are considered to be well adapted to surviving the climate of their alpine home. And they are docile with humans.
So Carinthia’s law has a strong following among the state’s beekeepers, eager to keep unwanted traits out of the gene pool. The neighboring state of Styria has a similar law.
But opponents of the law see an echo of the area’s Nazi past.
“It’s a racist dictatorship,” said Gerhard Klinger, director of a beekeepers’ association in the Lavanttal valley, where there are 10 legal proceedings against beekeepers.
Gottfried Götze, the Third Reich’s chief beekeeper, was convinced that native bees should be the exclusive choice to supply the Wehrmacht with honey, as well as the beeswax used in bombs. The Nazis instructed beekeepers to bring their queens to mating stations where pedigreed Carniolan drones awaited them.
The State has come to accept that color alone cannot be the sole determining factor, so bee samples are now being sent for further analysis. If more than two of the 50 specimens collected deviate from Carniolan characteristics, the entire colony is marked and the queen bees must be replaced.
Huter appealed his case to the federal administrative court in Vienna and won, with the court calling the state’s approach “extremely illegal”, partly because at the time it was based solely on the color of a bee. Carinthia is considering amendments to state law that would more explicitly define the subspecies and toughen penalties.
Kirsten Traynor, director of beekeeping research at the University of Hohenheim in Germany, said the focus on the racial purity of a subspecies was misplaced.
“In other countries, you have more of a ‘let’s try to combine all the best characteristics in one bee, regardless of where that genetics come from,’” he said. “Racial purity among human populations has been problematic, and I don’t know why we’re trying to do the same with a managed species.”
By: DENISE HRUBY
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6563457, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-02-09 01:50:09
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