Wait, Does America Suddenly Have a Record Number of Bees? (spokesman.com) 77
"America's honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high," reports the Washington Post:
We've added almost 1 million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn't count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over...
Much of the explosion of small producers came in just one state: Texas. The Lone Star State has gone from having the sixth-most bee operations in the country to being so far ahead of anyone else that it out-bees the bottom 21 states combined... [A]ll 254 Texas counties adopted bee rules requiring, for example, six hives on five acres plus another hive for every 2.5 acres beyond that to qualify for the tax break...
When the census was taken in December 2022, California had more than four times as many bees as any other state. We emailed pollination expert Brittney Goodrich at the University of California at Davis, who explained that pollinating the California almond crop "demands most of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. each year...
Sadly, however, this does not mean we've defeated colony collapse. One major citizen-science project found that beekeepers lost almost half of their colonies in the year ending in April , the second-highest loss rate on record. For now, we're making up for it with aggressive management. The Texans told us that they were splitting their hives more often, replacing queens as often as every year and churning out bee colonies faster than the mites, fungi and diseases can take them down. But this may not be good news for bees in general. "It is absolutely not a good thing for native pollinators," said Eliza Grames, an entomologist at Binghamton University, who noted that domesticated honeybees are a threat to North America's 4,000 native bees, about 40% of which are vulnerable to extinction...
Many of the same forces collapsing managed beehives also decimate their native cousins, only the natives don't usually have entire industries and governments pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting them.
So while Texas bee exemptions "have become big business," the article ends with this quote from Mace Vaughan, who leads pollinator and agricultural biodiversity at Xerces, an expanding insect-conservation outfit. "The way you support both honeybees and beekeepers — and the way you save native pollinators — is to go out there and create beautiful flower-rich habitat on your farm or your garden."
Much of the explosion of small producers came in just one state: Texas. The Lone Star State has gone from having the sixth-most bee operations in the country to being so far ahead of anyone else that it out-bees the bottom 21 states combined... [A]ll 254 Texas counties adopted bee rules requiring, for example, six hives on five acres plus another hive for every 2.5 acres beyond that to qualify for the tax break...
When the census was taken in December 2022, California had more than four times as many bees as any other state. We emailed pollination expert Brittney Goodrich at the University of California at Davis, who explained that pollinating the California almond crop "demands most of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. each year...
Sadly, however, this does not mean we've defeated colony collapse. One major citizen-science project found that beekeepers lost almost half of their colonies in the year ending in April , the second-highest loss rate on record. For now, we're making up for it with aggressive management. The Texans told us that they were splitting their hives more often, replacing queens as often as every year and churning out bee colonies faster than the mites, fungi and diseases can take them down. But this may not be good news for bees in general. "It is absolutely not a good thing for native pollinators," said Eliza Grames, an entomologist at Binghamton University, who noted that domesticated honeybees are a threat to North America's 4,000 native bees, about 40% of which are vulnerable to extinction...
Many of the same forces collapsing managed beehives also decimate their native cousins, only the natives don't usually have entire industries and governments pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting them.
So while Texas bee exemptions "have become big business," the article ends with this quote from Mace Vaughan, who leads pollinator and agricultural biodiversity at Xerces, an expanding insect-conservation outfit. "The way you support both honeybees and beekeepers — and the way you save native pollinators — is to go out there and create beautiful flower-rich habitat on your farm or your garden."
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Re: Yes (Score:2)
I haven't put up bee traps for the past few summers since I heard they were in decline. It's possible others had the same line of thinking? Now that I hear they have revovered, I might put up traps again this year. (For flies, wasps, and bees.)
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It seems unlikely that the same trap would get both wasps and bees, given their significantly different food preferences.
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Reread the summary, they're only talking about domestic honey bees and they're basically breeding them quicker then they die.
More important are the native bees. They work when it is colder and have other advantages and are very important for pollination.
It's interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
So much of our agriculture depends on the honeybee. And so many people don't realize it's a species that's not native to North America.
Re:It's interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
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Perhaps, but the honeybee has the advantage of producing a second product, the honey, in quantities in excess of what the hive needs to survive. I don't know (literally, I don't - totally welcome to links to some details) if that's the same for the native species.
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>I don't know (literally, I don't - totally welcome to links to some
>details) if that's the same for the native species.
Inquiring grizzlies want to know!
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Almost every year I get some ground bees by my porch for a few months, before they go who knows where, but last year we had a few swarms in my backyard (three total, all along the same branch on the same tree), and I put two of the swarms into langstroth hives, and gave the third away. Only one hive survived through the fall/winter, but I've got one pretty strong colony now.
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Nice. I've always wanted to try my hand at beekeeping (As a beer brewer, I've wanted to try doing my own mead, but a lot of commercial honey in my location has additives incompatible with brewers yeast. Plus, its interesting! Unfortunately I live inner-city with a micro backyard that I suspect is rather incompatible with the artform.
If this stupid economy ever lets me retire to the country, beekeeping is likely to be the first thing I try however.
Re:It's interesting (Score:5, Informative)
Most people also don't realize that queen bees are produced on demand [psu.edu], and pollination, adding an estimated $18 billion/year [usda.gov] in crop yields, means that beekeepers (or, rather, those specialists who breed queens) will, indeed, produce as many queens as are needed every year.
The entire "bee die off" crisis wasn't. The price went up by a significant percentage, but in terms of dollars, it was a minor inconvenience for an industry that's never been in danger of failing.
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The entire "bee die off" crisis wasn't. The price went up by a significant percentage, but in terms of dollars, it was a minor inconvenience for an industry that's never been in danger of failing.
The price of what went up; real honey, or fake honey?
Global demand never fell. So the theories as to how supply kept up, are beyond conspiracy at this point. If there wasn’t ever really a “die off” event, then Greed really got corruptly greedy in that industry to peddle crap product and collude to push higher prices.
Re:It's interesting (Score:4, Informative)
The entire "bee die off" crisis wasn't. The price went up by a significant percentage, but in terms of dollars, it was a minor inconvenience for an industry that's never been in danger of failing.
The price of what went up; real honey, or fake honey?
The price of queen bees. Commercial beekeepers buy them, like they buy their other supplies. As the links you didn't bother to read (while masturbating furiously at how much you hate people who are more successful then you will ever be) explained.
Try to pay attention.
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It take time to grow a colony from a single queen, which was part of the reason there has been a shortage of hives for rent around here.
Then there the problems with the native bees, which are also very important, both for crops and native plants.
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And so many people don't realize it's a species that's not native to North America.
I happen to be one of those people, so care to elaborate a bit on this from the scientific point of view? Seems rather odd that at some point honeybees (as in all varieties of them) would simply not exist on an entire continent that otherwise has obvious history with the kind of flora that would thrive and survive with them.
”North America” is a human term given to a patch of land, and honeybees don’t read English.
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Honey Bee usually refers to one species of bee that has been domesticated, or perhaps a genera (Apis) of bee, all native to Afro-EuroAsia. There's lots of other species/genera of bees that are native to N. America, bumble bees, mason bees etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Here you go. Basically, honeybees don't actually like much of North America's climate very well. People tried to introduce them to this continent multiple times over the span of a couple centuries... finally succeeding in the 1800s. But without beekeepers they would likely dwindle significantly over time.
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/are-... [usgs.gov]
https://goodnaturedflowerfarm.... [goodnature...erfarm.com]
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So much of our agriculture depends on the honeybee.
Most of our agriculture does not depend on bees.
Corn, wheat, soybeans, cotton, peanuts, and rice don't need bees for pollination.
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I was surprised, after tolerating an underground hive of honeybees for years, to find that they don't pollinate tomatoes. [now they're gone; a punk kid ran through several yards, and the county paid to kill the hive so that the police could look for the gun, having narrowed where he dropped the murder weapon to three yards. {it was such a nice neighborhood when I moved in 30 someodd years ago . . .}{they don't even test here; they presume africanization}]
bumblebees, however, do. [and apparently, it's more
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The best preparation to backstop the current mass extinction is AI, it doesn't need a biosphere. We're just playing for time.
Beewesome! (Score:2)
Re: Beewesome! (Score:1)
Beads? (Score:1)
Oh (Score:2)
Many of the same forces collapsing managed beehives also decimate their native cousins, only the natives don't usually have entire industries and governments pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting them.
So, kinda like how domesticated cattle have replaced whatever species they were derived from?
So what you are saying is that if you prefer the native species, that you need to figure out how to make them a lucrative crop. Seems like the most effective strategy.
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Yup. If the dodo bird and carrier pigeon tasted as good as pig, we've have farms full of them :)
Being tasty to humans is an evolutionary advantage.
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So what you are saying is that if you prefer the native species,
Doesn't always work that way. Grab a couple of wild salmon from a stream. Breed and rear the juveniles in a hatchery and they are no longer considered native. They must be marked, so as not to allow a count of fish populations to be biased by their success. How to you tag bees?
It's not about "wild native populations good". It's about "human involvement bad". The Chinese ran into this when their panda breeding programs appeared to have reversed the decline in overall populations. One environmentalist remark
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>How to you tag bees?
verrry carefully!
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30 or 40 years ago, people were asked to bring in any of the (supposedly) endangered desert tortoises, they found, for preservation.
In one of those things that you just can't make up, so many were brought in that they euthanized many of them!
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So, kinda like how domesticated cattle have replaced whatever species they were derived from?
No. The honeybee is not native to North or South America - it was intentionally introduced from the Old World (and it took about 200 years of trying before that succeeded). However it is true that the honeybee most of us are familiar with is domesticated.
Weren't they supposed to die out? (Score:4, Funny)
It's like
"I thought you're dead..."
"Yeah, but I got better"
"Yeah, but I got better" (Score:2)
Did Eric the half a bee ever regrow his missing half?
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If only you could have read the summary and had your implied question answered before you posted.
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Given the young lady had a pointy end, a saucy reply of "No, I'm not!" also fits.
Heroic breeding efforts (Score:2)
Breeding of new hives has been greatly increased due to the colony collapse problem. Since so many more hives fail now than used to, we have to produce many more hives. It sounds like we've finally got production up above the rate of loss, if this story can be believed.
If this rate of production can be maintained, then the problem is essentially solved, unless the rate of collapse continues to increase.
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Production was never below demand. Queen bees are produced on demand in whatever quantity is needed. The main effect of the die off was the price for queens went up a bit.
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There's still questions about the native bees and how well they're doing. They're also important for native plants, eg here, it is still cold and the bumble bees are busy pollinating the huckle berries and now the salmon berries. Honey bees like it warmer.
I am seeing more bumble bees here then during the last few years. I remember as a kid in the big city, lawns would have a lot of bumble bees visiting the clover, don't see that in town anymore.
Noâ¦. (Score:4)
Feral bees (Score:3)
Sorry, but I had to laugh when I read that bit.
I had this image of a pile of bees snarling and snapping their teeth like a pack of wild dogs.
Re: Feral bees (Score:2)
Feral hives are interesting, like a stack of dinner plate pained by Dali and hanging from a tree branch.
There is a whole past time of bee lining. Tracking the direction of travel of bees to work out the direction of a hive. This includes techniques of triangulation to work out approximate location of a hive.
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That's cool to know, thanks.
Invasive bees displace native species (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't as great news as it seems - native bee species are probably being displaced even MORE due to this, and can't compete with huge colonies of honeybees.
It's like saying 'there's a record number of cows'. It's not hard to breed more. But what's going on with the rest of nature, and the species that are actually supposed to be there?
Re:Invasive bees displace native species (Score:4, Insightful)
Natural selection is a thing. And everything is part of nature, even your iphone and iced latte.
Even if you believe the rate of change that we're experiencing now is greater than all of the earth's history, this is just another natural selector - those mutations that can survive those evolutionary pressures will survive, and those that don't will go extinct.
Nothing is "supposed to be there". It just survived when all other competitors did not.
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It's 'natural selection' we have 100% influence over.
I figure you don't give a shit, but for people who are 'save the bees', this is a hugely important distinction, and often conflating 'saving bees' with 'more honeybees'.
And keep in mind we're in for a world of hurt if something worse than colony collapse disorder hits bees, and wipes out most honeybees, AND we've fucked over the native species. (Go ahead and try eating 'natural selection' when the entire world is starving because we can't grow enough crop
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I understand each word you used there, but I still can't figure out what you really mean.
Simple question - if someone has 100% influence over something, does that mean they have 100% control over it? If not 100% control, how much control is 100% influence?
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Natural selection is a thing. And everything is part of nature, even your iphone and iced latte.
If your definition of natural selection include iPhone and selective breeding by farmers then you're no longer talking about the same natural selection as anyone else.
Even if you believe the rate of change that we're experiencing now is greater than all of the earth's history, this is just another natural selector - those mutations that can survive those evolutionary pressures will survive, and those that don't will go extinct.
Nothing is "supposed to be there". It just survived when all other competitors did not.
That's true, but what you're missing is the implications of that process.
Lets just ignore the fact that a diversity of species is nice for its own sake.
All those native bees fit into the local ecosystems. Those bees go and now other species are under added pressure, the plants that relied on them as pollinators might not do as well with honeyb
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Agreed. Too many people simply don't understand Darwin. I think part of it is the odd religious impulse to see humans as outside of nature, created by some transcendent God outside of "natural" animals and plants.
There is no useful demarcation between "natural" and "not-natural".
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Agreed. Too many people simply don't understand Darwin. I think part of it is the odd religious impulse to see humans as outside of nature, created by some transcendent God outside of "natural" animals and plants.
There is no useful demarcation between "natural" and "not-natural".
Actually there is a useful demarcation, whether an active human influence is playing a critical role in the selection.
Take farm turkeys, they literally cannot breed without human assistance [mcmurrayhatchery.com]. The difference between the selective breeding that created farm turkeys and natural selection is that the selective breeding system is incredibly fragile. Without human intervention farm turkeys would likely go extinct in a generation. Heck, I suspect that there's industrial breeds that do go extinct because no one thin
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How is that useful? How far back do we go? Does anything influenced by Homo Erectus count as "not natural"? Anything in the primate family?
You're making an arbitrary distinction based on your personal aesthetics, not anything quantifiable.
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Natural Selection + Artificial Selection = Selective Pressures.
Sure, finding the perfect line separating natural vs artificial isn't always easy, annoyingly fuzzy boundaries are unfortunately a feature of biology.
The problem with you trying to lump everything into Natural Selection is that you lose all of the features that make Natural Selection different from Artificial Selection.
If we go extinct, it will be because we failed to survive selective pressures. We have surprisingly little control over that. We can't predict selective pressures with any sort of accuracy, so our ability to mitigate them is strikingly close to zero.
Honestly, it seems like this is your objective rather than a true concern over scientific accuracy. To me, your position sounds
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Are you saying that things cannot possibly change as fast with "natural" selection versus an arbitrary "artificial" selection? Is there *anything* that "artificial" selection can do that "natural" selection cannot? I mean, a massive asteroid hit can cause *incredibly* quick changes on a global scale - it's not that you have a fuzzy bound
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Are you saying that things cannot possibly change as fast with "natural" selection versus an arbitrary "artificial" selection?
No, I'm not signing onto ridiculous strawmen.
Is there *anything* that "artificial" selection can do that "natural" selection cannot?
The turkey example seems like a decent bet.
I mean, a massive asteroid hit can cause *incredibly* quick changes on a global scale - it's not that you have a fuzzy boundary, it's that you have a rule based on opinion, rather than specification.
You have many examples of natural selection acting incredibly quickly that aren't mass extinction events?
Oh, I worry about plenty - I want lots of cows to eat, deer to hunt, and bees to harvest honey from. But I'm not going to base any arguments on appealing to "nature" - the whole invasive species trope is a thin veneer over a belief that humans are gods, and have both responsibility and control over everything. I find humility a more productive point of view.
Adaptation to change is the key to long term survival - the prevention of change is impossible. I'm choosing the strategy that is more effective.
So, you're claiming that natural selection is like artificial selection, and therefore we don't need to worry about "nature" since they're basically the same thing.
But your overlap of natural and artificial selection is instances of very rapid change, which leads to mass extinction.
So your philosophy seems like an ext
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There are all kinds of symbiotic organisms that cannot survive without assistance from other species. For example, acacia trees and ants.
COVID variants? Or any number of bacteria and viruses? Or our immune systems fighting against them?
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There are all kinds of symbiotic organisms that cannot survive without assistance from other species. For example, acacia trees and ants.
Yeah, but acacia trees aren't suddenly going to decide they're going a different route and a species of ant goes extinct in a season.
COVID variants? Or any number of bacteria and viruses? Or our immune systems fighting against them?
I'll grant you that viruses and bacteria can evolve quickly via natural selection. But that's hardly something that extends to large multicellular life.
So strawman for me, but not for thee? :)
Honestly, that feels like the claim you're making.
I believe that the best strategy for survival is adaptation. I believe that trying to prevent change to survive is a lesser strategy. If you were looking at how much effort to split between the two, I'd probably suggest something like 90%/10%. My guess is that your aesthetic puts you more at 10%/90%.
It's not about preventing change, it's being conscious of the change we're already creating. Go for a long drive outside a city, there's a good chance you're looking at a farm.
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Actually, it's more the other way around, but is that your criteria? If a human had to make a decision for it, that's the critical difference?
Again, this seems like an aesthetic opinion, lacking humility.
So, one of the basic p
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Native bee species may not be viable going forwards. Managed hives sometimes decide that they don't want to be managed any more, in that the queen decides it's time to fuck off to someplace else and start a wild hive. When we were living in the sticks we tried having a couple of hives. One of them just straight failed, but the other one moved out into the neighborhood someplace. We know because of what kind of bees they were. So if we can make a better bee, as defined by its ability to survive the new envir
TxDOT is Serious about Wild Flowers (Score:5, Informative)
TxDOT buys and sows about 30,000 pounds of wildflower seed each year
By 1934, department rules delayed all mowing, unless essential for safety, until spring and early summer wildflower seasons were over. This practice has stayed in place for more than 60 years and has expanded into today's full-scale vegetation management system.
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Lady Bird Johnson, first lady of President Lyndon B. Johnson was adamant about trying to beautiful our national highways as Texas had been doing since the 30s. It seems like a small price to pay (actively seeding native wildflowers along our highways, and not mowing in the spring) to cover up some of the ugly that is our "pave earth" highway plan.
https://highways.dot.gov/publi... [dot.gov]
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So many people miss the real problem (Score:1)
European honey bees are not native to the Americas. That means that they will either expand and wipe out domestic pollinators or they will eventually succumb to disease. Or both. Our agriculture is so dependent on the honey bee that if the population suddenly collapse our food supply would be at risk. We can't afford to just let the honeybee die out, but we need to anticipate a future without it. That means we need to invest in the science of how to grow food crops without the honey bee. Our best chance
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European honey bees are not native to the Americas. That means that they will either expand and wipe out domestic pollinators or they will eventually succumb to disease. Or both.
I really don’t understand this logic of one or the other outcome here. At one point there was a LOT that wasn’t “native” to a particular part of the planet (to include humans), but we somehow adapted, to include making the things that “non-native” honeybees survive and thrive on, native.
For a “non-native” species, it sure does seem to thrive quite well over the last few (centuries) of being in America. To include all those decades when we weren’t pedd
The buzz... (Score:2)
So, the next time the entomologists predict doom, we should tell them to mind their own beeswax?
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bee-lining (Score:2)
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Farmed bees are bad for the environment (Score:2)
These are farmed bees. They are destroying wild bee populations.
Just like all farming, monocultures and "best practices" destroy nature.
But what I didn’t know was that by keeping bees I would only be helping one species of bee – the domesticated honeybee, which doesn’t really need saving – and possibly harming others.
https://www.theguardian.com/co... [theguardian.com]
Btw... (Score:2)
Kill Your Lawn (Score:2)
If you actually care about pollinators, kill your lawn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
So the pendulum swings... (Score:1)
Were corrective measures taken?
Did they over correct?
Or is this just a natural fluctuation that we really don't need to worry about, unless we are concerned that honey prices would fall?