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U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

washingtonpost.com

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Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

#31

Post by floatrock »

There's a little bit of dodging going around in this article... What's really going on is we still have a high amount of churn in the funnel, we're just spending more to hide it.

> "The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies -- that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers -- is now the highest it's been in 20 years."

So the absolute numbers are up, great, but that did not come for free:

> "The average retail price of honey has roughly doubled since 2006"

Or, put in startup lingo, the churn is still high, but we're just hiding it by paying more to acquire a larger number of bees. CCD is still killing off bees, but we're just spending more to compensate.

This is the dodgeyness: any good HN reader knows that it's your churn that kills your finances in the end.

And that's where the insanity lies: I believe that CCD has basically been conclusively traced to a certain class of pesticides... what sounds insane to me is we have created a toxic environment that has increased the leaking in the boat, but it's okay because we can just spend more money on bigger bilge pumps instead of addressing the underlying cause of the leak.

Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

#32

Post by pauloday »

maratd wrote: post #14
c-slice wrote: post #5

Life finds a way. I think in some ways, CCD has probably "pruned" the bee population in a good way. Beekeeping allowed weaker hives that would have normally died off in the wild to continue to spawn new hives. CCD has reversed that trend, and may have improved the overall strength of the bee population genetics.

> CCD has probably "pruned" the bee population in a good way A reduction in the population is never a good thing. Is this some sort of neo-eugenics viewpoint? Pruning the population will not create some sort of super-bee. That's not how it works. It will enhance whatever qualities are being selected for, but it will reduce the genetic diversity in the population, making it vulnerable to a hole raft of new diseases an…

Well I wouldn't say population reduction is never a good thing, but it's probably pretty obvious when it's needed.

Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

#33

Post by rrss1122 »

maratd wrote: post #14
c-slice wrote: post #5

Life finds a way. I think in some ways, CCD has probably "pruned" the bee population in a good way. Beekeeping allowed weaker hives that would have normally died off in the wild to continue to spawn new hives. CCD has reversed that trend, and may have improved the overall strength of the bee population genetics.

> CCD has probably "pruned" the bee population in a good way A reduction in the population is never a good thing. Is this some sort of neo-eugenics viewpoint? Pruning the population will not create some sort of super-bee. That's not how it works. It will enhance whatever qualities are being selected for, but it will reduce the genetic diversity in the population, making it vulnerable to a hole raft of new diseases an…

It seems that the way beekeepers raise bees, spreading positive genetic variants happens often. They split healthy colonies into two to hedge their bets against bad colonies bringing down the entire population.

Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

#34

Post by tptacek »

maratd wrote: post #14
c-slice wrote: post #5

Life finds a way. I think in some ways, CCD has probably "pruned" the bee population in a good way. Beekeeping allowed weaker hives that would have normally died off in the wild to continue to spawn new hives. CCD has reversed that trend, and may have improved the overall strength of the bee population genetics.

> CCD has probably "pruned" the bee population in a good way A reduction in the population is never a good thing. Is this some sort of neo-eugenics viewpoint? Pruning the population will not create some sort of super-bee. That's not how it works. It will enhance whatever qualities are being selected for, but it will reduce the genetic diversity in the population, making it vulnerable to a hole raft of new diseases an…

Yours is a needlessly inflammatory response to what was in fact a reasonable question.

Eugenics is a philosophy that suggests human breeding should be controlled to select for favored features. It's disfavored for a variety of obvious reasons that connect to our principals about the unique value of human life.

Honey bees are livestock. Livestock has been selectively bred for millennia, and discussions of long-term genetic selection among honey bees is not an indicator that participants believe in eugenics.

Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

#35

Post by tptacek »

nonameface wrote: post #30

Buying more and more bees is a very expensive solution. Perhaps I'm just a poor beekeeper (maybe true?) but I would have to sell my honey at untenable prices if I was looking to make money on my beekeeping. For example, I've spent $1600 on bees and equipment, I've harvested 3 gallons of honey. I would have to sell that honey at $44/Pound to break even. Now hopefully over the long term this goes down a lot as the upfr…

If reconstituting new hives from annually purchased queens was economically non-viable, pollination prices --- which is where the money in honey bee husbandry seems to come from --- would show that. But while prices have risen, it doesn't look like they've done so at a historically unprecedented rate.

Irrigation is a much bigger economic threat to pollinated crops than pollination.

Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

#36

Post by floatrock »

rrss1122 wrote: post #29

Interesting that the government put together a policy framework to "save the bees", but the market corrected itself anyway. Also interesting that you can buy a queen bee online for $25.

The 'market corrected' itself by increasing prices because that's the only way you can keep up with a high leaky churn.

We haven't 'corrected' anything, we've only found a new (more expensive) equilibrium because the inputs are still dying off at a higher rate. The correct thing to do is to address WHY the inputs have become more expensive... my understanding is that research now points to a certain class of destructive pesticides.

Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

#37

Post by stephengillie »

nonameface wrote: post #30

Buying more and more bees is a very expensive solution. Perhaps I'm just a poor beekeeper (maybe true?) but I would have to sell my honey at untenable prices if I was looking to make money on my beekeeping. For example, I've spent $1600 on bees and equipment, I've harvested 3 gallons of honey. I would have to sell that honey at $44/Pound to break even. Now hopefully over the long term this goes down a lot as the upfr…

Honey sales aren't your only revenue source. You can also charge farms for transporting your bees there and pollinating their crops. And I believe the article said this price point is also increasing.

Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

#38

Post by tptacek »

floatrock wrote: post #31

There's a little bit of dodging going around in this article... What's really going on is we still have a high amount of churn in the funnel, we're just spending more to hide it. > "The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies -- that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers -- is now the highest it's been in 20 years." So the absolute num…

You're referring to neonicotinoids. Let's stipulate that neonicotinoids are in fact the root cause of CCD, which is defined as the increase in overwintering colony losses.

Honey bees are a livestock animal, tied directly to agriculture. Neonicotinoids are popular in part because they're a narrow spectrum pesticide targeted at insect biology, and have fewer ill effects on other mammals than other pesticides.

Here's the question: if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture, and CCD can be mitigated by more aggressive colony generation strategies, why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all? The market seems to have already done that.

Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

#39

Post by Beltiras »

nostromo wrote: post #24

So was that the solution all along? Just breed more bees to replace the ones that die? If that's the case, it seems like a mountain was made out of a mole hill in the media. I read multiple times that I may never eat a pollinated fruit or vegetable again.

No, the article is just putting forth very misleading and cherry-picked data. It's a little bit amazing that he actually mentions splitting and higher hive count close to each other without realizing that this will not increase the pollinator count by twofold. A real beefarmer has a comment on the article that everyone should read, it's illuminating.

""" Mr Ingraham---do not assume you can read a few papers on CCD and bees and make cogent, authoritative remarks in a newspaper piece----this piece fails miserably. I AM a beekeeper, in Los Angeles, using feral honey bees, making public presentations, teaching beekeeping and selling honey. I am going to fill in your ignorance here with a few salient points. Making splits causes a yield of TWO WEAK hives, which is not the same as having the vigorous, healthy original hive. And just so you know, the splits the commercial folks are making from the survivors of pesticide, fungicide, herbicide exposure on industrial crops are the already weakened colonies that happen to make it. So, the splits are not especially fated to thrive, either. Your little tables showing statistics does not tell the real story of the insults being suffered by ALL pollinators from monocrop, industrial agriculture. The typical Consumerist answer to a problem---"just buy more" bees and queens is not addressing the real problems which are decline in clean forage from toxic chemical exposure, lack of forage diversity, trucking bees all over the country, narrow in-bred genetics. The loss of all pollinators, as well as decline in overall ecosystem diversity from the same insults, is the REAL issue. Your piece is also old ground previously plowed over by that corporate apologist and booster at Forbes, Jon Entine, another geek behind a computer who writes about beekeeping with a singularly narrow and uniformed arrogance. Like your ballyhooed Tucker and Thurman, the "economists" (never far from pontificating for the beauties of the "free market") the people weighing in on the loss of pollinators and trying to urge us not to be concerned are akin to Climate Change denialists. """

Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

#40

Post by tptacek »

Beltiras wrote: post #39
nostromo wrote: post #24

So was that the solution all along? Just breed more bees to replace the ones that die? If that's the case, it seems like a mountain was made out of a mole hill in the media. I read multiple times that I may never eat a pollinated fruit or vegetable again.

No, the article is just putting forth very misleading and cherry-picked data. It's a little bit amazing that he actually mentions splitting and higher hive count close to each other without realizing that this will not increase the pollinator count by twofold. A real beefarmer has a comment on the article that everyone should read, it's illuminating. """ Mr Ingraham---do not assume you can read a few papers on CCD an…

This beekeeper's comment doesn't appear to contain any testable arguments. They don't like the fact that maintenance of honey bee stock will require aggressive colony creation, but they don't appear to have an argument to back that up that isn't essentially an appeal to the naturalist fallacy.

This is also a beekeeper attempting to husband honey bees using feral bee populations, 98+% of which were annihilated by the varroa mite a long time ago (there are people who dispute whether "feral honey bees" really still exist at all in the US).

I'm not especially moved by arguments that attempt to tar people asking reasonable questions about insects to climate change denialists.

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