U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by anon1385 » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 7:50 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #53

anon1385 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because honeybees are just one of many pollinating insects whose numbers are falling dramatically. They just happen to get talked about a lot in the press because there are people with a direct economic interest in them.

Can you cite statistics showing that e.g. mason bee populations are collapsing?

I'm not in the US but this seems to be the biggest study there http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6127/1611

>Using historic data sets, we quantified the degree to which global change over 120 years disrupted plant-pollinator interactions in a temperate forest understory community in Illinois, USA. We found degradation of interaction network structure and function and extirpation of 50% of bee species. Network changes can be attributed to shifts in forb and bee phenologies resulting in temporal mismatches, nonrandom species extinctions, and loss of spatial co-occurrences between extant species in modified landscapes. Quantity and quality of pollination services have declined through time. The historic network showed flexibility in response to disturbance; however, our data suggest that networks will be less resilient to future changes.

News article: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/28/wild-bees...

Pesticides are far from the only factor, but adding that to habitat loss and climate change is hardly helping.

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

#62

Post by maratd » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 7:50 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #34

maratd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ge…

> ... to what was in fact a reasonable question.

There was no question. It was a statement.

> Yours is a needlessly inflammatory response ...

I'm sorry, but what word would you use to describe the theory that selective pressures that decimate a population will eventually result in a superior specimen?

It may be inflammatory, but that's the only word that came to mind.

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

#63

Post by breischl » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 7:53 PM UTC

So the proffered solution is ordering new bees from the internet. That seems like magical thinking. I don't think Amazon has figured out how to fabricate bees from base atoms, so presumably somebody, somewhere is breeding those bees for sale.

Don't those breeders have the same problems? What's preventing the magical internet bee source from having their colonies die off?

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

#64

Post by 13thLetter » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 7:54 PM UTC

rational-future wrote: post #42

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…

>> addressing the underlying cause of the leak There are problem causes that are very hard to address. E.g. alcohol consumption causing a lot of traffic accidents. Or massive corporations, with huge lobbying budgets, releasing toxins in the environment. Toxins that cause no obvious harm, but kill a lot of bees or cause cancer in some humans after 20 years of exposure.

Can you be more specific about what these toxins are, and how it's known that they kill bees or cause cancer over a period of twenty years?

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

#65

Post by chrissnell » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 7:56 PM UTC

I'm not so sure. I have a large backyard garden and I'm surrounded by neighbors who also garden. I was chatting with some of them the other day and we've all noticed a significant drop in fertilization amongst our plants this year. My tomato plants are typically overloaded with fruit by this time of year but now only have four or five tomatoes each. Same story with the tomatillos, the squashes, the cukes and the watermelons. Production is less than half of a typical year.

My neighbor kept bees but lost his colony last year. I can't say for sure that CCD is the root of our problems--home gardens are more popular around here than ever and perhaps the bees have an overabundance of food--but it certainly feels like something is wrong. Obviously home gardeners and beekeepers don't have the funds to bolster the bee population like a large commercial grower might.

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

#66

Post by rpenm » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 7:59 PM UTC

Interestingly, European bees hybridized with African bees seem to be quite resistant to CCD. Makes me wonder if one of the problems afflicting American honeybees is a lack of genetic diversity.

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

#67

Post by happyscrappy » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 8:03 PM UTC

g8oz wrote: post #56

tptacek wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

So brutally rapid market driven natural selection of the honey bee population is a good thing, hmm. Darwinian both financially and biologically, and fits with prevailing American economic philosophy. I venture that we're performing an uncontrolled experiment with known benefits and risks we are just beginning to understand. Not worth it. One can only hope the E.U invades in Operation American Freedom and imposes the…

The EU should concentrate on keeping themselves viable, I am not sure they can afford to worry about Americans.

Edit: I have a lot of sympathy for the EU, they are in a tough situation.

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

#68

Post by marknutter » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 8:05 PM UTC

maratd wrote: post #62

tptacek wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

> ... to what was in fact a reasonable question. There was no question. It was a statement. > Yours is a needlessly inflammatory response ... I'm sorry, but what word would you use to describe the theory that selective pressures that decimate a population will eventually result in a superior specimen? It may be inflammatory, but that's the only word that came to mind.

How about "genetic engineering".

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

#69

Post by mohawk » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 8:08 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #53

anon1385 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because honeybees are just one of many pollinating insects whose numbers are falling dramatically. They just happen to get talked about a lot in the press because there are people with a direct economic interest in them.

Can you cite statistics showing that e.g. mason bee populations are collapsing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Other_wildlife

REVIEW: An overview of the environmental risks posed by neonicotinoid insecticides http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12111/f...

Forget about the bees, it doesn't sound like something i would like to have on my food...

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

#70

Post by bronson » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 8:11 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #60

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…

I don't understand how this would work. You can't turn money into bees. You can turn bees into more bees, and money can be used to persuade people to put in more effort to make this happen, but at some point the bees themselves have to be reproducing. I thought the whole problem with colony collapse and the honeybee crisis was that bees were declining and nobody knew how to stop it. If you can stop it with money, may…

You can't stop it with money, but you can reduce it with more human labor/management. And money buys human labor.

And, even though people are figuring out how to deal with the problem, that doesn't mean that the problem is over.