Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 194 posts

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

#71

Post by jschwartzi »

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.

To wit, the phrase "Survival of the fittest" was not coined by Darwin. It was coined by Herbert Spencer when he was taking about corporate survival in a free market. Any argument that boils down to using that phrase to describe the natural world is suspect at best.

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

#72

Post by maratd »

marknutter wrote: post #68
maratd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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".

Genetic engineering doesn't necessarily result in a population reduction.

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

#73

Post by mohawk »

torgoguys wrote: post #57
ch4s3 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, research is coalescing around neonicotinoids being the primary culprit, as they weaken bee immune systems.

You are at least the second commentor to suggest neonicotinoids as the primary factor. I've seen them discussed elsewhere too, but cannot figure out with the modest data available how folks can state such a thing with anything approaching a reasonable level of confidence. And that's consequential if that causes one to stop looking too early. Maybe I've missed something. Is there some persuasive evidence you can make…

There's quite a few papers referenced on wikipedia.

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

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

#74

Post by droithomme »

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.

Also, there are dozens of different pollinating species in north america which are doing fine and have been doing fine throughout all this since they were not subject to the same stressors as domestic european honey bees. For example, one factor is european honey bees have their honey taken by people and replaced with corn syrup, which does not contain the antibiotic elements they produce in their own honey that they eat themselves. The claims that pollination was going to stop and the world come to an end were entirely hysterical, political, and totally without basis in science.

Just think about it. Consider tomatoes, a new world crop. How were they pollinated before the arrival of the european honey bee? The answer is they were pollinated by various north american pollinating insects, which has continued to this day. European honey bees are notable because they produce an especially large volume of honey which makes them a little more economically useful since they can contribute to two different revenue streams: honey and pollination services. Native american bees such as Melipona beecheii and Melipona yucatanica which produce honey produce it in smaller quantities. Both those species are domesticated and stingless and historically were kept as pets by native americans such as various Mayan tribes who used the honey, pollination for their own local use, and religious ceremonies. The reason they are not used in modern production is because of the quantity of honey, not because they can't produce it or don't pollinate.

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

#75

Post by mikeash »

bronson wrote: post #70
mikeash wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the problem is fewer bees, and money is able to compensate by creating more bees, then there is no problem.

If you view the problem as being that bees are being killed by something, then yes, this doesn't solve the problem. But isn't the problem ultimately how many bees you have, not the rate at which they're reproducing and dying?

The comment I replied to seems to be implying that the death of the honeybee is still nigh, and that this extra money is just temporarily hiding it. But how could that be?

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

#76

Post by klibertp »

marknutter wrote: post #68
maratd wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... 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".

I don't think genetic engineering involves killing off large chunks of a population just because it - for the moment - pays off. I'm not a specialist, though, so I may well be wrong here...

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

#77

Post by anon1385 »

13thLetter wrote: post #64
rational-future wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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?

In the case of neonicotinoids and honeybees recent research suggests it disrupts their ability to navigate back to the hive: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

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

#78

Post by tdaltonc »

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…

By segregating a colony in a clean room with high quality feed and optimal conditions you could quickly bulk and split colonies. That would basically turn money in to bees.

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

#79

Post by floatrock »

jusben1369 wrote: post #52
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…

The author is actually expliciting stating "Yep, there is an increase in bee deaths but the total number of bees is substantially higher so the supposed negative effect of these increased deaths is overstated or wrong" I don't think that's dodgy.

You can spend more money on your Adwords campaigns and get a measurable increase in absolute page views or absolute conversions. However, the KPI's that your investors care about are things like your cost-of-acquisition.

If it's actually the case that you're spending more just to maintain the same conversion because you're losing customers at a higher rate, that indicates something is wrong.

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

#80

Post by Keyframe »

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…

I know next to nothing about this, but I have a question. Couldn't you make more hives yourself? What prevents you to 'cultivate' (or whatever it's called) queens and let them mate?
Post reply on HN