A comment from a real bee farmer on the article: " 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. "
U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
81–90 of 194 posts
Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
CCD is an economic problem. The varroa mite wiped out feral North American honey bees --- which are not native to North America --- a long time ago. Supposedly, any honey bee you've seen in the wild for the past decade has been part of a proprietary hive. So, ordering more honey bee queens off the Internet seems to be a pretty reasonable response to the problem of a 10-20% increase in overwintering hive failures.
What would a non-native honey bee in the wild look like? I live in California and the bees in my garden and in the local parks are various. Some look like bumblebees and some look like just bees but I don't know bees from bees.
> What would a non-native honey bee in the wild look like?
It would look like a honey bee. None of them are native. Native bees are orchard mason bees.
Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
#83A comment from a real bee farmer on the article: " 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…
There's already a sub-thread about this in the comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024292
Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
#84There'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 th…
> why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all?
Unintended consequences of large-scale ecological engineering perhaps. Sure, commercial beekeepers can increase prices and the neonicotinoid users can accept it as an indirect cost of their choice of pesticide, but what about the large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied into commercial interests, but on which we still depend?
Seems to me like there's a huge indiscriminant spillover effect into an incredibly complex system, the implications of which can not be easily predicted nor priced.
One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost onto carbon emissions. Also note how you said "have fewer ill effects on other mammals"... there are still effects, and asbestos seemed like a miracle material before the long-term effects were studied.
The indiscriminate usage of an chemical toxic enough to cause measurable ecological web disruption sounds like a geo-engineering quagmire to me, even if the commercial front-line can compensate with higher prices. How do you accurately price what you don't know?
Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
#85There'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…
also worthy of note: > show that the number of managed colonies Says nothing about wild bees. If they're declining more rapidly than before that's still a problem.
There are no wild honey bees. They got wiped out in the 1990s by varroa mites.
Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sti…
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Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sti…
> [if] money is able to compensate by creating more bees, then there is no problem.
The problem comes when "creating" more bees becomes too expensive/difficult, and you can no longer afford it.
In HN terms: a little cash infusion can make everything look great... until it runs out.
Edit: this comment does a much better job of using HN terms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024771
Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
#88Buying 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…
Seems like you should try selling hives instead of honey.
Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
#89From Wikipedia: The pollination of California's almonds is the largest annual managed pollination event in the world, with close to one million hives (nearly half of all beehives in the USA) being trucked in February to the almond groves. Much of the pollination is managed by pollination brokers, who contract with migratory beekeepers from at least 49 states for the event. This business has been heavily affected by c…
Wow. 49 states implies that at least one of Alaska or Hawaii is involved.
Re: U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
also worthy of note: > show that the number of managed colonies Says nothing about wild bees. If they're declining more rapidly than before that's still a problem.
There are no wild honey bees. They got wiped out in the 1990s by varroa mites.
There are other species of wild bees besides honey bees. Are they not affected by this?