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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

#91

Post by jusben1369 »

floatrock wrote: post #79
jusben1369 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know all analogies break down with scrutiny but I think the major issue here is you're assuming bees are customers when in actuality bees are the workers, honey is the product or service and the customers' consume honey. To put this in startup terms "We're seeing higher employee turnover and so our expenses are rising because we're spending more to recruit and retain works and those workers are more expensive and less productive till they get up to speed (and with high employee churn might leave us before they're fully productive) Higher costs suck because we've had to raise the prices for our service to offset but the market has absorbed a 2x increase in our prices since 2006 so it's not exactly all bad"

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

#92

Post by ChuckMcM »

Nice to see the other side of the story for a change. While the 'extinction threat -> loss of all pollinated food -> disaster' narrative gets a lot of fear views, if we actively assist honey bee colonies in growing on a large scale we can replace a lot of bees quickly.

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

#93

Post by mikeash »

bronson wrote: post #87
mikeash wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's the trouble, all this startup mumbo jumbo makes no sense to me!

Anyway, I think these analogies fail because they keep talking about investors, where you're supposed to be spending money up front for a great return later on. If you're spending more and more money to maintain the same future return then you're in trouble. But things like money spent on bees and honey prices are just straightforward money-for-product transactions.

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

#94

Post by CWuestefeld »

floatrock wrote: post #84
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…

> 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? Seem…

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.

Actually, this isn't a shortcoming of the market as such. It's a failure in conjunction of our incomplete recognition of private property rights. By preventing certain types of property from having private ownership, we don't allow the market to correct itself. More specifically, if we had some private entity or entities that were recognized as the owners of air or water, then they would be able to recover damages from the polluters, thus removing ability to externalize the cost of pollution.

But once you start removing things from the purview of the market (in this case by saying that nobody can own it, and thus nobody has an ownership interest in protecting or has a right to damages), then you're actively preventing the market from correcting. I think it's really amazing that the market does as well as it does, considering how ubiquitous are the regulations that handicap it.

Edit: I should have read farther down the chain, where this [1] mentions the same idea.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024457

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

#95

Post by kaitai »

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…

Moreover, the article entirely ignores wild bees. That's somewhat understandable as they're not as well studied, but they're a significant pollination force nevertheless -- according to this White House fact sheet [1], wild bees accounted for $9 billion of the economic benefit of pollination (compared to $15 billion for domesticated bees). The wild bees are not being replaced. This article really does have a lot of dodgy accounting (esp ignoring externalized costs).

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/20/fact-... [PNAS] Bumblebees: http://www.duluth.umn.edu/biology/documents/MaKarrall2_000.p...

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

#96

Post by lisper »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #94
floatrock wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Seem…

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. Actually, this isn't a shortcoming of the market as such. It's a failure in conjunction of our incomplete recognition of private property rights. By preventing certain types of property from having private ownership, we don't allow the market t…

> if we had some private entity or entities that were recognized as the owners of air or water

I volunteer to be that entity.

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

#97

Post by ultrasandwich »

wang_li wrote: post #85
the8472 wrote: post #51

Earlier 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.

Source? As someone who kept tabs on wild honeybee colonies around the Austin area, I'm a little baffled by this comment.

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

#98

Post by kaitai »

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.

It's dodgy because

[1] the author is claiming that the number of colonies of domesticated bees is higher (not the number of bees),

[2] the author ignores non-domesticated bees and thus misses a significant economic contributor that matters for agricultural pollination, if not honey.

It's particularly dodgy because you're an example of a reader who came away thinking, "But there's more bees so that's good!" That's a false conclusion, the blame for which I lay partly at the feet of this author.

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

#99

Post by 001sky »

bronson wrote: post #87
mikeash wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The empirical existence of rising marginal cost (as you point out) is not evidence of non-viability. Every economic 101 good is thought to be produced until its marginal cost is sloping upward. Economically coherent industries will continue to produce widgets. And increasing costs do not simply make an industry incoherent. Both social value ($demand/subsidization) and technology (cost/difficulty) come into play. It seems a bit arbitrary to make adverse assumptions about future ecosystems a bit more evidence.

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

#100

Post by pdknsk »

abakker wrote: post #48

From 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…

This is shown in detail in the Swiss documentary More Than Honey.

http://morethanhoneyfilm.com/

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