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

washingtonpost.com

101–110 of 194 posts

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

#101
The bottom line is there are huge corporate interests willing to spend money to bury the fact that their investments in toxic agricultural pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are having a permanent, devastating effect on the planetary biome.

The collapsing honey bee is the poster child of the irrevocable damage they are perpetrating on the planet, which is the mostly silent holocaust of our times.

So take any positive media on the recovery of the honey bee that isn't result of curbing industrial agricultural practice, with a big grain of organic salt.

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

#102
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thanks for the link. Yes, neonicotinoids are bad for bees, but so are lots of other things. Other than one special symptomatic consistency (aside from death), there still doesn't appear to be an especially good reason to peg most of the blame on them yet. Doesn't mean they aren't to blame in a large measure, but it doesn't appear there is any reason to think that YET. It's one of those annoying "more study is needed" situations. Several original hypothesises as to the cause of CCD have been ruled out by more study, but none confirmed yet.

The linked wikipedia article says neonicotinoids' role is being studied as a cause if CCD, perhaps in combo with other factors, but doesn't draw a clear line from one to the other. However, it does, as the parent post mentions, provide some nice references for more info.

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

#103
post #95

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 d…

I find it incredibly sad that the only way to make people care about the destruction of wild bees is to talk about how much economic benefit they provide.

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

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure that comments from "beekeeper in Los Angeles" sprinkled with phrases like "corporate apologist" are especially authoritative either.

I'm more willing to listen to an anecdote from someone in the trenches than flimsy misrepresentations that are internally inconsistent.

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

#105
post #85
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.

Wild honey bees in the US have always been descended from escaped domesticated bees. Native wild bees in North America don't seem to make honey.

The population of feral honey bees has certainly collapsed, but it's not zero (in part because bees keep escaping!).

A fun article on the possible benefits of learning more about the wild bee cousins: http://grist.org/food/born-to-bee-wild-how-feral-pollinators...

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

#106
post #99
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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 s…

Absolutely agreed. And it's a bit arbitrary to make favorable assumptions about future ecosystems (as this article does) without a bit more evidence too.

Since the colonies are still collapsing without explanation, a modicum of pessimism might be understandable, even if it isn't completely justifiable.

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

#107

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 wate…

Sounds like you need to fashion a bee stick [1] so you can do the pollination yourself.

We used these in a high school science project to pollinate fast plants.

[1]http://www.fastplants.org/how_to_grow/pollinating.php

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

#108
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't upvote you. Bravo.

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

#109
post #38

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 th…

One thing we can stipulate is that the chemistry of our planet is changing rapidly as result of human industry. We might not be able to prove that fact with conclusive evidence before any fallible human court of law, or public opinion. But whether we do or not doesn't change the fact that big changes in planetary chemistry mark major extinction periods in our planetary past, and that we are messing with forces far beyond our control. That is the height of hubris.

So we can also stipulate that the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance.

Unfortunately our corporate law and ideas of rightful production were founded before accurate concepts of our place in the ecology of the planet were fully formed.

So we are dealing with a lot of retrograde ideas of a human centered produce chain, and these are based very firmly in law and ideas of right and good that are outdated in the anthropocene.

You can talk about a "net win for agriculture" and "aggressive colony generation strategies", however net wins and aggressive strategies need to be evaluated in the larger context of their impact on life on earth - the whole thing, not just human ability to pig out for another 50 or 100 years before we go extinct! Cheers.

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

#110

The bottom line is there are huge corporate interests willing to spend money to bury the fact that their investments in toxic agricultural pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are having a permanent, devastating effect on the planetary biome. The collapsing honey bee is the poster child of the irrevocable damage they are perpetrating on the planet, which is the mostly silent holocaust of our times. So take any posit…

> irrevocable damage

That seems a bit hyperbolic to me. The damage seems revocable if actual effort were put into it instead of just papering over the symptoms.

Of course such things often require policy change, change that some people might oppose. But that does not make the damage itself irrevocable.

It just means that people are prioritizing other goals over it.

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