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

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

#121

Post by snowwrestler » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 9:57 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #38

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…

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…

Because wild populations of bees are affected too.

From a strictly utilitarian point of view, that reduces biodiversity, which increases the risk of disease. The narrower the gene pool, the greater percentage of animals could be lost to a particular virus or bacteria.

From a broader perspective, it would be a bummer of a world of the only bees are managed colonies that are trucked around from farm to farm. Goodbye to fields of wildflowers with bees buzzing around, and goodbye to all sorts of wild plants that depend on wild bee pollination.

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

#122

Post by semi-extrinsic » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 9:59 PM UTC

schiffern wrote: post #115

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…

>if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture The logic here seems to be that: * Farmers buy neonicotinoids. * Therefore, neonicotinoids have a net positive effect on agriculture. (in other words, like a good libertarian you are assuming that the market has complete/perfect/accurate information) Unfortunately that's just not true. Today's farmers simply don't have the required soil science/botany/ecology/hydrology…

To be fair though, neonicotinoids have become popular since the 90's because they are much more narrow spectrum than previous pesticides. In particular, they are not harmful to mammals, which is often seen as a good thing.

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

#123

Post by schiffern » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 9:59 PM UTC

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

How exactly would that work? Say I buy a piece of land. Under your proposal, I presume I would have to pay a licensing fee to Nestle whenever it rains, and to 3M for the privilege of breathing?

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

#124

Post by hughw » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 10:01 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #58

g8oz wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honey bees are not American. They're livestock brought into the country by settlers.

As I am not American. My forebears came here as settlers.

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

#125

Post by schiffern » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 10:05 PM UTC

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #122

schiffern wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture The logic here seems to be that: * Farmers buy neonicotinoids. * Therefore, neonicotinoids have a net positive effect on agriculture. (in other words, like a good libertarian you are assuming that the market has complete/perfect/accurate information) Unfortunately that's just not true. Today's farmers simply don't have the required soil science/botany/ecology/hydrology…

To be fair though, neonicotinoids have become popular since the 90's because they are much more narrow spectrum than previous pesticides. In particular, they are not harmful to mammals, which is often seen as a good thing.

By destroying the soil, you kill everything (mammals included) because they're all part of the same food web. The video I linked explains this.

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

#126

Post by wang_li » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 10:07 PM UTC

ultrasandwich wrote: post #97

wang_li wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not as settled as my comment made it sound, but the second paragraph at the below article briefly touches on the idea:

http://www.honeybeesuite.com/of-feral-colonies-and-varroa-mi...

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

#127

Post by schiffern » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 10:08 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #117

schiffern wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture The logic here seems to be that: * Farmers buy neonicotinoids. * Therefore, neonicotinoids have a net positive effect on agriculture. (in other words, like a good libertarian you are assuming that the market has complete/perfect/accurate information) Unfortunately that's just not true. Today's farmers simply don't have the required soil science/botany/ecology/hydrology…

I would appreciate it if you would not call me a libertarian, as I am not one of those, and you couldn't possibly know anyways. This mistake --- the fundamental attribution effect --- causes more bullshit misunderstandings on HN than anything except for perhaps the is-ought fallacy.

Whether or not you call yourself the "L" word, you argument relies on free market fundamentalism, which is just as bad.

Free Market Fundamentalism: the belief that markets are giant calculating machines that output optimal social relations, i.e. Pareto optimal transactions

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

#128

Post by STRiDEX » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 10:08 PM UTC

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…

the beekeepers are what migrate

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

#129

Post by bsder » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 10:10 PM UTC

rrss1122 wrote: post #33

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…

It seems that the way beekeepers raise bees, spreading positive genetic variants happens often. They split healthy colonies into two to hedge their bets against bad colonies bringing down the entire population.

Evolution doesn't work that way.

Your genetic variant is positive for what?

If you select for resistance to CCD, other characteristics can (and will) vary negatively. Organisms have a finite amount of energy to grow and breed. If increased energy is channeled into one particular characteristic, then there is less energy for other characteristics.

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

#130

Post by tehchromic » Fri, Aug 07, 2015, 10:22 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #120

tehchromic wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 be…

I will not 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" , because I don't even know what that means. The Precautionary Principle works well in some places and not in others. In this case: you're pretending that the po…

You not knowing what that means is a good thing. That's where you and all the industrial production chain should start PRIOR to deciding that one toxic chemical really ought to be used in place of ten others, etc. A proper foundation for any use of industrial, planet scale chemistry is: I don't know what the effect will be.

That's why I'm not narrowly focused on neonicotinoids at all, and didn't mention them in my post. I'm focused on the entire supply chain, from legos to legumes. It should all be looked at with a big dose of critical skepticism.

From there, understanding the difference between growing beans and dumping weird plastic molecules into the ecosystem is pretty fundamental to knowing what is and isn't a natural party of our ecology. That's the wisdom that should sit at the top of our supply chain.