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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

#131

Post by schiffern »

tdaltonc wrote: post #78
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…

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.

"Don't worry, the rich will still be able to afford honey made in a clean room! No problems here!!"

(you, on the other hand, can have high fructose corn syrup and pesticide and fertilizer-contaminated water)

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

#132

Post by semi-extrinsic »

schiffern wrote: post #125
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I definitely agree that using less (ideally no) pesticides is the best. But moving from a pesticide with more side effects to one with less is an improvement any way you look at it. Also, I believe it's an open question whether we would be able to feed the world population without using pesticides. If you have to choose between adverse affects on soil quality and potentially having people starve, the choice for policy makers is obvious.

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

#133

Post by schiffern »

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…

>If you use less neonicotinoid pesticide, you will use more land

If you think that the only possible way to grow food is monoculture fields sprayed with poison and fertilizer (aka the "green revolution"), then you'd be right.

But is that really true? Is that the only possible way to grow food?

I ask because forests seem to grow lots of food (an unmanaged forest generates many times more biomass per hectare than a farm field), without requiring nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, neonicotinoids, glycophosphates, diesel fuel...

But surely there's no way to design a system that operates with no inputs like a forest, and also turns much of that biomass into food for humans, right?

Oh wait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_forest

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

#134

Post by earleybird »

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.

This is a narrow view. As go the honey bees, so go the indigenous pollinators.

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

#135

Post by thrownaway2424 »

kaitai wrote: post #111
thrownaway2424 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

tptacek has a very efficient guide to bees posted. Another nice national one that is very comprehensive is the USDA's guide at http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb530646... . Scroll to page 17 or so to start looking at illustrations of particular bees if you don't want to read about their habits. But the best for CA is the Berkeley Bee Lab's page on native bees at http://www.helpabee.org/common-bee-…

The Berkeley site is neat, but it's got a picture of the european honey bee right at the top and no mention of it being non-native.

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

#136

Post by tptacek »

schiffern wrote: post #127
tptacek wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is also false. Please don't use me as a coat rack for arguments you want to make that are unrelated to mine.

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

#137

Post by schiffern »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #132
schiffern wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I definitely agree that using less (ideally no) pesticides is the best. But moving from a pesticide with more side effects to one with less is an improvement any way you look at it. Also, I believe it's an open question whether we would be able to feed the world population without using pesticides. If you have to choose between adverse affects on soil quality and potentially having peopl…

> I believe it's an open question whether we would be able to feed the world population without using pesticides.

I would counter that it is a closed question whether we can feed the world population with pesticides, and the answer is "no."

The industrial food system is not a viable replacement for itself. People tend to forget that that's all "unsustainable" means.

>If you have to choose between adverse affects on soil quality and potentially having people starve

False choice. That's like asking someone to choose between inhaling and exhaling.

Nations are built, both literally and figuratively, on their soil. Nations that forget this perish.

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

#138

Post by schiffern »

tptacek wrote: post #136
schiffern wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is also false. Please don't use me as a coat rack for arguments you want to make that are unrelated to mine.

If you'd like to talk about the glaring hole I pointed out in your argument instead of clutching your pearls, I'd be happy to change topic! :)

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

#139

Post by tptacek »

earleybird wrote: post #134
tptacek wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is a narrow view. As go the honey bees, so go the indigenous pollinators.

That does not in fact appear to be the case.

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

#140

Post by tptacek »

schiffern wrote: post #138
tptacek wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is also false. Please don't use me as a coat rack for arguments you want to make that are unrelated to mine.

If you'd like to talk about the glaring hole I pointed out in your argument instead of clutching your pearls, I'd be happy to change topic! :)

I am convinced you don't understand my argument and have substituted for it the most immediately available outrageous argument. Please don't do that.
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