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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

#181

Post by brohee »

dejv wrote: post #169
Keyframe wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know next to nothing about this, but I have a question. Couldn't you make more hives yourself? What prevents you to 'cultivate' (or whatever it's called) queens and let them mate?

Yes, bees create new hives by themselves. Every year there are couple of swarming that include young queen leaving the hive to build new colony. In traditional beekeeping, the owner will catch the swarm, put it to new home and you've got another hive, which you either sell or use for more produce. The problem is that a lot of hives die during winter (because of various form of illness and conditions) and the populati…

Hives are only swarming if in very good health, and even then both new colonies are more vulnerable than the former one... It's certainly not "every year a couple of swarming" (how would that be sustainable anyway).

If they have to split hives forcefully, it's because they are not healthy enough to do it naturally...

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

#182

Post by torgoguys »

mohawk wrote: post #173
torgoguys wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"…

Well-documented neurotoxicity and bioaccumulation seem good reasons to me. Of course there will always be colony collapses without neonicotinoids too. How about we stop using them until we fully understand their effects? EU has banned their use for two years: http://ec.europa.eu/food/archive/animal/liveanimals/bees/neo... http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/beehealth.htm?wtrl...

> How about we stop using them until we fully understand their effects?

Because doing so would ignore the benefits they provide. The reasons we started using them over the alternatives. Their effects are reasonably well understood, enough to use them in a likely safe manner. The EU experiment (the ban) will provide another data point to inform the cost-benefit calculus.

Relying on complete knowledge of somethings effects before use is impractical. Do you know for certain that goat milk doesn't cause Alzheimer's? No? That doesn't mean we ban its production until it is better understood. Yes, this example is a a bad one, not exactly analogous, but only because I didn't take the time to think up something better. I think the point is clear enough.

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

#183

Post by icebraining »

schiffern wrote: post #137
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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

That's empty rhetoric. What actual alternative do you suggest?

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

#184

Post by icebraining »

schiffern wrote: post #131
tdaltonc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The argument is that either the honey gets more expensive, or all other food does. If you want to refute that as a false choice, you need more than populist rhetoric.

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

#185

Post by icebraining »

anon1385 wrote: post #77
13thLetter wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be more specific about what these toxins are, and how it's known that they kill bees or cause cancer over a period of twenty years?

In the case of neonicotinoids and honeybees recent research suggests it disrupts their ability to navigate back to the hive: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Do they actually die as a result, or just continue living somewhere else? Because if the problem is just that beekeepers lose them, that doesn't seem so bad as if it actually decimated them.

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

#186

Post by tehchromic »

Houshalter wrote: post #180
schiffern wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 far…

Just because the forest has more mass does not mean it produces more food . Trees produce tons of mass in an evolutionary war to be taller than all the other trees and get more sunlight. None of it is edible though. All of them are in a highly competitive war for resources. Plants produced poisons to kill other plants. They try to spread their seeds faster. They try to grow taller and faster and steal sunlight. They…

You post is great until the last sentence:

Permaculture is really cool, but you are never going to get anywhere near as many calories per unit of land.

Permaculture means living such that we don't go extinct. Having a great portion of our workforce return to bucolic agrarian pursuits is one way to get there! As they say: it beats flipping burgers.

The point of a food forest is that it has been carefully cultivated to maximize your human edibles, without needing energy expensive, oil based, or otherwise negatively impactful external inputs. When you subtract the non renewable energy expenditure, you certainly will get as many calories per unit of land!

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

#187

Post by Houshalter »

tehchromic wrote: post #186
Houshalter wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because the forest has more mass does not mean it produces more food . Trees produce tons of mass in an evolutionary war to be taller than all the other trees and get more sunlight. None of it is edible though. All of them are in a highly competitive war for resources. Plants produced poisons to kill other plants. They try to spread their seeds faster. They try to grow taller and faster and steal sunlight. They…

You post is great until the last sentence: Permaculture is really cool, but you are never going to get anywhere near as many calories per unit of land. Permaculture means living such that we don't go extinct. Having a great portion of our workforce return to bucolic agrarian pursuits is one way to get there! As they say: it beats flipping burgers. The point of a food forest is that it has been carefully cultivated to…

If you are optimizing towards energy use, we could theoretically make robots or tractors that are solar powered.

But this isn't an issue at all. Farm equipment does not consume that much fuel, and fuel isn't that expensive.

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

#188

Post by manicdee »

icebraining wrote: post #183
schiffern wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

Nations are built, both literally and figuratively, on their soil. Nations that forget this perish. That's empty rhetoric. What actual alternative do you suggest?

Step 1: devise a sustainable system of growing food, where "sustainable" means that the process can be maintained for at least five hundred years without exhausting resources.

An example of unsustainable agriculture is a model based on mining phosphate.

An example of sustainable agriculture is a model where human waste can be converted into fertilisers (e.g. by processing sewage using reed beds, then charring the reeds to use as biochar and mulch).

Turn our attention to plants which will efficiently store phosphorous in a biologically available form, and ensure that the phosphorous we currently discard in effluent can be captured.

Treat spaceship Earth as a closed system and relise that we have to plumb our outputs back into our inputs or there will be a heck of a mess to clean up later.

There is also the issue of the begged question when asking, "how do we feed 9 billion people?"

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

#190

Post by Retric »

Houshalter wrote: post #187
tehchromic wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You post is great until the last sentence: Permaculture is really cool, but you are never going to get anywhere near as many calories per unit of land. Permaculture means living such that we don't go extinct. Having a great portion of our workforce return to bucolic agrarian pursuits is one way to get there! As they say: it beats flipping burgers. The point of a food forest is that it has been carefully cultivated to…

If you are optimizing towards energy use, we could theoretically make robots or tractors that are solar powered. But this isn't an issue at all. Farm equipment does not consume that much fuel, and fuel isn't that expensive.

The energy costs of fertilizer and pesticides are the problem not the cost of robots/tractors.

All fossil fuels are going to be gone within 5k years. Humans are several times that old and presumably humans will want to survive that. Sure, we can kick the can on this one, but it is a long term problem.

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