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Bee Bread

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Re: Bee Bread

#71

Post by byron_fast »

saalweachter wrote: post #33
bradbeattie wrote: post #29

Are there any negative effects to harvesting this bee bread? > But the bees do not consume their pollen fresh. Instead, they take it into the hive and pack the granules into empty comb cells, mixing them with nectar and digestive fluids and sealing the cell with a drop of honey. Once processed in this way, the pollen remains stable indefinitely. Beekeepers call this form of pollen ‘perga’ or ‘bee bread’. This implies…

All harvesting from bees is essentially stealing their food. Modern hive designs allow a beekeeper to take excess honey or pollen from a hive non-destructively. The trick is to only take it from strong hives, while leaving the bees a sufficient quantity to overwinter. Honey is the overwinter food; beekeepers typically try to leave the bees about 80 lbs, depending on the climate. Pollen is much more important for rais…

In my experience most commercial beekeepers use cyanide gas to kill their bees after harvesting the honey; they start fresh with new queens in spring. The rare few who overwinter their bees use sugar syrup and store the bees in a cool warehouse designed to keep them dormant during winter.

From a commercial beekeeping perspective "colony collapse disorder" is nothing but a recent news fad. There are cycles of different problems for decades, but I doubt there is something extraordinary about the current state of beekeeping.

Killing the makers of your livelihood and dealing with catastrophic problems is usually known as "farming".

Re: Bee Bread

#72

Post by mchaver »

justinpombrio wrote: post #65
mathrawka wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stealing does not mean we view bees as selfish. Stealing means we know it is not ours, yet we take it without consent.

> we know it is not ours Ownership is not a physical property of the world, it exists in the minds of people. The bees almost certainly have no notion of ownership, so saying that "we know it is not ours" speaks more about humans than it does of bees.

I don't see why the concept of ownership could not exist in non-human beings. Animal concepts of territory seem like a form of ownership.

This discusses some species of bees defending mating territories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territory_(animal)

Re: Bee Bread

#73

Post by jdswain »

cgh wrote: post #62
jdswain wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there were still baby cow's. The baby cows are taken away from their mothers and slaughtered.

If that were true, all cows would be extinct within one generation. As someone who just visited a farm and bought a quarter of a cow for the freezer, I can say I saw various calves wandering around.

Not all calves, but most. They need to keep the cows lactating, so they need to keep having calves. There is some work on selectively breeding to produce females, but even then there are more females born than are useable for milk production. They are separated from their mothers as early as 1 day after birth and are normally sold at 2 weeks of age.

Veal is meat from calves that are only weeks old, anywhere from a few weeks to about 8 months old. There's varied opinions on if this is acceptable animal welfare.

But basically, calves are a byproduct of milk production.

Re: Bee Bread

#74

Post by beala »

dugword wrote: post #67
aetherson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human-managed honeybee populations are not in decline.

Yes they are. That is exactly what the Colony Collapse Disorder crisis is all about. The hives managed by beekeepers for the purpose of pollenating crops are mysteriously dying off, and they are having a hard time finding replacement swarms to manage.

I'm hardly a beekeeping expert, but I've read that human managed colonies are actually not in decline.

"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." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-...

The article argues that CCD has made beekeeping more expensive, which is a cost passed onto consumers in the form of more expensive honey, but beekeepers have found ways to keep their colonies from disappearing.

Re: Bee Bread

#75

Post by PavlovsCat »

dpratt71 wrote: post #68
PavlovsCat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do some humans help a wounded or hungry/thirsty animal they come across, even when there are no other humans around to signal virtue to? Why wouldn't a bee (colony) be nice just because it can and likes to? I'm not saying that is the reason, but why can't that be the reason, or part of it?

I think it could be argued that the behavior you ascribe to humans exists for the same reason that some dogs chase after cars. That is, it is an ingrained behavior that tends to enhance our survival and is sometimes expressed or triggered in contexts where it doesn't really make sense. In truth, I believe that life has a spiritual dimension, that my life has purpose, blah blah blah, but I find it useful on occasion t…

Okay, but bees are arguable even more social than we are, so the same might apply to them. I'm not saying that's the cause, that they recognize a person they like and let them have some honey, I guess they simply don't have a good enough reason to attack (which is not "free" for bees, either), and in the long run, it turned out to be useful to play nice with humans. But I don't know.. and I also wouldn't be surprised if bees are good judges of character and/or are generous, or have pity on us confused humans and wish they could do more to help than just giving us honey.

In a general sense, liking life forms that don't actively threaten us, just enjoying there being other life, should be useful for all life, since all life kind of depends on the "tapestry of life" which sustains it as well. Doesn't mean it is so, but it wouldn't surprise me. I say this a lot but that's kind of my point, "why should this be ruled out, why would that be surprising", not so much making a positive claim as debating an implied negative one.

In this [1] thread, someone linked the concept of biophilia, and I had to think of this discussion as well: if we allow for humans liking life "just because" or "for some reason", we should allow for that in animals, too.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12053272

Re: Bee Bread

#76

Post by beardicus »

byron_fast wrote: post #71
saalweachter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All harvesting from bees is essentially stealing their food. Modern hive designs allow a beekeeper to take excess honey or pollen from a hive non-destructively. The trick is to only take it from strong hives, while leaving the bees a sufficient quantity to overwinter. Honey is the overwinter food; beekeepers typically try to leave the bees about 80 lbs, depending on the climate. Pollen is much more important for rais…

In my experience most commercial beekeepers use cyanide gas to kill their bees after harvesting the honey; they start fresh with new queens in spring. The rare few who overwinter their bees use sugar syrup and store the bees in a cool warehouse designed to keep them dormant during winter. From a commercial beekeeping perspective "colony collapse disorder" is nothing but a recent news fad. There are cycles of differen…

Where is this common practice? I've heard of warehousing bees, but not gassing them to death.

Re: Bee Bread

#77

Post by noipv4 »

retox wrote: post #26
noipv4 wrote: post #20

For my seasonal pollen allergies here's what I do. a) Take a spoonful of dried bee bread b) Take 2 spoonful of local honey c) Add 100ml warm water d) Stir it until the bee-bread dissolves e) Drink it. (Starts acting in 10 minutes) Anyone know why it works?

How often do you do this, and how long do the effects last? Do your allergies stop bothering you entirely? I am plagued by hayfever in the warm season and my only option seems to be to munch antihistamines each morning, or twice a day sometimes.

I do this whenever I have sneezing and itchy eyes. During peak allergy season 3 times a day is normal. I have tried honey alone and BB alone. Never worked individually. It only works if I dissolve BB + honey in warm water. Have been doing this since 2 seasons, i.e. 2 years (~3 month season April, May, June)

Re: Bee Bread

#78

Post by noipv4 »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #66
fit2rule wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.. unless you've been doing the "10-minute fix" for some years ..

It still doesn't work that way though. The GP didn't describe immunotherapy, they described "take a substance, feel better in a few minutes" like an aspirin. That is just not how immunotherapy works.

Do you have a hypothesis as to why it works? In my case it has almost the same antihistamine effect as 60mg Allegra pill.

Re: Bee Bread

#79

Post by saalweachter »

beala wrote: post #74
dugword wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they are. That is exactly what the Colony Collapse Disorder crisis is all about. The hives managed by beekeepers for the purpose of pollenating crops are mysteriously dying off, and they are having a hard time finding replacement swarms to manage.

I'm hardly a beekeeping expert, but I've read that human managed colonies are actually not in decline. "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." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-... The article argues that CCD has m…

The way an old-timer described it to me was that CCD amounts to an increase in overwintering failures from around 10% for well-managed hives to around 25-50%.

This in turn means that you've got to do a lot more splits (where you create a new hive by splitting an old hive into two, and either inducing them to produce a queen or adding a carefully-bred queen yourself) or buying new packages of bees from someone who has already done this for you. A new hive usually needs a year to get up to full strength -- you can occasionally take a little bit off a new hive, but not much, and most beekeepers don't even risk it.

As you say, 25-50% failure rates are expensive but currently within the range of what can be replaced; new packages of bees currently cost around $100-150 on the east coast, but aren't really hard to find. I'm somewhat curious how high of a failure rate can be sustained. It pretty much depends on how many splits you can generate a year starting from a single hive, which isn't a number I'm familiar with.

Re: Bee Bread

#80

Post by nommm-nommm »

noipv4 wrote: post #78
nommm-nommm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still doesn't work that way though. The GP didn't describe immunotherapy, they described "take a substance, feel better in a few minutes" like an aspirin. That is just not how immunotherapy works.

Do you have a hypothesis as to why it works? In my case it has almost the same antihistamine effect as 60mg Allegra pill.

No mechanism of action I know of other than placebo effect.

You did not describe anything that resembles immunotherapy. Immunotherapy takes a very long time (months to over a year) before you start to notice an improvement in symptoms and requires year round treatment, not just during allergy season. After 3-5 years treatment is discontinued.

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