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Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

#21

Post by tptacek »

JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #3

Uh, I thought it was the wild bees that we were concerned about. And from the article about wild bees: "Of course, the discussion above concerns only commercial bees that are managed by humans and businesses. Wild bees — whether they're honeybees or one of our 4,000 other native bee species — face different difficulties. If those species suffer die-offs, there's nobody around to breed new queens and help them recover…

Wild honeybees have been extinct in the US for decades, owing to the Varroa mite.

Re: Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

#22

Post by onewaystreet »

ethbro wrote: post #16
onewaystreet wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Authors for major news sites don't write their own headlines which is why there is often a disconnect with the actual content of the article.

I see this comment a lot on poorly titled articles. My question, what job title is typically responsible for writing headlines?

Copy editor

Re: Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

#23

Post by tptacek »

EGreg wrote: post #11

They are talking about commercial bees. Not bees in the wild, which are dwindling. Just like tree farms don't mean rainforests aren't disappearing. People are turning the world into farms and this article is oblivious.

There are no North American wild honey bees.

Honey bees are an introduced species.

The last feral North American honey bees were wiped out in the 1980s, by the Varroa mite.

There are thousands of North American bee species that aren't honey bees. Some of them may be threatened by any number of factors (most likely: habitat encroachment).

But an important thing to remember about wild bees and the honey bee CCD phenomenon is that many wild bee species, including important pollinators, aren't social. Mason bees, for instance, don't have colonies: every female makes her own nest. CCD is a social bee phenomenon.

I think? it's possible that there are no North American native social bees that overwinter entire colonies the way honey bees do. For instance, all the bombus bees have colonies that last only a year (the colony produces new queens, which start entire new colonies). If that's the case, CCD is a phenomenon that definitionally only affects foreign introduced livestock bees.

Re: Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

#24

Post by tedunangst »

reidacdc wrote: post #6

That's an infuriating headline. The upshot of the article is, the bees that were recently in the news for newly being endangered are a small number of species in a geographically confined area. The commercially-important bees that are important for pollination are not endangered, and while mortality for these bees remains anomalously high due to colony collapse disorder, available stocks remain high because beekeeper…

How does the price of honey relate to fake honey? Like does honey cost more because people cracked down on fake honey, or is fake honey on the rise because of increased demand, or what?

Re: Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

#25

Post by beardicus »

tptacek wrote: post #23
EGreg wrote: post #11

They are talking about commercial bees. Not bees in the wild, which are dwindling. Just like tree farms don't mean rainforests aren't disappearing. People are turning the world into farms and this article is oblivious.

There are no North American wild honey bees. Honey bees are an introduced species. The last feral North American honey bees were wiped out in the 1980s, by the Varroa mite. There are thousands of North American bee species that aren't honey bees. Some of them may be threatened by any number of factors (most likely: habitat encroachment). But an important thing to remember about wild bees and the honey bee CCD phenome…

> The last feral North American honey bees were wiped out in the 1980s, by the Varroa mite.

This is likely overstated a bit, though I can't find any recent definitive surveys of persistent feral honeybee hives. The best I can do is this:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

but they don't actually test any feral hives, just attempt to determine factors that could lead to survival with varroa infestation. Anecdotally I know of a few feral hives that have survived multiple years in trees and barns, but I can't rule out the possibility that they're "seeded" by swarms from managed hives every spring (they're too far away for me to inspect regularly). Also, Youtube has a few folks doing cutouts of wild hives that have taken up residence in houses and sheds, and there's clear evidence of multiple years of work in some of these hives.

A bit of a nitpick, I admit, but I'd go with "mostly wiped out" personally.

Re: Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

#26

Post by tptacek »

beardicus wrote: post #25
tptacek wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no North American wild honey bees. Honey bees are an introduced species. The last feral North American honey bees were wiped out in the 1980s, by the Varroa mite. There are thousands of North American bee species that aren't honey bees. Some of them may be threatened by any number of factors (most likely: habitat encroachment). But an important thing to remember about wild bees and the honey bee CCD phenome…

> The last feral North American honey bees were wiped out in the 1980s, by the Varroa mite. This is likely overstated a bit, though I can't find any recent definitive surveys of persistent feral honeybee hives. The best I can do is this: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... but they don't actually test any feral hives, just attempt to determine factors that could lead to survival with varro…

I'm fine with stipulating "mostly wiped out" rather than "eradicated" as long as we can both agree that they're not native to the country. They were brought here as livestock.

Re: Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

#27

Post by EGreg »

tptacek wrote: post #26
beardicus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The last feral North American honey bees were wiped out in the 1980s, by the Varroa mite. This is likely overstated a bit, though I can't find any recent definitive surveys of persistent feral honeybee hives. The best I can do is this: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... but they don't actually test any feral hives, just attempt to determine factors that could lead to survival with varro…

I'm fine with stipulating "mostly wiped out" rather than "eradicated" as long as we can both agree that they're not native to the country. They were brought here as livestock.

It's amazing how much you guys know about bees ... I was relatively sure that tptacek's main job was computer related security, so having such a deep knowledge of bees is impressive.

Re: Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

#28

Post by tptacek »

EGreg wrote: post #27
tptacek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fine with stipulating "mostly wiped out" rather than "eradicated" as long as we can both agree that they're not native to the country. They were brought here as livestock.

It's amazing how much you guys know about bees ... I was relatively sure that tptacek's main job was computer related security, so having such a deep knowledge of bees is impressive.

It's the thing I love most about this site, is that it generates an incentive to go read journal articles about bees.

Things like this usually start with some seed of general knowledge or trivia --- in my case, it's listening to EconTalk, which had an episode with a bee economist talking about the misconceptions about colony collapse. But in an HN thread, you usually need something more specific than the general vibe of an EconTalk episode, so you go do a bunch of reading.

It's fun! It's like competitive librarianing.

(For what it's worth: that's not what I do in infosec and crypto threads.)

Re: Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

#29

Post by tupshin »

tptacek wrote: post #21
JauntyHatAngle wrote: post #3

Uh, I thought it was the wild bees that we were concerned about. And from the article about wild bees: "Of course, the discussion above concerns only commercial bees that are managed by humans and businesses. Wild bees — whether they're honeybees or one of our 4,000 other native bee species — face different difficulties. If those species suffer die-offs, there's nobody around to breed new queens and help them recover…

Wild honeybees have been extinct in the US for decades, owing to the Varroa mite.

Citation would be nice. This article talks about them having rebounded after near extinction:

http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/08/some-honeybee-coloni...

Re: Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

#30

Post by dvh »

Coworker's husband is a beekeeper. Recently he read in the newspaper that in his region EU granted few million euros for bee-reintroducing program. He had some losses so he went to local government office to ask if he as a small beekeeper is eligible for subsidies. They told him the money will only be used for advertisement to recruit new beekeepers.
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