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Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

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Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#61

Post by h2odragon »

peteradio wrote: post #15

> However, the numbers may sound more alarming than they really are because honey bees are efficiently bred and managed by humans. Could that be part of the problem, they mention diversity loss in habitat, how about diversity of honeybee genetics. At the same time, HoneyBees are basically barnyard animals, we don't monitor the collapse of pig populations as they head to the slaughterhouse. I understand its not quite…

Remember "Killer Bees"? People killed a lot of wild honeybee hives from fear they'd hybridize and introduce new genes into the domestic population.

There's a few people who will talk about the lack of diversity in domestic bee genetics. AFAIK they're not popular, everybody wants to blame anyone but regulators.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#62

Post by henearkr »

oblak wrote: post #60
henearkr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of being alarmed of the Bee Apocalypse is that you look at the honey bees as an indicator, just like the lichens on trees are an indicator of air pollution (few lichens mean a bad air quality). When honey bees are dwindling, pretty much all the insects are too. The Bee Apocalypse has not gone anywhere, it's just still here, and it is in fact an Insect Apocalypse, which is many orders of magnitude wors…

I don't know what's driving it but I've been observing sharp changes in insect populations that visit our balcony which has been completely taken over by some kind of huge black wasp/hornet monsters. These bastards seem to hunt baby grasshoppers all day long and butcher all kinds of other wasps and bees, too. I used to find piles of chopped bodies but until competition got the message and show no more. I even found a…

The decline of insects has brought an unbalance that may make some species over-represented as a consequence.

But what you are seeing can also be a case of climate change moving the habitats of species around, and make them live where they did not live before (because also prevent them from living anymore where they had always been living).

Edit: thanks for the compliment :D

Just for the record, I'm an insects lover (also more generally a lover of Nature). And the situation is making me very, very sad.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#63

Post by JoBrad »

synu wrote: post #53
michael1999 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reasons that domesticating any animal leads to the extinction of the wild variant - habitat displacement - competition for food - disease

Aren’t there still some wild dogs, cats, horses, sheep, goats, and everything else humans have domesticated? Or are you being very specific about what went extinct, or maybe predicting future extinctions (in which case I’m curious more about what you mean?) Edit: sorry if the question came off as rude and that’s why it was downvoted, I was sincerely curious what you meant.

I did some light searching, and it would seem that your examples don’t support your viewpoint. I didn’t look into all of them, but there is only 1 truly wild horse species, which was actually extinct in the wild at one point. The rest are feral horses. Canis familiaris is the descendent of an extinct species. Many (most?) wolves and other wild dog species that do not live well among humans are either currently or were until recently endangered.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#64

Post by DiggyJohnson »

42e6e8c8-f7b8-4 wrote: post #41
photochemsyn wrote: post #6

(1) Stop using neonicotinoid pesticides. There are plenty of alternatives for protecting food crops from insect infestations, such as neem oil applied as a foliar spray or a soil soak in response to infestations. Neonictoninoides are based on the tobacco nicotine molecule structure, but are typically chlorinated and modified to make them more persistent and toxic to insects relative to animals. There's a good argumen…

Demonization of neonics is misplaced. You can spray at night when bees aren't active. You can spray when your plants aren't in bloom and attracting bees. Oh well, the 2 minutes hate have emerged against neonics and farmers pivot like they ways do.

> Demonization

This is a dramatic overstatement. You’re disagreeing about neonics, I’m sorry if that’s hard not to take personally but it seems like something than could be discussed without the vitriol.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#65

Post by jamal-kumar »

oblak wrote: post #60
henearkr wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of being alarmed of the Bee Apocalypse is that you look at the honey bees as an indicator, just like the lichens on trees are an indicator of air pollution (few lichens mean a bad air quality). When honey bees are dwindling, pretty much all the insects are too. The Bee Apocalypse has not gone anywhere, it's just still here, and it is in fact an Insect Apocalypse, which is many orders of magnitude wors…

I don't know what's driving it but I've been observing sharp changes in insect populations that visit our balcony which has been completely taken over by some kind of huge black wasp/hornet monsters. These bastards seem to hunt baby grasshoppers all day long and butcher all kinds of other wasps and bees, too. I used to find piles of chopped bodies but until competition got the message and show no more. I even found a…

That sounds really alarming to have to be around (no pun intended). What part of the world is this in, I was hearing something about the pacific northwest experiencing invasive Japanese giant 'killer' hornets at some point in the past couple of years, I thought the course of action in that case was calling the wildlife authorities to try and stem the spread?

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#66

Post by henearkr »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #65
oblak wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what's driving it but I've been observing sharp changes in insect populations that visit our balcony which has been completely taken over by some kind of huge black wasp/hornet monsters. These bastards seem to hunt baby grasshoppers all day long and butcher all kinds of other wasps and bees, too. I used to find piles of chopped bodies but until competition got the message and show no more. I even found a…

That sounds really alarming to have to be around (no pun intended). What part of the world is this in, I was hearing something about the pacific northwest experiencing invasive Japanese giant 'killer' hornets at some point in the past couple of years, I thought the course of action in that case was calling the wildlife authorities to try and stem the spread?

I have seen an other wasp (I'm in Japan) than the 'giant killer hornets' killing (decapitating) what looked like either another wasp/bee either a bee-looking fly.

It was quite a small-scale wasp, a black one with narrow white stripes, but its technique was very good. It just dropped next to where I was sitting holding its prey which was trying to escape.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#67

Post by solardev »

peteradio wrote: post #57
solardev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honeybees are basically an invasive species that humans brought to the Americas in order to pollinate old-world crops (and also harvest honey). The thing is, we've replaced a lot of native new-world ecosystems and foods with old-world crops that depend on old-world bees. There are a few separate problems that the media often mixes up: One is that our old-world crops aren't getting enough old-world bees to meet their…

To which old-world crops do you refer?

(Not my knowledge, just repeating sources): almonds, some apples, melons, alfafa, plums, avocado, blueberry, cherry, pear, cucumber, sunflower, cranberry, kiwi, etc.

Source: PDF page 4: https://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/poll...

Background, in order from "most readable" to "scholarly":

https://www.museumoftheearth.org/bees/agriculture

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

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.262413599

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8396518/

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#69

Post by BirAdam »

What happened is that the apocalypse did happen, is still happening, and will continue to happen until such time as people quit using tons of pesticides.

Worse is that warmer air usually means more oxygen is available which should make insect and arachnid populations explode, and should result in physically larger insects and arachnids. That we do not see this speaks to the health of these populations.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#70

Post by foobiekr »

eru wrote: post #9
Overtonwindow wrote: post #2

Tangentially related, I wonder if anyone has done a meta-analysis about media reported calamities, like Zika, the bee population dying off, etc., and doing a follow up. Then comparing it to what the media reported initially. Was this accurate, blown out of proportion, understated, or simply sensational reporting?

Doing this for back-issues of Zero Hedge would be particularly entertaining.

ZH is a great example of the asymmetric warfare of fighting bullshit. They report a mix of truth, distorted interpretations and wholly made up nonsense simultaneously. It costs them almost nothing to generate this trash, and efforts to inspect it would be stymied by the level of effort in tracking citations (if they exist, which is almost never) or even just reporting on whether some predicted topic occurred. Another problem is that many of the predictions are premised on a non-reality that in and of itself makes addressing the content difficult.

disclaimer: I love reading ZH and have for at least a decade because it is entertaining in a gross way. They are basically consistently wrong but like crypto people, everything is positive signs that they are right.

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