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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations > “Some of the insects most affected include bees, butterflies, moths, beetles, dragonflies and damselflies.” Great. It’s gonna be nothing but roaches, mosquitos, and ants eventually.
(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…
Is neem realistic for large scale farms? We use it in our personal garden, but you need to continually re-apply every 4-5 days with really good coverage for a period of time for it to be effective. It has been hit or miss for us. If neem doesn't work then its oh well, plant something else, but we aren't selling a crop.
It probably helps that millions of people are helping insect and bird populations by planting stacks of wildflowers, doing No Mow May, and being a bit nicer to local wildlife which all adds up.
Last year I had a plant to move a flat stone behind a masonry retaining wall on my property to be a hat on a low stone wall that extended off of the end of it, hoping to create some bee habitat. The rock turned out to be too heavy to move, and as soon as I started jostling it, bumble bees came out from under it to see what the ruckus was. So apparently that rock was working just fine where it was. Instead I bought some new stone, but I haven't observed any bees so far this year.
Some people use old pots for this task, but I know people, and an upturned pot is going to be inspected, potentially destroying the hive. Kids in particular would be both more prone to this, and more traumatized to learn what they'd done. A big ol' rock is less of an attractive hazard.
(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…
Colony collapse to some degree is also supposedly normal, see 'beepocalypse nah' (sarah taber) https://soundcloud.com/farm-to-taber-podcast/farm-to-taber-0...
Other fauna have declined as well, without us noticing.
I go to northern Maine a few times a year and I’m always looking for moose. I used to be able to find them. Now I only see them when I’m in the air (from a plane).
My friend showed me a study the state did tracking 60 newborn moose calves. Due to overwhelming winter tick population, 90%(!) did not survive the first year, and therefore could not reproduce. This problem has led to a massive decline of moose.
This article buries its lede, which is about how honey bees get all the attention but are at less risk than wild bees: > And that brings us to the actual problem. The honey bee (Apis mellifera) is only one of about 20 thousand different bee species. The non-honey bees are usually referred to as wild bees, and each location has its native species. According to an estimate from researchers at Cornell University in 2006…
Organics are important not because GMOs are the enemy but rather because the land use change is inherently bad for all life in that area. GMOs don't have to lead to monoculture crops that span acres or rampant neonicotinoid insecticides, but they often do, and it's precisely at that point we can see drastic changes in a biome's stability and therefore the health of bees among many other pollinators. That's why we need to be talking about insect numbers at large and not only bees.
The study of biodiversity has an extremely difficult time modeling these kinds of changes, and that's probably why many scientists won't go to bat against this kind of land use change. A self-respecting scientist won't say that converting croplands to monocultures ready for insecticide use lead to biodiversity die-off because it's hard to actually track the fluctuations between species. It takes so much time to collect data to analyze before we even get an inkling of the interplay. We understand so little about the microscale interactions and how it fits into our larger understanding of agriculture and land development.
For those who think this is all overblown and alarmist, go sit on the grass -- if you can find a patch -- and stare at a spot until it comes alive. Things are moving around and teeming with a multitude of species of plants and insects. The reality you see escapes unnoticed until you stop to think about the ecological systems that underpin our fragile existence. Our health depends on a functional biosphere. If we cannot figure out how to share the earth with its other inhabitants, what the fuck are we doing going to Mars?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're talking about trying to stem the destruction of wild species here (The problem really isn't about domesticated honeybees), then you should definitely consider the fact that spraying at night won't help those wild bees which are nocturnal [1], nor does your point of view on these address the fact that these pesticides have a degree of environmental persistence. [2] This isn't demonization, it's just straight…
You're mistaken. only big ag can pivot. The smaller your are, the harder it is to keep up with all the regulation. Notice also the phenomenon of regulatory capture.