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Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

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Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#101

Post by Turing_Machine »

haspok wrote: post #44
Turing_Machine wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> go back to tried and tested agricultural methods https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US... "Tried and tested" agricultural methods produced about 20 bushels of corn per acre. Current "artificial modern chemicals" methods produce about 160. Eight times as much. > your harming your own wasteland that for some reason you grow copious amounts of corn on The reason is that it feeds a substantial po…

Long live High Fructose Corn Syrup!

The same is true for wheat, rice, and virtually every other staple crop.

Not to mention that going back to the "traditional" methods would require that 90% of the population be dedicated to performing manual agricultural labor, the bulk of which has historically been performed by unfree people (i.e., slaves and serfs).

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#103

Post by peteradio »

hinkley wrote: post #94
vr46 wrote: post #20

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.

If you're trying to help bumble bees, they tend to like to build their nests in the ground under/around rocks, or occasionally in dense duff like straw bales/wattles. 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 a…

I unwittingly disturbed a solo bumblebee who made his winter home in my compost pile. I wasn't quite sure what I came across, I'd unearthed a wildly vibrating ball of fine fluff, once I teased it apart out flew a big ol' bumblebee. I've got dozens of bumblebees around my yard this part of the summer as our comfrey goes to flower. I believe they winter among my raspberries where its basically an undisturbed hugelkultur mound. Besides bumblebees and carpenter bees I'm pretty much unaware if I'm looking at a wild bee or some type of fly. There are at least a dozen probably closer to two dozen different bee/fly species on the raspberries alone this time of year. I also see honeybees but they stick to the clover, I will see more of them when sunflowers and stonecrop flower. I feel very fortunate to see that kind of variety, we even get monarch butterflies enough to cause the branches to move under their collective weight, I wasn't aware that happened outside of Mexico.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#104

Post by m-i-l »

jamal-kumar wrote: post #22
kibwen wrote: post #13

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…

I think the colloquial term for (edit; the most commonly well-known) many wild bees in English is "bumblebees". They're often burrowing species that don't have honey producing hives (They do stuff like make little caves in moss, dirt, and underbrush), and are often crucial pollinators of certain species of plants which are specifically attractive to certain wild bees (Orchids are a good example here) but which domest…

Random trivia I learned from a visit to a fruit farm a few weeks back: Fruit farmers much prefer bumble bees to honey bees because they're much better fruit tree pollinators - bumble bees start much earlier in the day than honey bees (e.g. 07.30 vs 12.30), will work at much lower temperatures, and will pollinate 6 flowers in the time a honey bee takes to do 1 (because the honey bees tend to stick around longer on a flower to get more nectar out).

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#105

Post by mistrial9 »

tcmart14 wrote: post #71

Still happening, it’s just now maintaining bee colonies and taking them on the road to pollinate is now an industry.

there is a single man who was/is credited with starting this so-called industry -- it was on the cover of a New York Times sunday supplement, long ago.. not everyone was thrilled by this, as you can imagine. When big trucked-bee death event happened contemporaneously with documented colony collapse, I bet that he had his name scrubbed from more than one website.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#106

Post by tacocataco »

tehchromic wrote: post #97

Humans are wiping out the planetary biome as predicted

Do you think industrialization led to atrophy of our ability to adapt to our environments? (The reason we're apex predator)

Or maybe modern civilization requires more long term planning then our brains are wired for?

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#107

Post by tacocataco »

solardev wrote: post #67
peteradio wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

Corn beans and squash?

https://www.reneesgarden.com/blogs/gardening-resources/celeb...

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#108

Post by veddox »

zahma wrote: post #99

I appreciate that she draws the link between monoculture crops, land use, and the health of ecosystems upon which agriculture depends. 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 p…

While I heartily agree with most of your comment, I must strongly disagree with the third paragraph (this is exactly what I'm doing my PhD on):

> 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

Although you are correct that the details are complicated and different species respond in different ways, the overall picture is abundantly clear. Intensive agriculture with large monocultures, simplified landscapes, and heavy fertiliser/pesticide input is wreaking havoc on biodiversity around the world. The scientific literature has been very explicit about this for over twenty years [e.g. 1-5], and lots of scientists (including my colleagues and I) are actively engaging with farmers, NGOs, and policy-makers to find workable solutions to ameliorate the problem.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2005.00782.x [2] https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1253425 [3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.03.002 [4] https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14606 [5] https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abg6995

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#109

Post by WhitneyLand »

henearkr wrote: post #51
kibwen wrote: post #13

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…

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…

>honey bees are dwindling

It seems they are not dwindling.

That was one of the clarifications of the piece. The bigger concern is the number of species rather than the number of honeybees.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#110

Post by TaylorAlexander »

jb1991 wrote: post #92

I thought this was going to be about the impending doom of the Mexican killer bees we were all warned about in the 80s but that never came. It was in the news for months about a cloud of killer bees.

One problem with the news is that every issue of concern gets blown way out of proportion in the news until it sounds like some kind of existential disaster, and then when total disaster does not come, people think the issue wasn't nonsense. But in reality many of these things are a real problem, just not quite at the scale the news has made it out to be. But what I see time and time again is people dismissing issues of concern because of how the media treated the issue, when what we should really be doing is trying to read through the media's sensationalism to the underlying facts. But I don't think enough people have really internalized how much of the media is sensationalism and lies. People know it when you ask them, but then they go on and believe it all anyway.
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