The bee apocalypse is still here. The bees haven’t come back. 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 sur…
Do you have a link to the study? I’m curious how that survival rate compares to the past.
It's no worse than sugar. Both are unnecessary for humans and can be extracted as needed from fats and proteins by the human body.
According to Dr. Robert Lustig of University of California fructose is indeed worse than sugar. [1]
It's been a good while since I've watched this video. As far as I remember, he argues that fructose is to the human body strikingly similar to alcohol. Since (unlike glucose) fructose can neither be utilized by muscles nor by the brain, it gets treated more or less like a toxic substance in the liver.
In the video Lustig claims that fructose might even be harder on the liver than alcohol.
So I'd conclude: more fructose --> less healthy. Thus High Fructose Corn Sirup HFCS = far from healthy.
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 f…
They're loved by crop farmers where I live too (I also learnt recently), but they're illegal to cultivate because they're an introduced species.
(Now that I write that, I assume honeybees are too, but perhaps the honey industry is well entrenched)
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…
Same here on our tiny farm. I don't need any more hobbies, but I often entertain keeping bees. But I also have a bias towards native plants and native insects. So I cultivate lots of flowering plants, and leave areas wild, but have never done anything with honeybees. I kinda wish there was a native Northeastern American bee that had some of the utility of honeybees for sugar and/or wax production. TIL that bumblebees…
Consider caring for some other solitary bees. Personally, I like leafcutter and mason bees, which mostly just means providing homes (hollow tubes), construction materials (leaves & mud respectively), and flowering plants. In late winter, you harvest the cocoons to remove parasite-ridden or diseased (fungal, usually). They are aggressive pollinators and if you grow fruit & vegetables you will see increased yield that makes up for the lack of wax & honey.
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.
I thought they were the Africanized ones? Those were the ones I read about as a kid in my school library, and the way they depicted their projected spread across the USA made it look like a pestilence worthy of Revelation. I honestly thought I wasn't going to live to become an adult because we'd all be over taken by super aggressive bees.
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, and I’m not saying this to deny climate change: variations between the coldness of a given winter and when spring onsets will, in general, greatly affect insect populations. Climate affects both how many survive the winter and how they migrate. Add oscillating patterns to that as predatory animals react delayed to that.
Some years you will see huge winged ants, other years will be heavy with mosquitoes, other years will have giant hornets.
Bumblebees are a genus[1] (_Bombus_) of (wild) bees. There are many more genera of bees (taxonomic superfamily _Apoidea_) out there. They are, however, adorable chubby fluffs. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank
I believe they prefer to be referred to as fluffy chönks.
I always called them flying cotton balls. They're also not aggressive, so working around them isn't likely to get you a sting, as opposed to those damn yellow jackets. I get all species are important but I hate those things.
If there weren't hunters around to hunt them to extinction, they would have depleted natural resources and starved and been a lethal danger to people on future roads and highways. Hunters are entitled to our eternal gratitude for providing these services.
I don't know, maybe one day we will see that we are part of a balanced ecosystem, and that this balance is ultimately more important than having good roads.
> balance is ultimately more important than having good roads
...or ever-increasing numbers of humans living an ever-more-consumerist life.