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Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

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Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#121

Post by scruple »

mulmen wrote: post #111
hammock wrote: post #96

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.

I found an article about it because I was also curious.

https://www.mainepublic.org/environment-and-outdoors/2022-05...

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#122

Post by Jedd »

I thought that Varroa destructor (a mite that attacks bees) had been determined to be a big causal factor? Improving tools for beekeepers, mostly chemical treatments, have ameliorated the situation.

Here in Australia we're V. destructor free. Well mostly. We've had 3 incursions, two of which were controlled, and the third is happening now with some fierce responses (colony and equipment destruction within a wide radius).

It's understood that this pest would destroy remaining feral colonies of honeybees (probably a good thing), but also have a huge cost for beekeepers and other susceptible (native) species.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#124

Post by hinkley »

peteradio wrote: post #103
hinkley wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hugelkultu…

Sometimes I just stand at arm's length and lean over an stare for a bit. The bees in such cases are too busy to bother with you (and indeed I've used this exercise as exposure therapy for myself and two kids who were all previously nervous around bees) and seeing three or four species in a five minute span, you can start to tell them apart in a way you won't get if you spread that duration out over a month.

Lavender and rosemary are very good stages in this regard, roses and the whole rose family (including blackberries, apples, cherries) are also good. If you're on the west coast the ceanothus bush is pollinator paradise.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#125

Post by Barrin92 »

tcmb wrote: post #87
Maursault wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>we are part of a balanced ecosystem

we're really not though. Extinction is about as natural as anything else. We've had many in our planet's history some wiping out 90% of life, for a variety of reasons. Your car runs on dead dinosaurs and trees that have been pressed and liquified into the sediment and we didn't bury them there, nature is hardcore that way.

Which is not to say that a balanced ecosystem isn't a great idea, but recognize it's an artificial one. Condemning hunters or humans or roads and just letting the Aurochs run wild is no guarantee for some kind of balance.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#126

Post by Dylan16807 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #82
Dylan16807 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh so recycling actually works, but we need fake jobs for people who don't care about economic efficiency? I'm glad we got some clear eyed realists in to explain this all to us. That's not what the op-ed is saying. The existence of benefits does not mean the benefits are bigger than the costs. In context, that sentence is part of an argument against the idea that landfills are filling up. So how big are the benefit…

So the quote: > Recycling remained inefficient and of dubious benefit, and never really caught on. Linking to an article that, in your words: > cites some data to say that recycling paper and metal does a good job and > the social good would be optimized by subsidizing the recycling of some metals But also says metal mining and logging communities are against it because they 'have accepted the environmental trade-off…

If mass recycling doesn't work well except for two materials, then it's not unreasonable to disparage recycling in general. Especially when you're talking about recycling as an alternative to landfills.

> Nor is cheaper ways of reducing CO2 a sensible argument. Every method of reducing CO2, except for one, has cheaper options. We should do all the ones that are a net positive, and so save us money, not only the very best one.

Since CO2 is all fungible, we should only spend significant amounts of money on the methods that are in the same ballpark as the cheapest option.

And what do you mean "save us money"? One main point of that piece was that it cost a lot of money to try to recycle everything.

You can't even give away many kinds of recyclables, after paying to collect them.

> The whole article is weak sophistry of this kind. As I said, it doesn't support the argument, just does its best to pretend it does.

The argument was that trash isn't piling up. Which is supported just fine.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#127

Post by conorcleary »

Jedd wrote: post #122

I thought that Varroa destructor (a mite that attacks bees) had been determined to be a big causal factor? Improving tools for beekeepers, mostly chemical treatments, have ameliorated the situation. Here in Australia we're V. destructor free. Well mostly. We've had 3 incursions, two of which were controlled, and the third is happening now with some fierce responses (colony and equipment destruction within a wide radi…

Ferel colonies of honeybees provide genetic diversity.

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#128

Post by _yb2s »

ephbit wrote: post #112
stjohnswarts wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Lust…

High fructose corn syrup and sucrose (table sugar, which is a combination of fructose and glucose) have roughly the same amount of fructose- 50%.

Also, what Lustig says is nonsense and isn't backed by any plausible mechanism or observational evidence. Alcohol and fructose aren't metabolized very similarly at all. He points out that if liver glycogen is constantly full, the liver has to convert extra fructose to fat (de novo lipogenesis) [1], eventually leading to fatty liver disease, which also happens to alcohol, and short chain fats (e.g. from eating fiber that gets fermented in the gut). As he admits in his own paper this doesn't happen unless you are massively overeating. People that are eating in calorie balance will use the fructose immediately for cellular energy as designed, with no ill effects. Reglarly overeating without exercising much isn't great for your liver because it keeps glycogen overfilled... but it really doesn't matter much what you're overeating.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/advances/article/4/2/226/4591631?lo...

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#129

Post by thaumasiotes »

mark_h wrote: post #114
m-i-l wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> 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.

Unlike the crops?

Re: Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

#130

Post by hedora »

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 call for action at the end is also not great. From what I can tell, these people are your best bet, assuming you want to help local wild bee populations. (If you have other suggestions, please let me know!)

https://xerces.org/

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