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As always with these kinds of headlines the answer is no. Humans live in a symbiotic relationship with bees, we can not exist without each other.
As always with these kinds of headlines the answer is no. Humans live in a symbiotic relationship with bees, we can not exist without each other.
What do you mean? We can live without bees from bee-keeping just fine. That's like saying cows and us can't live without each other.
on edit: fixed grammar
As always with these kinds of headlines the answer is no. Humans live in a symbiotic relationship with bees, we can not exist without each other.
Our current civilization certainly seems to score very high on neuroticism. 50 years from now, people will label the Zeistgeist as a resurgence of old Victorianism, with different (in direction, not in kind) racial and sexual taboos and an extra dollop of hairshirt environmentalism.
In a way, beekeeping is stealing nectar from wild bees. I pretty much never see wild bees in my garden anymore - they're all honey bees, and usually some human is keeping/farming them - effectively stealing nectar from my garden and that of thousands of my neighbours that we had left out for wild animals.
As always with these kinds of headlines the answer is no. Humans live in a symbiotic relationship with bees, we can not exist without each other.
I think bees can easily live without humans, they would just became another insignificant species like many others, say for example, like Alburnoides Bipunctatus. Wait, why did I picked that one? What's so special about it that I picked it? Nothing, that's why I picked it.
As always with these kinds of headlines the answer is no. Humans live in a symbiotic relationship with bees, we can not exist without each other.
As always with these kinds of headlines the answer is no. Humans live in a symbiotic relationship with bees, we can not exist without each other.
The article is making the case that the answer is Yes. It goes over the reasons why the current way of Beekeeping (predominately for harvesting their honey) could be bad for bees and explains methods that the 'natural beekeepers' are using to make their pollination role more sustainable.
From the article:
> Most beekeepers’ colonies are much larger than those which occur in the wild, and rival colonies might be separated by only a few yards, rather than by half a mile. Much of the bees’ honey, which is supposed to get them through the winter, is taken before they have a chance to eat it. A queen bee goes on a spree of mating flights early in her life, and then lays the fertilized eggs until her death. In apiaries, queens often have their wings clipped, to interrupt swarming (a colony’s natural form of reproduction), and are routinely inspected, and replaced by newcomers, sometimes imported from the other side of the world. Propolis—a wonderful, sticky substance that bees make from tree resin and that has antibacterial qualities—is typically scraped out of hives by beekeepers because it is annoying and hard to get off their hands.
> Natural beekeepers leave their bees alone. They seldom treat for disease—allowing the weaker colonies to fail—and they raise the survivors in conditions that are as close as possible to tree cavities. They fill their hives with swarms that come in on the wing, rather than those which come from dealers who trade on the Internet.
As always with these kinds of headlines the answer is no. Humans live in a symbiotic relationship with bees, we can not exist without each other.
In a way, beekeeping is stealing nectar from wild bees. I pretty much never see wild bees in my garden anymore - they're all honey bees, and usually some human is keeping/farming them - effectively stealing nectar from my garden and that of thousands of my neighbours that we had left out for wild animals.