31–40 of 185 posts
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.
And bees steal the polen and the nectar from flowers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stealing is a weird choice of words. Do you steal the oxygen that you breathe, or the water that you drink ? For it to reach your tap, it has been stolen by some fish's lake
Wait until they realize bees do all that work without a profit incentive!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's true, but I do agree in part that we've a pretty good relationship with bees. And, any beekeeper will respect the bees and only take what's needed without making their life harder.
Beekeper extracts almost all honey and replaces it with sugar. Because sugar is cheap and bees survive with sugar. Edited typo
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stealing is a weird choice of words. Do you steal the oxygen that you breathe, or the water that you drink ? For it to reach your tap, it has been stolen by some fish's lake
The parent has a point, though I never thought about it that way. In a way a similar case would be if you had a squad of squirrels that gather seeds and nuts from your neighbour's gardens, and you would then take and sell the bounty that they bring back.
No of course not. Paywalled article so just guessing.
The real headline could be more accurately put as "Is modern amateur/hobbiest beekeeping making bee's genetically weaker?" "None of us knew at the time how strong the selection would be in the wild,” Seeley told me recently. “It turned out that the bees had the variation needed to develop the traits to resist the mites.” While beekeepers were experimenting with chemical treatments and hive designs, the bees in the fo…
It's not like beekeepers keep their hives significantly overlap with where wild bees live.
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. 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 thos…
Depending on how you view it that bit is actually wrong. You are specifically NOT ALLOWED to ship bees between e.g. Europe and North America. I think you can send sperm and maybe eggs (not sure if that's possible).
There's a lot of weird assumptions in the article. "Normal" beekeepers try to breed varroa resistant bees as well, but still trying to keep the non-resistant ones alive too. It might be faster to just let nature deal with the issue, but that means losing an insane amount of hives. It's basically the same as claiming that hunters don't care about animals or the forrest, or that dairy farms don't care about their cows.…
If you go by the conditions the majority of milk cows in industrialized nations live under that is a very obvious conclusion.