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Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture

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Re: Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture

#41

Post by lopis »

bborud wrote: post #34
lopis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not quite. Much of the industry for growing fruit depends on beekeepers renting out their bees as pollinators. As for cattle, well, yeah, they wholly depend on us. If you are in doubt just look at the relative sizes of populations of cattle vs mammalian wildlife.

Yes, cattle depends on us, but we definitely don't depend on them; that was the point I was trying to make.

Re: Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture

#42

Post by cryptonector »

I highly recommend Top-Bar Beekeeping: Organic Practices for Honeybee Health, by Les Crowder.

My bees are treatment-free and going strong, and we'll be converting all of our Langstroth hives to top-bar hives this coming Spring.

Basically, honeybee hives with mite treatment have high failure rates, and honeybee hives with no chemical treatments do better when the bees have been bred for mite resistance, so do the latter.

As for top-bar hives vs. Langstroth, it's nigh impossible to keep from killing bees with Langstroth hives every time you get into them, and that's what makes them sting. Besides wanting a better relationship with the bees, it feels real bad to kill any, so why do it? Langstroth hives are only advantageous for large-scale commercial beekeeping (because the "supers" stack, and because the frames fit neatly in honey extractors), but in every other way Langstroth hives are just awful.

Re: Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture

#43

Post by pvaldes »

dvh wrote: post #11
Lacerda69 wrote: post #3

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.

(second word in lowercase please: Alburnoides bipunctatus).

In any case some species are key species and have more impact on ecosystems than other.

Re: Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture

#44

Post by Modified3019 »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #15
londons_explore wrote: post #9

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.

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 nectar and pollen that flowers produce is in fact a limited resource, both in quantity and in time available.

Honeybees have the capability of depleting such resources because they are far more active than they actually need to be, which is one of the reasons we use them for crops with very high densities of flowers, like blueberries. They are efficient and thorough enough to get the job done.

There are times of the year (in particular, late summer/fall) where good flowers are especially hard to come by, and so solitary bees can have trouble trying to compete against a hive in the area when they are trying to gather the resources they need to reproduce. Meanwhile a hive also has honey stored so dips in availability during the year matter much less.

Re: Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture

#45

Post by defrost »

lopis wrote: post #41
bborud wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite. Much of the industry for growing fruit depends on beekeepers renting out their bees as pollinators. As for cattle, well, yeah, they wholly depend on us. If you are in doubt just look at the relative sizes of populations of cattle vs mammalian wildlife.

Yes, cattle depends on us, but we definitely don't depend on them; that was the point I was trying to make.

Oh, really?

How do you explain wild feral cattle thriving in the Kimberley, Arnhem Land, etc. then?

https://news.csu.edu.au/feature/are-feral-cattle-the-brumbie...

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/offtrack/the-banteng-...

http://www.windyhills.com.au/wild-cattle/

Re: Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture

#46

Post by BbzzbB »

pell wrote: post #39
mrweasel wrote: post #21

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.…

>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.

That's particularly a US problem, ours are not crammed like sardine cans.

Re: Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture

#47

Post by cryptonector »

mrweasel wrote: post #21

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.…

Strong, no-chemical-treatment hives with "good genetics" in low-pesticide environments have low loss rates.

Even the loss rates we see advertised (38% or whatever) are not existential problems for beekeeping because you can split hives (i.e., reproduce) at a higher rate anyways. So the switch to no-chemical-treatment plans is not that hard.

Honeybee colonies are mainly stressed by a) pesticides (in the pollen and nectar that they gather, in the wax that beekeepers give them to accelerate comb building, in the water they drink, and in the mite treatments they are subjected to), b) the varroa mites that have inadvertently been bred to be strong while the bees have been inadvertently bred to be weak.

Re: Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture

#48

Post by cryptonector »

londons_explore wrote: post #9

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.

I have every kind of wild local pollinator on my flowers as well my honeybees: wild solitary bees, wasps, butterflies, and hummingbird moths.

Re: Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture

#49

Post by mrweasel »

londons_explore wrote: post #9

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.

This is completely anecdotally but keeping honey bees in my garden appeared to attract a large number of wild bees, like bumblebees, ground nesting and solitary bees. Part of it might be that I've attempted to great an good environment for my own bees, part of it might also simply be that I notice bees a lot more.

Commercial beekeepers are a different story, but they mostly place their apiaries in areas where wild bees couldn't possibly manage to cover the entire area anyway, like fields.

One issue that might be at play in your case is that types of bees beekeepers normally keep are way better at dealing with pesticides, as compared to bumblebees and solitary bees. Your neighbors might be going a bit heavy on the spraying and some might actively be destroying the nests of ground nesting bees out of fear. For a few weeks each year my sidewalk is alive with ground nesting bees, while just a few meters away everything is fuck dead, because a stupid neighbor is allergic to bees and wasp and assumes that every bee is going to kill him (he doesn't keep an epi-pen so I question the seriousness of his affliction), so he sprays pretty much all sidewalks around here, except mine.

Re: Natural beekeepers are the radical dissenters of apiculture

#50

Post by loxdalen »

BbzzbB wrote: post #46
pell wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

That's particularly a US problem, ours are not crammed like sardine cans.

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