51–60 of 185 posts
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Bees steal nectar, not pollen, but in exchange the flower reproduces
Bees "steal" nectar (sugar) AND pollen (protein) :-)
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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.
If the bees are in a man made hive they need you to remove honey so that they have room to lay. If you don't they will leave and not all of that honey is going with them.
Honeybees produce more honey than they need for several reasons, mainly that a) they are natural hoarders, b) we've bred them to hoard even more.
It's true that colonies can become pollen-bound and/or nectar-/honey-bound, and thus have too little space for brood. When this happens it's very likely that the colony will swarm off, leaving behind as few as 20% or so of the bees behind, as well as and swarm cells from which one victorious queen will emerge, and then the rump colony will have plenty of honey while it's weak and recovering its numbers. During that time they'll consume whatever it was they had too much of and thus make room for brood.
A different article I read this week says urban bees exceed the feeding capacity in the city in some places and we need to be more circumspect about who, and how many bees. More diverse pollination insects would probably be net beneficial in bee pollinated foods.
Urban beekeepers in low-capacity areas will give up when their hobby colonies fail. Let them.
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.
Also hives can (and do) abscond and go feral from the beekeepers hives any time they wish. They stay because the conditions are good.
Colonies do abscond, absolutely, and there's lots of feral honeybee colonies out there.
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That's particularly a US problem, ours are not crammed like sardine cans.
Source?
Note that the rules are worse for cows breed for meat.
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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
Don't buy commercial honey. Buy local, small- and medium-batch honey.
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> 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…
> replaced by newcomers, sometimes imported from the other side of the world 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).
Germplasm (which I think is used to artificially inseminate queens) does seem less restricted:
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/planthealth/import...
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If the bees are in a man made hive they need you to remove honey so that they have room to lay. If you don't they will leave and not all of that honey is going with them.
Eh, it's not quite that simple. Honeybees produce more honey than they need for several reasons, mainly that a) they are natural hoarders, b) we've bred them to hoard even more. It's true that colonies can become pollen-bound and/or nectar-/honey-bound, and thus have too little space for brood. When this happens it's very likely that the colony will swarm off, leaving behind as few as 20% or so of the bees behind, as…
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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
If you mean that the larvae combs are removed and replaced by sugar... most probably not. The idea is having as much bees by beehive as you can breed.
If you mean that beekeepers remove "almost all" honey leaving bees to starve, this is an oversimplification. Any professional beekeeper know that will need to leave enough honey for winter. Leaving a minimum of 12-15 Kg of honey is standard and should suffice for the bees. If the beehive looks weak may not be harvested at all. Sugar is provided if needed as winter emergency feeding. The beekeeper will feed the bees in autumn also to assure that the fall born bees are as strong as fatty as 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.…
Is there a suggestion here that people who kill animals for fun/leisure care for them? In the same sense that one might use the word 'care' when referring to a loved one or a pet?