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The bee that everyone wants to save

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Re: The bee that everyone wants to save

#51

Post by matt_kantor »

bombcar wrote: post #41
b3ing wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honeybees aren’t native to North America

Neither are humans, apparently. I wonder if it would be possible to experiment a bit - ban honeybee hives in a 10 mile square radius, or perhaps in that area that bans all radio transmitters. See what happens.

> Neither are humans, apparently.

That depends on how you draw the line. Most would consider buffalo[0] to be native to North America, but they arrived less than 200000 years ago. If you go far enough back, no life is native to anywhere except wherever abiogenesis occurred.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bison

Re: The bee that everyone wants to save

#52

Post by jibbit »

QuaArbiter wrote: post #49

Humble recommendation; https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m002t686/my-garden-of... (Wildlife film-maker Martin Dohrn is bee obsessed. He has found over 60 species in his Bristol garden and sets out to film them, with mind-blowing results.)

This was genuinely one of the best bits of TV i've ever seen

Re: The bee that everyone wants to save

#53

Post by gus_massa »

bombcar wrote: post #44
chongli wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just need to supply the native plants they prefer to pollinate, they’ll do the rest. If you’re wondering about whether you can harvest honey from them, I don’t think so. Most native pollinator species don’t produce honey. Bumblebees do produce a kind of honey, but it’s much thinner and less concentrated than proper honey (which has had most of the water evaporated off by the wing beats of the bees).

A thousand years of effort might be able to "domesticate" the bumblebee and make it produce something akin to usable amounts of honey - but unlikely to be worth it.

Someone domesticated foxes in 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox , so perhaps it's possible to domesticate bumblebee in a few decades - but unlikely to be worth it.

Re: The bee that everyone wants to save

#54

Post by smallstepforman »

As with all things commercial, my neighbour keeps 40 hives and extracts too much honey in the autumn, resulting in desperate hungry bees in the spring that get very aggressive. If he left them more honey (less profits), they wouldnt be as hungry or aggressive. The entire neighbourhood suffers due to the antics of a single owner. Legally, he’s within the council regulations so there is nothing we can do … Its impossible to sit outside from 9am-6pm in April and May. Once there is enough food, they calm down.

Re: The bee that everyone wants to save

#56

Post by eszed »

neonnoodle wrote: post #40
bregma wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honeybees are livestock. They're no more endangered than chickens or cows. If we need more, we just breed more. In most places honeybees are raised they couldn't even survive in the wild. Just like cows and chickens and pigs. As with most livestock, without human intervention they would probably be wiped out.

“Breeding more” bees is not as trivial as raising other animals, because bee reproduction depends on hive stability. Other animals are kept fully enclosed in captivity and can be artificially inseminated in some cases. Bees are semi-wild and have to be free to leave the hive to forage, and if they don’t return or if the hive collapses, you can’t “breed more.”

Fun fact: queen bees can be artificially inseminated, and most commercial queens are. Beekeepers prefer naturally-inseminated queens, because they're stronger, but "nature" can't keep up with commercial demand.

You're correct about "breeding more" not being trivial, but they do it on an industrial scale. In really broad strokes: in late winter, in preparation for pollination season, they feed their hives intensively (with sugar syrup) and add extra brood boxes for the queens to fill with eggs. Then they split the hives, leaving the old queen in one box, and adding new queens to the box(es) they take off. Voila! Double (or more) the hives.

Pollination is where commercial beekeepers earn their living, by renting out hives of bees to farmers. Honey production is not necessarily an afterthought, even though it doesn't really turn a profit - it's worth doing because you'll be putting the bees on nectar flows for the summer, anyway, so you won't have to feed them, and extracting (some of) the honey covers transportation costs - but all the money's in pollination.

I could keep going and going - queen production and hive splitting are fascinating topics on their own - but I'll stop before I risk boring people with an over-long comment. I have commercial beekeepers in my family, and I've worked (summer / vacation jobs, when I was a kid) every part of the process.

(This is all in a USA-ag context. Beekeeping is - very! - different in other parts of the world.)

Re: The bee that everyone wants to save

#57

Post by j_bum »

smallstepforman wrote: post #54

As with all things commercial, my neighbour keeps 40 hives and extracts too much honey in the autumn, resulting in desperate hungry bees in the spring that get very aggressive. If he left them more honey (less profits), they wouldnt be as hungry or aggressive. The entire neighbourhood suffers due to the antics of a single owner. Legally, he’s within the council regulations so there is nothing we can do … Its impossib…

Have you ever talked to him about this?

Re: The bee that everyone wants to save

#58

Post by mapt »

smallstepforman wrote: post #54

As with all things commercial, my neighbour keeps 40 hives and extracts too much honey in the autumn, resulting in desperate hungry bees in the spring that get very aggressive. If he left them more honey (less profits), they wouldnt be as hungry or aggressive. The entire neighbourhood suffers due to the antics of a single owner. Legally, he’s within the council regulations so there is nothing we can do … Its impossib…

"I'm going to start spraying imidacloprid if I keep getting stung"

Re: The bee that everyone wants to save

#59

Post by chasil »

pfdietz wrote: post #50
bregma wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's not as much crossover as you might think. In North America the native pollinators are adapted to the native plants and can't even pollinate the introduced eurasian ones. And it goes the other way: honeybees can't pollinate the native plants, only the introduced eurasian ones. If course, if you're in Europe, honeybees are the native pollinators. At least around the Mediterranean.

So, what you're saying is that honeybees are facilitating the spread of invasive plants in North America? Seems like a definite negative.

Those ships have literally sailed, centuries ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange

Re: The bee that everyone wants to save

#60

Post by pfdietz »

chasil wrote: post #59
pfdietz wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what you're saying is that honeybees are facilitating the spread of invasive plants in North America? Seems like a definite negative.

Those ships have literally sailed, centuries ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange

Invasives are an ongoing and escalating problem.
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