Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine • Hacker News Board

Re: Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

#31

Post by polynomial » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 7:26 AM UTC

lucideer wrote: post #4

I don't understand the purpose of this article. The headline seems to be pushing the message "relax, forget about it, everything's fine". The content of the article is much more ambiguous. It starts by saying a Hawaiian bee has been added to the endangered list, follows by explaining the effects of colony collapse disorder: little change in commercial bee numbers, harsh economic times for beekeepers, unmeasured and l…

Articles and headlines are written by different people with different roles and different goals.

Re: Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

#32

Post by sametmax » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 8:25 AM UTC

reidacdc wrote: post #6

That's an infuriating headline. The upshot of the article is, the bees that were recently in the news for newly being endangered are a small number of species in a geographically confined area. The commercially-important bees that are important for pollination are not endangered, and while mortality for these bees remains anomalously high due to colony collapse disorder, available stocks remain high because beekeeper…

Especially, I find it amazing this article considers that preserving only the bees we breed is important.

It's precisely the contrary.

The important bees are the wild ones, holding the biodiversity, pollinating non agricultural lands and being a responsive part of the ecosystem. Not the ones we are mechanizing with specialized intents, decorelated with their purpose in the natural order, unable contribute in a balanced way because we shape them for something.

Re: Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

#33

Post by beardicus » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 12:28 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #26

beardicus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The last feral North American honey bees were wiped out in the 1980s, by the Varroa mite. This is likely overstated a bit, though I can't find any recent definitive surveys of persistent feral honeybee hives. The best I can do is this: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... but they don't actually test any feral hives, just attempt to determine factors that could lead to survival with varro…

I'm fine with stipulating "mostly wiped out" rather than "eradicated" as long as we can both agree that they're not native to the country. They were brought here as livestock.

> as long as we can both agree that they're not native to the country

Of course. There's no deep ecological need for wild honeybees to exist in North America.