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The running thought is these non-native European honeybees couldn’t find forage at the right times due to climate change and these massive commercial hives died of malnutrition. That’s why introduced species and monoculture agriculture don’t work out so well.
Okay, but European honeybees in the US aren’t exactly new afaik. That would be like if all of the sudden, 80% of wild horses up and die and the answer is “well, they’re an introduced species, so it only makes sense”.
I definitely don’t want to downplay a crisis, but I feel like I’ve been seeing headlines saying “all the bees are dying and we don’t know why” every year for nearly 20 years now.
I’m no bee expert. Just seems to me, based on the headlines, bees would’ve been extinct 10 years ago.
Some cursory searching led me to Colony Collapse Disorder which seems to have no agreed-upon cause. It appears devastating losses to honey bee colonies started being reported around 1900. But it also mentions:
In 2024, the United States Census of Agriculture reported an all-time high in commercial honey bee hives (mostly in Texas), making them the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country.[38]
Link to the source cited there: https://archive.is/nfeb2
Apparently last year saw the largest honey bee populations in US history. Though they write that huge boom in honey bee population is a threat to other native pollinators, so I guess that presents its own unique problems.
Usually, when people talk about bees dying, they mean wild bees. Unlike honey bees they aren’t cultivated by us. They also tend to be better pollinators than honey bees, adapted to local plants that honey bees can’t handle well.
The issue is OP is spreading misinformation. You‘re right, we haven‘t lost 80% of the bee population, because this was a hypothetical statement in the article saying it would have consequences if it happened.
The person in the article says you can’t keep up the industry if 80% of the bees die every year.
Probably the same reason we had 40+ tornadoes, huge hailstorms, floods, and drought-enabled wildfires in six adjacent states within 48 hours. Anthropogenic climate change is real, whether you believe in it or not.
The upside is now farmers won’t have to worry about what to do with the crop surplus from trade wars, dismantled USAID, and defunded school lunch program.
Anthropogenic climate change is real, whether you believe in it or not.
You know who believes in climate change? Fossil fuel companies, insurance companies, the military industrial complex, and every single politician talking about buying or taking Greenland by force. All the very same people who have spent the past half century publicly denying the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Not only do they believe in it, but they are designing their profit models around it at our expense.
Dont forget that time the hurricane hit Tennessee and it fucking flooded the mountains
Everything is totally normal
Well, one would expect mountainous areas to flood because elevation focuses water flow. I’m in Florida, flattest state in the union. We never flood except in hurricanes, and those floods don’t last like they do in other places, in and out.
Still… I expect hurricanes in Florida, not in Tennessee.
Hurricanes are known to travel in land and up North though. The fact a hurricane hit Tennessee isn’t odd. It was the strength and the length it lingered over the state that made it devastating.
It’s always the lingering part. What was that one that fucked Houston not long ago? Sat on top of them forever. Hurricane Ivan was like that down here. Only a CAT-3 at landfall, but I listened to that freight train sound for over 10 fucking hours.
Please stop saying sacreligious comments like this. It’s offensive to religious people.
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Slap her in the face for me.
Mortified, but I am not a bee-ologist.
Honey bees are dying but you can help native bees in your area. Find out what they like and plant that shit. Also just letting weeds grow helps a lot of species.
I get leafcutter bees at my place as well as a few other solitary species
Weeds? I thought they were pests
As long as you mow them it’s all good. Just having a yard with anything than just a monoculture grass is better.
Weeds aren’t really a thing. A weed is just a plant we don’t like.
weeds are to gardens like my house is to HOAs.
G
I can’t do that! What about my nice green grass lawn? /s
My city will put a letter in my mailbox telling me to get rid of weeds and fine me $150 if I don’t. Rip
Ouch. I have been trying to plant native plants in our garden. Luckily I don’t have anything like that in my city.
How do they enforce that? HOA?
Cities have a lot of soft power in that regard. Mine, just as an example, bans parking on grass. Even if you’re not in a fancy neighborhood, and have been parking on your lawn underneath the spreading oak tree for the last 50 years, they can ticket you for it (and tow) if they feel like being ornery.
I think the usual wording for grass/plants goes along the lines of property values and nuisances to bring it within legal frameworks for what they can regulate.
No, the city rolls around and if there are things sticking up out of the ground high enough outside of a flower bed they take pictures and send you a letter
The actual city sends a fine. If you don’t clean it, they send a crew. If you don’t pay for the crew, they lien the property.
Source: got letter from the city a week ago.
In fairness, I’ve been dealing with a lot and there were some areas that looked like we were abandoned. I’ve been meaning to clean out the unwanted stuff so the flowers can grow. My lawn is mostly moss and clover and that’s not what they cared about.
Send them a letter back with the definition of a weed.
a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants.
If you want them there, they aren’t weeds.
Making bee hotels for solitary bees is child’s play. Take a chunk of wood, drill holes, hang in a tree.
Technical aspects:
- Don’t use pressure treated lumber, anything else is fine.
- Look up “solitary bee hotel” for your area to see what size holes to make for the locals. In any case, it’s going to be a variety of different sizes to cover all your bases. Doesn’t have to bee (heh) perfect.
- Make the holes, especially the edges, nice and smooth. They’re not dumb enough to nest their if the hole is raggedy and might jack up their wings.
That’s mostly it. You can research easily enough in an hour or less There’s a woman on YouTube that sells bee hotels and has solid advice for making your own. Wish I remembered her name. Anyone?
Damned satisfying when you find the holes plugged with wax! You have new tenants! Stupid easy and basically free.
CAVEAT: These things are single use. Chunk 'em out every season, or better, burn them. Keeps the mites out. Make another for free.
I don’t like this meme
Maybe if Monsanto can cross a Bee with a mosquito and release it into the wild, maybe things will be better? Maybe said mosquito will not mate with a Japanese killer wasp in an unfortunate twist of events?
Specifically, honey bees (Apis mellifera). Native bees that aren’t colony dwellers may not be impacted the same by the mites.
Who cares then, aren’t they only useful for monocropping large farms? Most US bee enthusiasts would instantly cull every honey bee if they could.
Personally, I care because I love honey, farm grown food, and they are a poster child for all bees. Without them, there is certainly a lot less care for native bees. While yes they are primarily important for large monocropped farms, that’s your food. Like, so much of your food. Natuu is very bee populations aren’t sufficient or interested in pollinating our food crops, so yes we should really care.
Do you like food? We use bees to grow that
You don’t need honey bees to grow food.
“Only”.
80% of crops grown in the US are pollinated by honey bees.. If you think grocery prices are bad now…
Why would the bee enthusiasts cull honey bees?
Because the aren’t native, would be my guess
That’s really interesting and I’d love to read more
Honeybees compete for resources with native bees and are much more efficient foragers, and it’s hard to state the scope of impact they have had on native bee populations, but most believe it to be significant.
They were introduced to North America in the 1600s and then again, over repeated colonizations as colonizers were frustrated that native bees didn’t produce honey. Native Americans called them “white man’s flies”.
Africanized honey bees were introduced from South America around the 1990s. Which are even more aggressive in their foraging and nature then their European cousins, although produce more honey.
Native bees are relatively docile and some variants lack the ability to sting at all.
Here is an article, or op ed about the problem: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-honey-bees/
Was it to make room to fit the 690% increase in newborns?
I was worried so I looked for the source of the information, it seems to be from 'Washington State University" from their website they say it concerns “Commercial honey bee colony”, so it might not be all bees (I don’t know enough to say what the difference is exactly), they say “60 to 70% losses” (not 80), and they also say “Over the past decade, annual losses have typically ranged between 40 and 50%.”, so it is probably worrying but not as much as the CBS article was making it seem.
so worry but not panicking yet. gotcha, nothing will be done then.
Part of the panicking should be wild bees. They’re dying at accelerated rates.
We also know why, commercial bee keeping is part of it, as is hobbies bee keeping.
And pesticides… and monoculture farming.
I don’t know whether you were satiric or not, but it feels like it, hard to tell on a text medium. No hard feelings either way 😄
If you were “mocking my post in a satiric way”: I didn’t mean to say that nothing should be done or that it was not a reason to worry. I actually believe we should protect our ecosystems, but I think we need accurate data and this kind of posts, even if they convey the “right” message according to me, are misleading and create false information about what is going on. I truly believe we should try to avoid doing this.
This story is about domesticated honeybees, which have been declining for decades due to Colony Collapse Disorder and other stressors. Native North American bees are in their own long-term decline, with 1 in 4 species at risk of extinction. However, domesticated honeybees are tremendously important for the pollination and yield of many crops important to humans, and this population drop, thought to be the largest annual losses seen, should be considered in the context of the longer decline, and the possibility that we could hit a tipping point when pollination, and a crucial pillar of our food system, could fail.
The longer I live the more I see modern civilization collapse inevitable and happening in the relatively near future.
How the fuck do you even prepare for something like that?
U don’t. U just watch it collapse. If u cannot control something, don’t worry too much. That’s my take. Enjoy everyday.
No idea.
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Fall back to the fundamentals - communities, you’re part of many, join more. The people in your community can work together for survival or or turn against each other. You have a chance if you work with people, but not much of one if you try to lone wolf it. History is prologue. (your community should include everyone you can get on board, I’m not saying huddle up, I’m saying join the fight - It’s wealth disparity and it’s a global war)
If we were to do that now, we could take it all back in a week, but we won’t do that. Humans have to lose something important to them before they really take a look around and desperation kicks in, and too many aren’t seeing much difference yet. If you really connect to your community, they’ll see your suffereing or someone elses and that might be the catalist for them, but we’re easy to pick off piecemeal and lazy as fuck, so we’re losing meters every day.
There’s volumes of context here and I’m getting dragged into minutia, but we die apart, live together. That’s the formula, history proves it.
Pesticides, same as always.
At least i saved one from my dogs water bowl yesterday 🤷♀️
This doesn’t say 80% of the bees have died.
Pretty huge distinction
I agree it does mention hundreds of millions but is confusing because…Shook said. “If we lose 80% of our bees every year,…” Not very clear in the article on exactly what percentage of the bee population died.
make sure you retract words like bias and gender from your articles and they will come back. they are just extremely bigoted.
I think you mean… Beegoted.
nice one!
Awww fuck… Bees are mostly colonies of females living in harmony?
