U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
> "The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies -- that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers -- is now the highest it's been in 20 years."
So the absolute numbers are up, great, but that did not come for free:
> "The average retail price of honey has roughly doubled since 2006"
Or, put in startup lingo, the churn is still high, but we're just hiding it by paying more to acquire a larger number of bees. CCD is still killing off bees, but we're just spending more to compensate.
This is the dodgeyness: any good HN reader knows that it's your churn that kills your finances in the end.
And that's where the insanity lies: I believe that CCD has basically been conclusively traced to a certain class of pesticides... what sounds insane to me is we have created a toxic environment that has increased the leaking in the boat, but it's okay because we can just spend more money on bigger bilge pumps instead of addressing the underlying cause of the leak.
Honey bees are a livestock animal, tied directly to agriculture. Neonicotinoids are popular in part because they're a narrow spectrum pesticide targeted at insect biology, and have fewer ill effects on other mammals than other pesticides.
Here's the question: if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture, and CCD can be mitigated by more aggressive colony generation strategies, why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all? The market seems to have already done that.
I'm concerned that we haven't proven yet that we can properly mitigate CCD long term with aggressive colony generation strategies, at least not long term. We need more data.
>Using historic data sets, we quantified the degree to which global change over 120 years disrupted plant-pollinator interactions in a temperate forest understory community in Illinois, USA. We found degradation of interaction network structure and function and extirpation of 50% of bee species. Network changes can be attributed to shifts in forb and bee phenologies resulting in temporal mismatches, nonrandom species extinctions, and loss of spatial co-occurrences between extant species in modified landscapes. Quantity and quality of pollination services have declined through time. The historic network showed flexibility in response to disturbance; however, our data suggest that networks will be less resilient to future changes.
News article: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/28/wild-bees...
Pesticides are far from the only factor, but adding that to habitat loss and climate change is hardly helping.
REVIEW: An overview of the environmental risks posed by neonicotinoid insecticides http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12111/f...
Forget about the bees, it doesn't sound like something i would like to have on my food...
Edit: I have a lot of sympathy for the EU, they are in a tough situation.
Unintended consequences of large-scale ecological engineering perhaps. Sure, commercial beekeepers can increase prices and the neonicotinoid users can accept it as an indirect cost of their choice of pesticide, but what about the large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied into commercial interests, but on which we still depend?
Seems to me like there's a huge indiscriminant spillover effect into an incredibly complex system, the implications of which can not be easily predicted nor priced.
One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost onto carbon emissions. Also note how you said "have fewer ill effects on other mammals"... there are still effects, and asbestos seemed like a miracle material before the long-term effects were studied.
The indiscriminate usage of an chemical toxic enough to cause measurable ecological web disruption sounds like a geo-engineering quagmire to me, even if the commercial front-line can compensate with higher prices. How do you accurately price what you don't know?
Actually, this isn't a shortcoming of the market as such. It's a failure in conjunction of our incomplete recognition of private property rights. By preventing certain types of property from having private ownership, we don't allow the market to correct itself. More specifically, if we had some private entity or entities that were recognized as the owners of air or water, then they would be able to recover damages from the polluters, thus removing ability to externalize the cost of pollution.
But once you start removing things from the purview of the market (in this case by saying that nobody can own it, and thus nobody has an ownership interest in protecting or has a right to damages), then you're actively preventing the market from correcting. I think it's really amazing that the market does as well as it does, considering how ubiquitous are the regulations that handicap it.
Edit: I should have read farther down the chain, where this [1] mentions the same idea.
I volunteer to be that entity.
I really don't think you need to worry too much about that.
The theorem states that if trade in an externality is possible and there are sufficiently low transaction costs, bargaining will lead to an efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property.
In the interest of intellectual honesty, I should go on to quote:
In practice, obstacles to bargaining or poorly defined property rights can prevent Coasian bargaining. ... Coase argued that real-world transaction costs are rarely low enough to allow for efficient bargaining and hence the theorem is almost always inapplicable to economic reality. Since then, others have demonstrated the importance of the perfect information assumption and shown using game theory that inefficient outcomes are to be expected when this assumption is not met.
That being said, it should be equally clear that the failures of public choice [2] are also legion, and in the example of pollution, it's clear that the regulatory system has bungled quite a lot of it, so it's far from obvious that the private ownership approach would be any worse.
How exactly would that work? Say I buy a piece of land. Under your proposal, I presume I would have to pay a licensing fee to Nestle whenever it rains, and to 3M for the privilege of breathing?
Going even further, what about the side-effects on the very same field?
Pesticides kill insects, but they kill both beneficial (pest eating) and pestilent insects. The problem is the bad guys can bounce back faster - picture the deer population vs. wolf population. This means that, paradoxically, the use of pesticides now leads to a greater need for pesticides later.
The solution is to step back, recognize this negative feedback loop, and address the root causes of pest invasion: dead soil and loss of biodiversity. This is where techniques like cover cropping, interplanting, and inoculating with compost (soil microorganisms) come in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_crop
http://extension.illinois.edu/soil/SoilBiology/soil_food_web...
Is it relevant that honeybees are not native to North America, and can't pollinate many native American plants?
So we can also stipulate that the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance.
Unfortunately our corporate law and ideas of rightful production were founded before accurate concepts of our place in the ecology of the planet were fully formed.
So we are dealing with a lot of retrograde ideas of a human centered produce chain, and these are based very firmly in law and ideas of right and good that are outdated in the anthropocene.
You can talk about a "net win for agriculture" and "aggressive colony generation strategies", however net wins and aggressive strategies need to be evaluated in the larger context of their impact on life on earth - the whole thing, not just human ability to pig out for another 50 or 100 years before we go extinct! Cheers.
Honey bees are not a natural part of our ecology. They are a livestock animal. Worrying about their population and the energy it takes to sustain them is a lot like worrying about the population of dairy cows.
That's why I'm not narrowly focused on neonicotinoids at all, and didn't mention them in my post. I'm focused on the entire supply chain, from legos to legumes. It should all be looked at with a big dose of critical skepticism.
From there, understanding the difference between growing beans and dumping weird plastic molecules into the ecosystem is pretty fundamental to knowing what is and isn't a natural party of our ecology. That's the wisdom that should sit at the top of our supply chain.
Points 1 and 2 from "5 Simple Chemistry Facts That Everyone Should Understand Before Talking About Science[1]" apply here.
1) Everything is made of chemicals, and
2) There is no such thing as a toxic chemical, there are only toxic doses. Let me say that again: all chemicals are safe at a low enough dose, and all chemicals are toxic at a high enough dose.
The idea that we can live in a world in which humans do no harm is untenable. Almost every single action we perform does some harm to some thing, and picking and choosing which things we can harm and which we cannot is rather arbitrary. Further, the idea that proving that "my chemical" does no harm is quite an impossible task, no matter how noble the chemical. H2O is responsible for innumerable floods, drownings, mudslides, erosion, etc. If your test fails for water, I think it's safe to say that your test is broken.
[1] - http://thelogicofscience.com/2015/05/27/5-simple-chemistry-f...
If you and I are responsible for a man who is exposed to doses of radiation everyday and I stand up and say, you know, we shouldn't have this guy exposed to radiation because it could be lethal, and you say, hoooold on, there's no such thing as lethal radiation, just lethal doses of radiation ... then I gotta wonder who you are working for!
Because both our points are that you gotta know how much radiation he is getting, and not according to some chart generated by someone who is benefitting from the labor from a distance, but actually what the effect of the dose is over the course of the guy's life.
We agreed about dose, but you don't tell me that I'm in the wrong for saying "halt work", by saying " but it's a question of dosage " and let the guy keep working while you do a 20 year study! You protect him first!
"So we can also stipulate that the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance."
That is an impossible task. Water is not safe. Oxygen is flammable. The number of things we can do that are not harmful to anyone or anything is closer to zero than you think.
If you set the bar at impossible, and I lower it to something achievable, it is bad form to evaluate my reasonableness as duplicitous.
Oxygen is, however, fairly toxic (2 atmospheres partial pressure starts to get pretty dangerous after relatively short times.)
Thank you for the correction.
If you think that the only possible way to grow food is monoculture fields sprayed with poison and fertilizer (aka the "green revolution"), then you'd be right.
But is that really true? Is that the only possible way to grow food?
I ask because forests seem to grow lots of food (an unmanaged forest generates many times more biomass per hectare than a farm field), without requiring nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, neonicotinoids, glycophosphates, diesel fuel...
But surely there's no way to design a system that operates with no inputs like a forest, and also turns much of that biomass into food for humans, right?
Oh wait.
(an unmanaged forest generates many times more biomass per hectare than a farm field)
Biomass is not the same thing as food. Are food forests actually capable of growing more calories (or fewer calories with enough compensating micronutrients) per unit area over an extended time compared to industrialized fields?
All of them are in a highly competitive war for resources. Plants produced poisons to kill other plants. They try to spread their seeds faster. They try to grow taller and faster and steal sunlight. They grow bigger roots to steal water.
No plant wants to be eaten, and so many produce poisons and thorns other deterrents. Few of them keep all their calories in one place, and require highly specialized digestive systems which humans don't have.
The exception is fruit plants of course, but they only produce the minimal amount of food necessary. The fruit you buy in a store has been extensively bred by humans to be so large - and this domestication has a massive energy cost that makes them uncompetitive in the wild.
Anyway the point is that the wild is not optimized for humans at all. It's an incredibly inefficient way to produce food. The plants are spending most of their resources fighting each other, and insects, and everything else. The winner of this game is whatever plants reproduce the most, not the ones humans want. Permaculture is really cool, but you are never going to get anywhere near as many calories per unit of land.
Permaculture is really cool, but you are never going to get anywhere near as many calories per unit of land.
Permaculture means living such that we don't go extinct. Having a great portion of our workforce return to bucolic agrarian pursuits is one way to get there! As they say: it beats flipping burgers.
The point of a food forest is that it has been carefully cultivated to maximize your human edibles, without needing energy expensive, oil based, or otherwise negatively impactful external inputs. When you subtract the non renewable energy expenditure, you certainly will get as many calories per unit of land!
But this isn't an issue at all. Farm equipment does not consume that much fuel, and fuel isn't that expensive.
All fossil fuels are going to be gone within 5k years. Humans are several times that old and presumably humans will want to survive that. Sure, we can kick the can on this one, but it is a long term problem.
Who knows what we will be able to do in 5,000 years. I wouldn't worry about it.
The logic here seems to be that:
* Farmers buy neonicotinoids.
* Therefore, neonicotinoids have a net positive effect on agriculture.
(in other words, like a good libertarian you are assuming that the market has complete/perfect/accurate information)
Unfortunately that's just not true. Today's farmers simply don't have the required soil science/botany/ecology/hydrology knowledge. Worst, they are actively misled by biocide and fertilizer salesmen, who have a natural profit motive to convince farmers that their products are essential.
Far from being essential, in reality pesticides destroy the nutrient harvesting ability of healthy soil. Soil microbiologist Dr. Elaine Ingham explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag
Free Market Fundamentalism: the belief that markets are giant calculating machines that output optimal social relations, i.e. Pareto optimal transactions
I would counter that it is a closed question whether we can feed the world population with pesticides, and the answer is "no."
The industrial food system is not a viable replacement for itself. People tend to forget that that's all "unsustainable" means.
>If you have to choose between adverse affects on soil quality and potentially having people starve
False choice. That's like asking someone to choose between inhaling and exhaling.
Nations are built, both literally and figuratively, on their soil. Nations that forget this perish.
That's empty rhetoric. What actual alternative do you suggest?
An example of unsustainable agriculture is a model based on mining phosphate.
An example of sustainable agriculture is a model where human waste can be converted into fertilisers (e.g. by processing sewage using reed beds, then charring the reeds to use as biochar and mulch).
Turn our attention to plants which will efficiently store phosphorous in a biologically available form, and ensure that the phosphorous we currently discard in effluent can be captured.
Treat spaceship Earth as a closed system and relise that we have to plumb our outputs back into our inputs or there will be a heck of a mess to clean up later.
There is also the issue of the begged question when asking, "how do we feed 9 billion people?"
From a strictly utilitarian point of view, that reduces biodiversity, which increases the risk of disease. The narrower the gene pool, the greater percentage of animals could be lost to a particular virus or bacteria.
From a broader perspective, it would be a bummer of a world of the only bees are managed colonies that are trucked around from farm to farm. Goodbye to fields of wildflowers with bees buzzing around, and goodbye to all sorts of wild plants that depend on wild bee pollination.
There are problem causes that are very hard to address. E.g. alcohol consumption causing a lot of traffic accidents.
Or massive corporations, with huge lobbying budgets, releasing toxins in the environment. Toxins that cause no obvious harm, but kill a lot of bees or cause cancer in some humans after 20 years of exposure.
> show that the number of managed colonies
Says nothing about wild bees. If they're declining more rapidly than before that's still a problem.
Nor do they have to deal with their produce being taken by humans.
http://www.honeybeesuite.com/of-feral-colonies-and-varroa-mi...
The population of feral honey bees has certainly collapsed, but it's not zero (in part because bees keep escaping!).
A fun article on the possible benefits of learning more about the wild bee cousins: http://grist.org/food/born-to-bee-wild-how-feral-pollinators...
If it's actually the case that you're spending more just to maintain the same conversion because you're losing customers at a higher rate, that indicates something is wrong.
[1] the author is claiming that the number of colonies of domesticated bees is higher (not the number of bees),
[2] the author ignores non-domesticated bees and thus misses a significant economic contributor that matters for agricultural pollination, if not honey.
It's particularly dodgy because you're an example of a reader who came away thinking, "But there's more bees so that's good!" That's a false conclusion, the blame for which I lay partly at the feet of this author.
I thought the whole problem with colony collapse and the honeybee crisis was that bees were declining and nobody knew how to stop it. If you can stop it with money, maybe that's not ideal, but is it a major problem anymore?
And, even though people are figuring out how to deal with the problem, that doesn't mean that the problem is over.
If you view the problem as being that bees are being killed by something, then yes, this doesn't solve the problem. But isn't the problem ultimately how many bees you have, not the rate at which they're reproducing and dying?
The comment I replied to seems to be implying that the death of the honeybee is still nigh, and that this extra money is just temporarily hiding it. But how could that be?
The problem comes when "creating" more bees becomes too expensive/difficult, and you can no longer afford it.
In HN terms: a little cash infusion can make everything look great... until it runs out.
Edit: this comment does a much better job of using HN terms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024771
Anyway, I think these analogies fail because they keep talking about investors, where you're supposed to be spending money up front for a great return later on. If you're spending more and more money to maintain the same future return then you're in trouble. But things like money spent on bees and honey prices are just straightforward money-for-product transactions.
Since the colonies are still collapsing without explanation, a modicum of pessimism might be understandable, even if it isn't completely justifiable.
(you, on the other hand, can have high fructose corn syrup and pesticide and fertilizer-contaminated water)
The problem is that building up a new hive is a lot of work for the bees themselves. A new hive needs to collect its own store of honey, raise the new comb to put this new honey in, and raise a lot of new bees to collect the honey, raise the comb, and tend the bee larva. All of this takes a lot of time and energy, and the bees will not be able to collect pollen and nectar as fast while under-beed, so the bees will produce a lot less extra honey for the beekeepers to harvest.
From a survival-of-bees perspective, the critical point is the point at which you can no longer split the surviving hives enough times each year to replace the ones lost overwintering; we're still probably a long ways off from that point.
From a beekeeping and honey perspective, the problem is that you essentially can't count on hives that are new or were split to generate any extra honey for harvest. This means that you need to increase the total number of hives being kept to harvest the same amount of honey. If you want to be able to harvest honey from 100 hives each year, you may need to keep 400 hives around -- 200 will die in the winter, 100 will be used to generate 200 new hives to replace the ones lost overwintering, and the last 100 you can actually take honey off of, which was your goal all along.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/20/fact-... [PNAS] Bumblebees: http://www.duluth.umn.edu/biology/documents/MaKarrall2_000.p...
However, the initial data on bee deaths following the use of dust-off mitigation strategies, like using Fluency Agent, looks promising. Granted, it is still early days to be forming any formal concluions, but the data that is available shows a significant change. Even if we can point to neonicotinoids as the cause, where do we go from here if changing our handling strategies resolves the problem?
Honeybees are not native. They have low genetic diversity from domestication. They are transported around the country by beekeepers every year, spreading their diseases and parasites. And they have their produce taken by humans.
Even if you removed all insecticides, they might improve a bit, but I doubt they would be doing well. And if they did get wiped out, so what? They aren't native, and there are wild bees that would replace them.
I keep seeing comments and articles implying that all bees are going extinct and that this will be cataclysmic. It's just a ridiculous misunderstanding of what is happening.
The pollination of California's almonds is the largest annual managed pollination event in the world, with close to one million hives (nearly half of all beehives in the USA) being trucked in February to the almond groves. Much of the pollination is managed by pollination brokers, who contract with migratory beekeepers from at least 49 states for the event. This business has been heavily affected by colony collapse disorder, causing nationwide shortages of honey bees and increasing the price of insect pollination...
Does anyone feel that transporting livestock from this many places to a single place where they can all commingle is a needlessly risky strategy? Assuming that CCD is caused by pesticides, this seems to guarantee exposure to a large number of bees that might otherwise live in pesticide-free areas. Additionally, if CCD has a fungal/parasitic component, then this would be an ideal way to infect as many hives as possible, in as short a time as possible.
For example, I've spent $1600 on bees and equipment, I've harvested 3 gallons of honey. I would have to sell that honey at $44/Pound to break even. Now hopefully over the long term this goes down a lot as the upfront capital investments spread out over the years.
My bee losses have been huge though. The first year I had 3 hives, lost 2. The second year I had 5 hives and lost 3, last year I had 5 hives and lost 4. Buying bees at $130/hive isn't sustainable (except through my charity) if I wanted to actually make any money at this, especially on a small scale.
Irrigation is a much bigger economic threat to pollinated crops than pollination.
Same concept as the cereal boxes. They look the same from the outside, but they put less cereal in it and charge you the same price instead of raising the price.
Now, Hobby scale honey can usually be sold for more than wholesale honey that the pollination guys use to offload their crop so hopefully that makes up the difference.
For me, I'll never catch up if I keep having the massive losses I've been having -- even if I sell my honey for $7/lb ($8 total including the jar and label). The wholesale price is around $2-2.50/lb
The problem is that a lot of hives die during winter (because of various form of illness and conditions) and the population couldn't sustain themselves.
If they have to split hives forcefully, it's because they are not healthy enough to do it naturally...
Win-win for them really.
Uh... forgive me if I seem a little dense here but... where the hell are these store-bought bees coming from then? The moon? If the mass hysteria of CCD continues unabated, does that mean that bees WON'T go extinct because we can simply "buy" more bees from God at the God® store?
Are we back in the 1800's when spontaneous generation still held some ostensible sway over mother nature? Do they spontaneously materialize and transmogrify from some other form of matter? Do flowers transform into bees because the two are actually the same?
Also: "put half the bees into a new beehive, order them a new queen online (retail price: $25 or so), and voila: two healthy hives."
Does that mean you have 100% more colonies but the same number of bees? I suppose not, but I think it would be interesting if we could see the evolution of the numbers of bees instead of the number of colonies.
Sure it does. They come from the Internet, it explicitly stated that.
Joking aside, from my understanding, the issue with bees is a combination of multiple factors, such as pesticides, disease, parasites, etc.
Those are primarily local issues. So it's perfectly feasible to find some isolated spot in the US, grow a ton of bees, and ship them across the country to wherever they are needed to make up for any local losses.
We can easily engineer around this issue, by increasing the bee population, genetically engineering them to be more resistant, wipe out parasites, or change the formulation of pesticides. It seems the market is responding by simply growing more bees to make up for the losses, which should be a viable solution in the short-term.
And that's consequential if that causes one to stop looking too early. Maybe I've missed something. Is there some persuasive evidence you can make me aware of that points to neonicotinoids likely being the primary culprit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Decline_in_bee_p...
The linked wikipedia article says neonicotinoids' role is being studied as a cause if CCD, perhaps in combo with other factors, but doesn't draw a clear line from one to the other. However, it does, as the parent post mentions, provide some nice references for more info.
EU has banned their use for two years:
http://ec.europa.eu/food/archive/animal/liveanimals/bees/neo...
http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/beehealth.htm?wtrl...
Because doing so would ignore the benefits they provide. The reasons we started using them over the alternatives. Their effects are reasonably well understood, enough to use them in a likely safe manner. The EU experiment (the ban) will provide another data point to inform the cost-benefit calculus.
Relying on complete knowledge of somethings effects before use is impractical. Do you know for certain that goat milk doesn't cause Alzheimer's? No? That doesn't mean we ban its production until it is better understood. Yes, this example is a a bad one, not exactly analogous, but only because I didn't take the time to think up something better. I think the point is clear enough.
My neighbor kept bees but lost his colony last year. I can't say for sure that CCD is the root of our problems--home gardens are more popular around here than ever and perhaps the bees have an overabundance of food--but it certainly feels like something is wrong. Obviously home gardeners and beekeepers don't have the funds to bolster the bee population like a large commercial grower might.
We used these in a high school science project to pollinate fast plants.
Also interesting that you can buy a queen bee online for $25.
We haven't 'corrected' anything, we've only found a new (more expensive) equilibrium because the inputs are still dying off at a higher rate. The correct thing to do is to address WHY the inputs have become more expensive... my understanding is that research now points to a certain class of destructive pesticides.
Don't those breeders have the same problems? What's preventing the magical internet bee source from having their colonies die off?
The collapsing honey bee is the poster child of the irrevocable damage they are perpetrating on the planet, which is the mostly silent holocaust of our times.
So take any positive media on the recovery of the honey bee that isn't result of curbing industrial agricultural practice, with a big grain of organic salt.
That seems a bit hyperbolic to me. The damage seems revocable if actual effort were put into it instead of just papering over the symptoms.
Of course such things often require policy change, change that some people might oppose. But that does not make the damage itself irrevocable.
It just means that people are prioritizing other goals over it.
So, ordering more honey bee queens off the Internet seems to be a pretty reasonable response to the problem of a 10-20% increase in overwintering hive failures.
A lot of what you're seeing are probably wasps (the yellow jacket being one variety).
It would look like a honey bee. None of them are native. Native bees are orchard mason bees.
There was a great art & education & science installation on native bees at the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley a few years back (http://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/article/Shirley-Watts-Mo...). I know they still have a beehive, and they might have some exhibits on native bees.
So, no, I don't see how this is unsustainable.
If that's the case, it seems like a mountain was made out of a mole hill in the media. I read multiple times that I may never eat a pollinated fruit or vegetable again.
""" Mr Ingraham---do not assume you can read a few papers on CCD and bees and make cogent, authoritative remarks in a newspaper piece----this piece fails miserably. I AM a beekeeper, in Los Angeles, using feral honey bees, making public presentations, teaching beekeeping and selling honey. I am going to fill in your ignorance here with a few salient points. Making splits causes a yield of TWO WEAK hives, which is not the same as having the vigorous, healthy original hive. And just so you know, the splits the commercial folks are making from the survivors of pesticide, fungicide, herbicide exposure on industrial crops are the already weakened colonies that happen to make it. So, the splits are not especially fated to thrive, either. Your little tables showing statistics does not tell the real story of the insults being suffered by ALL pollinators from monocrop, industrial agriculture. The typical Consumerist answer to a problem---"just buy more" bees and queens is not addressing the real problems which are decline in clean forage from toxic chemical exposure, lack of forage diversity, trucking bees all over the country, narrow in-bred genetics. The loss of all pollinators, as well as decline in overall ecosystem diversity from the same insults, is the REAL issue. Your piece is also old ground previously plowed over by that corporate apologist and booster at Forbes, Jon Entine, another geek behind a computer who writes about beekeeping with a singularly narrow and uniformed arrogance. Like your ballyhooed Tucker and Thurman, the "economists" (never far from pontificating for the beauties of the "free market") the people weighing in on the loss of pollinators and trying to urge us not to be concerned are akin to Climate Change denialists. """
This is also a beekeeper attempting to husband honey bees using feral bee populations, 98+% of which were annihilated by the varroa mite a long time ago (there are people who dispute whether "feral honey bees" really still exist at all in the US).
I'm not especially moved by arguments that attempt to tar people asking reasonable questions about insects to climate change denialists.
Just think about it. Consider tomatoes, a new world crop. How were they pollinated before the arrival of the european honey bee? The answer is they were pollinated by various north american pollinating insects, which has continued to this day. European honey bees are notable because they produce an especially large volume of honey which makes them a little more economically useful since they can contribute to two different revenue streams: honey and pollination services. Native american bees such as Melipona beecheii and Melipona yucatanica which produce honey produce it in smaller quantities. Both those species are domesticated and stingless and historically were kept as pets by native americans such as various Mayan tribes who used the honey, pollination for their own local use, and religious ceremonies. The reason they are not used in modern production is because of the quantity of honey, not because they can't produce it or don't pollinate.
There are many different species of bees in use, with different characteristic in areas of amount of honey produced, aggression, tendency to get different forms of illness and so forth.
A reduction in the population is never a good thing. Is this some sort of neo-eugenics viewpoint? Pruning the population will not create some sort of super-bee. That's not how it works.
It will enhance whatever qualities are being selected for, but it will reduce the genetic diversity in the population, making it vulnerable to a hole raft of new diseases and disorders.
Ideally what you want is for the genetic variant that protects against a specific disease to be already within the population and for that variant to simply spread, without any population loss. If you're losing population, that is a BAD thing. That means things are happening too quickly and you're in for a world of hurt in the long-term.
Your genetic variant is positive for what?
If you select for resistance to CCD, other characteristics can (and will) vary negatively. Organisms have a finite amount of energy to grow and breed. If increased energy is channeled into one particular characteristic, then there is less energy for other characteristics.
Eugenics is a philosophy that suggests human breeding should be controlled to select for favored features. It's disfavored for a variety of obvious reasons that connect to our principals about the unique value of human life.
Honey bees are livestock. Livestock has been selectively bred for millennia, and discussions of long-term genetic selection among honey bees is not an indicator that participants believe in eugenics.
There was no question. It was a statement.
> Yours is a needlessly inflammatory response ...
I'm sorry, but what word would you use to describe the theory that selective pressures that decimate a population will eventually result in a superior specimen?
It may be inflammatory, but that's the only word that came to mind.
See also "unnatural selection" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIeYPHCJ1B8
It's no big deal. Helpful tip for future reference: avoid calling people eugenicists.
If you are incapable of it, then eugenics was the right word to use, regardless of your sensibilities. It was not my intention to offend, but to accurately identify. If you have a better word for it, I would certainly like to hear it.
Again: What word would you use to describe the theory that selective pressures that decimate a population will eventually result in a superior specimen?
But ancestor post is also presuming that it is possible for bees to acquire genetic resistance to CCD. As we are not entirely certain about the exact mechanism involved, which may or may not have something to do with pesticides, chemicals in HFCS, dietary deficiency disease, or mites, it's hard to say whether any random mutation could protect against CCD without also making the colony unable to reproduce. For instance, if CCD is caused by a dietary deficiency, a colony is very unlikely to spontaneously acquire the ability to synthesize the missing nutrient, unless the species lost that ability at some point.
For instance, it is far more likely that humans could re-acquire the ability to synthesize ascorbate than it is that we might spontaneously gain the ability to synthesize our own omega-3 fatty acids. E. coli evolution experiments show it is possible, but the selection pressure has to be maintained over thousands of generations.
Applied human brainpower to the specific mechanisms of the threat is going to cure CCD much faster than bee breeding, which in turn is faster than natural bee evolution.
The only good behind the pruning of the population is that it is scaring the human agricultural industry into investing resources to stop further losses.
Given that the entire problem is being caused by a dragnet insect poison, it would seem the wiser approach would be to find an alternative or improvement to the poison in its current form.
We replaced the natural way with industry and the author call it success.