Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine | Hacker News Reader

Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine

washingtonpost.com

36 pointsem3rgent0rdr30 comments

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 beekeepers have largely compensated for the additional mortality with larger investments in breeding additional queens and splitting of hives. This effort is reflected in the cost of honey, which has doubled since 2006, and the cost of commercial pollination services, which has also risen.

I suppose it's a useful description of the scope of the new "endangered" status, but to my mind, there's a pretty big difference between "the bees are doing just fine" and "commercially important bee populations remain stable because the economic burden of colony collapse disorder has been passed on to consumers of bee services".

Agreed, annoying headline. I was ready to write some angry rant in response, but at least the article actually does address (unlike the last time this same article was written) the economic realities of constantly treading water to keep your bee population up.

I think the headline of this article should be considered in the context it's presented, namely the context where I've seen several variations on the same headline "Bees added to US endangered species list for the first time" shared dozens of times across social media. Personally, I find that headline to be much more infuriating than this articles.

The bees that are used to pollinate crops and produce honey are livestock, and --- the central argument of the post --- there are more of them today than there were when the CCD phenomenon began.

The price of honey is a relevant counterargument, but demand for honey has also increased, and there are cyclical changes in honey bee output. In the middle of the time period we're talking about, there was also apparently a worldwide honey shortage that was tied primarily to poor crop production; honey is a global commodity, so that also impacts prices.

How does the price of honey relate to fake honey? Like does honey cost more because people cracked down on fake honey, or is fake honey on the rise because of increased demand, or what?

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.

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 likely dire change for wild bees.

There is no conclusion to the article, but the bees do not appear to be "doing just fine"...

Authors for major news sites don't write their own headlines which is why there is often a disconnect with the actual content of the article.

In this case, I get the sense the editor may have cut a fair bit of content as well as adding a contradictory title, from a possibly reasonably OK original draft.

I see this comment a lot on poorly titled articles. My question, what job title is typically responsible for writing headlines?

Copy editor

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

Coworker's husband is a beekeeper. Recently he read in the newspaper that in his region EU granted few million euros for bee-reintroducing program. He had some losses so he went to local government office to ask if he as a small beekeeper is eligible for subsidies. They told him the money will only be used for advertisement to recruit new beekeepers.

Uh, I thought it was the wild bees that we were concerned about.

And from the article about wild bees:

"Of course, the discussion above concerns only commercial bees that are managed by humans and businesses. Wild bees — whether they're honeybees or one of our 4,000 other native bee species — face different difficulties. If those species suffer die-offs, there's nobody around to breed new queens and help them recover. Wild bees are on their own.

Recent research has shown that the use of certain insecticides called neonicotinoids has been linked to declines in wild bee populations. But assessing the true magnitude of the effect is difficult, because it's a lot harder to survey wild bee populations than domesticated ones."

So basically, move along, bit of a nothing article.

Wild honeybees have been extinct in the US for decades, owing to the Varroa mite.

Citation would be nice. This article talks about them having rebounded after near extinction:

http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/08/some-honeybee-coloni...

This seems a lot like Y2K syndrome -- Lots of experts working really hard to avert a crisis, and if/when they mostly succeed, it gives regular folks the impression that there wasn't much of an issue in the first place, and it was all overblown to begin with.

"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all"

Bee colonies is a somewhat optimistic number. US honey production is a more dramatic drop from 2000. http://www.capitalpress.com/Nation_World/Nation/20150325/us-... even though that chart looks almost flat from 2000 - 2016

Also of note, this is not in a vacuum the EPA has been active over the last few years. https://www.epa.gov/pollinator-protection/epa-actions-protec...

I'm no expert but surveying the number of kept hives doesn't tell you anything about the health of those hives or the total number of living bees.

If colonies are indeed collapsing, beekeepers may need to start more hives to deal with greater attrition rates.

The article does address this fact, though the headline writer chose to omit any such subtlety.

As with so many of WaPo's articles lately, I'm at a loss as to whether this is clumsy propaganda, or just incredibly inept reporting.

Yes, sadly, the Bezos Post is just a shade of what the Washington Post once was.

They are talking about commercial bees. Not bees in the wild, which are dwindling.

Just like tree farms don't mean rainforests aren't disappearing.

People are turning the world into farms and this article is oblivious.

There are no North American wild honey bees.

Honey bees are an introduced species.

The last feral North American honey bees were wiped out in the 1980s, by the Varroa mite.

There are thousands of North American bee species that aren't honey bees. Some of them may be threatened by any number of factors (most likely: habitat encroachment).

But an important thing to remember about wild bees and the honey bee CCD phenomenon is that many wild bee species, including important pollinators, aren't social. Mason bees, for instance, don't have colonies: every female makes her own nest. CCD is a social bee phenomenon.

I think? it's possible that there are no North American native social bees that overwinter entire colonies the way honey bees do. For instance, all the bombus bees have colonies that last only a year (the colony produces new queens, which start entire new colonies). If that's the case, CCD is a phenomenon that definitionally only affects foreign introduced livestock bees.

> 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 varroa infestation. Anecdotally I know of a few feral hives that have survived multiple years in trees and barns, but I can't rule out the possibility that they're "seeded" by swarms from managed hives every spring (they're too far away for me to inspect regularly). Also, Youtube has a few folks doing cutouts of wild hives that have taken up residence in houses and sheds, and there's clear evidence of multiple years of work in some of these hives.

A bit of a nitpick, I admit, but I'd go with "mostly wiped out" personally.

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.

It's amazing how much you guys know about bees ... I was relatively sure that tptacek's main job was computer related security, so having such a deep knowledge of bees is impressive.

It's the thing I love most about this site, is that it generates an incentive to go read journal articles about bees.

Things like this usually start with some seed of general knowledge or trivia --- in my case, it's listening to EconTalk, which had an episode with a bee economist talking about the misconceptions about colony collapse. But in an HN thread, you usually need something more specific than the general vibe of an EconTalk episode, so you go do a bunch of reading.

It's fun! It's like competitive librarianing.

(For what it's worth: that's not what I do in infosec and crypto threads.)

> 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.

I thought this article would have to africanized bees. Is anyone else worried about that? Commercial bees are just fine this says but it's only talking about population size.

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