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.
Just like tree farms don't mean rainforests aren't disappearing.
People are turning the world into farms and this article is oblivious.
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.
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.
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.)
Of course. There's no deep ecological need for wild honeybees to exist in North America.