Two Different Approaches to Saving Bees | Hacker News Reader

Two Different Approaches to Saving Bees

npr.org

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When we talk about "saving bees", most people think about honey bees. I'm a hobbyist beekeeper, and honey bees have a good chance of surviving thanks to people who care about them.

However, in most places, there are dozens or hundreds of other bee species. We don't know or hear much about them. They are solitary bees, various types of bumblebees, etc. They are the ones disappearing, and fast. Unfortunately, they are the first victims of growing urban areas, mono-culturing and pesticides.

I make mason bee houses(hotels, whatever) where ever I end up living (renting, moved around a bit). They're pretty awesome, no stingers, pollinate everything, and the houses are easy to build.

Interesting, thanks for posting this. I take some care to plant 'bee friendly' stuff but have no interest in beekeeping and have never bothered to look up fostering non-honeybees. Now I will do this after reading your comment http://www.ecolandscaping.org/03/beneficials/attract-mason-b... and some of the links from there.

Great! Mason bees are very gentle, and are good pollinators for fruits, nuts and certain flowers. We've had a small mason bee house for a while in the back yard. My son loves it. :)

Does anyone have links to similar things for North American solitary bees? These houses seem to be UK specific?

I live in Colorado. We have mason bees around here. And you should be able to find mason bee houses in certain big garden centers, big home improvement shops and online:

http://smile.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=mason+bee+house

Pinterest is your friend: https://www.pinterest.com/explore/bee-house/

Best approach: Use no poison. An alien may say: This humans seem to be bit insane - they put a lot of poison on their fields where they grow their food in order to protect their weak breeded plants against pets while they do everything that this pests have a easy run. Maybe we should search for another planet where the creatures seem to be more sane.

> while they do everything that this pests have a easy run

Which is exactly why we can produce so much food / acre. Land use would need to go up significantly, and thus the price of food, in order to be able to use "natural" methods of pest control. This would affect developing countries the most.

The article addresses this issue, it says that for soya bean there is no difference between treated seeds and non treated seeds. For corn there is a 2% difference but this was within statistical error for this study. The biggest way to boost crop yield is good quality fertiliser (organic or mineral).

or sell them more poison.

An "alien" watching us would understand the nuance of the situation instead of thinking like a children's book caricature.

Well perhaps an alien child would assess us like that.

Assuming aliens treat newly discovered populations the same way humans have over the past 200,000 years, that may be a good thing.

The aliens might be equally surprised that many of our medicines are also poisonous to us. Yet (as someone put it to me when describing anti-worm medicine that his dog was taking) they're more poisonous to our pathogens or parasites than they are to us. For example, ivermectin, which that dog was probably taking, is poisonous to mammals but much more poisonous to their parasites, while terbinafine is poisonous to humans but much more poisonous to fungi that infect us.

For all of our medicines, we or our doctors have to make a judgment about whether the side effects are worth it for the therapeutic value that we get. If we said that we would never deliberately use any poisonous substances, we might have to throw away most of our pharmacopoeia.

You can try to make an argument against pesticides on the basis that their side effects aren't worth it (and I prefer organics myself), but I think the fact that pesticides are "poison" doesn't get you there by itself.

Does that mean that neonicotinoids are now confirmed to be a major factor contributing to the bee colony collapse?

Still has to be confirmed by neonicotinoid manufacturers.

Still has to be INDEPENDENTLY confirmed.

(But yes. Just call it "poison dust", not neonicotinoid-derivatives..)

'One of the factors', yes. There are three causes, which are separate but related:

    - pesticide use (neonics, mostly)
    - 'varroa destructor' parasites
    - loss of bee habitat ('green deserts')

This triple-whammy is too much for bees, but that's not to say that solving just one issue (or even two) would be 'enough' of a solution.

The first one will be solved (I think) by public awareness. There is a clear direction in the public opinion against chemical pesticides (I know, 'everything is a chemical', I'm talking about public perception, for better or for worse). It won't be long before (the most damaging) pesticides will be squeezed out by on the one side regulation and on the other market pressures - consumers asking for food with certain origin characteristics (like, no use of certain pesticides, or none at all), thus farmers asking for treatment-free seeds, thus the manufacturers providing it. They might be resisting it now, but the invisible hand is hard to stop. It's just a matter of time - that's not a call for complacency, obviously, the pressure needs to be kept on.

The second one is a bee husbandry problem. There too the tide is turning - after 3 decades of researchers looking in the direction of chemical treatment, the direction is shifting towards less treatment, and moving towards resistant bees through selective breeding, going back to stronger, locally adapted breeds, 'Darwinian management' and less invasive apicultural practices. How this will fit with intensive agriculture remains to be seen (will such apiculture be compatible with moving 10's of thousands of hives from orchard to orchard across great distances, following the blossom of various plants across large areas?); but then again, there is already a small move towards/experimentation with alternatives for bee pollination anyway (like bumble bees). Maybe a combination of measures will yield a workable solution at scale.

The last one is the most overlooked but (IMO) the real killer. The efficiency of machines today (compared to even just 2 decades ago) makes agricultural land so maximally occupied for growing food that there is no room for natural habitats for any sort of animal - mammals, birds, and insects including bees. Modern agricultural land might look 'natural' and 'green' when looked at from aerial pictures, or even when driving by, but because every last square inch is cultivated, no animals can live there (hence 'green desert'). Bees today do better in urban and suburban settings than in rural areas, because of all the plants in people's gardens providing forage all season long.

If we want results in the next few years, the only solution will be government intervention - be it through subsidies for leaving land fallow, or by plain requiring certain naturalzing management interventions (or rather, 'non-interventions'. The public pressure that is shaping up around neonics just doesn't exist (yet) when it comes to (ecologically) sustainable land use management. It's also much harder to quantify - either a farmer uses neonics or he doesn't; but what is 'sustainably managed land'? Everybody can define that the way suits them best, hence a lemon market for consumers who wish to influence producers.

(note on references to the above: this is roughly the state of the literature in apiculture and agronomics, interspersed with some personal observations and extrapolations; although there will be plenty of different opinions on different aspects of it. In fact, I'm pretty sure that everybody in one of the fields that are relevant will find something to take issue with. There is no single one paper that says 'look everybody we conclusively proved that these three issues account each for x% to the total problem'. On the other hand, I don't think anyone who reads the major journals and follows the major conferences (and who doesn't have an ulterior motive to push some fringe agenda) will disagree that some combination of the above is what is causing the difficulties that bees are facing the last decade, or two).

Thank you for the insights.

Are there any numbers comparing colony collapse between normal and organic beehives?

I imagine that bees used for producing organic honey will have access to greater variety of plants, since their immediate surroundings doesn't contain pesticides, which obviously also lowers their exposure to pesticides.

I'm aware that bees used for organic honey travels outside their designated organic habitat, but all things equal, they should be better of with regard to the 1st and 3rd factor of colony collapse, than non-organic bees.

Thing is, there is no such thing as the colony collapse. Some colonies just disappear (abscond) and we don't know why, others are weak and don't survive winter, others are so heavily infested with varroa destructor that too many bees get deformed wing virus and fizzles out, ... It's a combination of things, which is what makes it so difficult to nail down. Furthermore, there are many more factors that make it hard to compare apples to apples (how many colonies in the area? How much forage? Weather? Disease vectors present? Etc...)

There are some monitoted experiments (google 'bond experiment' for example) but they cannot be used for 1:1 comparisons to say what is 'better'. Plus, what is 'organic'? Technically (legally), it's following Demeter standards, but who can fulfill those? Does that mean that all those others are 'non-organic'? No, there's a very wide range left.

And even more... What are the goals of the beekeeper? No commercial apiary can survive with 5 kg/year yield per hive. Should commercial honey production go away? Leaving aside the animal welfare aspect, I think there's room for a range of approaches, but it needs to be balanced. Of course, balanced by whom, that's the question...

I regularly try to plant my yard with "meadow mix" that includes lots of wildflowers, but the darn stuff never germinates. Just invasive weeds.

Yeah it's usually not as simple as the package wants you to believe. On one plot I tried to renaturalize, birds would eat any seeds within hours after I'd spread them. Are you sowing in existing grass? Clearing some of it may help establish in a few places. Grass is the most noxious weed of all to remove, and the common lawn varieties compete with the sort of flowers in such mixes.

I've sowed on bare dirt, and in grass. As far as I can tell, not a single sprout.

Unfortunately (from my perspective) I don't think we'll end up with pesticides etc going away. Humans are bad at understanding long-term threats, and ultimately immediate price matters the most for many. Combine those factors with the growing income inequality in this country and market pressures will continue to facilitate whatever ends up increasing yield (and thus lowering price of food).

Yes, that's right - I don't think so either. The Green Revolution wouldn't have been possible without chemical fertilizers and pesticides, we don't have replacements for them. But hopefully we can move towards a sustainable use of least-damage chemicals. There is a clear need and incentive for all parties to save bees. Many species won't be that lucky, of course.

Not necessarily. Schaafsma is located in Ontario, which is a jurisdiction that had already effectively banned the use of neonics, even before the federal government finished conducting their research on the matter.

Legislation alone is enough to incentivize him creating this new planter design.

Can't these seeds be treated with an additional protective coating that dissolves after planting?

It might be possible, but I'm guessing it's not trivial to make a hard coating which also has the ability to dissolve arbitrarily.

What about a hard coating that dissolves in the presence of water?

I'm with the filtered approach. I dont really trust Krupe's work. yeah, statistically significant on 12 fields .... 2% is right in the range of the stated yield benefit, .5 - 5%, which farmers who actually do business seem to think is economically beneficial.

"In another study, Krupke found that the seed treatments weren't of much benefit to corn yields... the results from all the sites, the average yield from the treated seed was about 2 percent higher, but Krupke says that difference is not statistically or economically significant "

Is the spread of African (aka "killer bees") a possible reason why?

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