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Comment by kortex | Hacker News Reader

American farming practices are a perfect storm of detriments to the honey bee. Widespread use of pesticides is, of course, directly bad. The monoculture of crops also exacerbates the accumulation of pesticides, since bees get a smaller variety of food. And due to the heavily managed style of beekeeping, hives are closer together and are inhibited from swarming, leading to even more propagation of Varroa mites.

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American farming practices are, as a sibling comment of this one says, really the only reason there are large numbers of honey bees in America. Honey bees aren't a native species, and feral honey bees were eradicated from North America ~20 years ago by the Varroa destructor mite.

Your parent comment cited two specific cases of farming practices that harm bees, and you're responding with the general case of all combined farming practices. Why not go even more general and note that, whatever benefits farming might provide to bees clearly aren't enough in the context of all factors, because bee populations are in decline.

I'm sure you can find specific farming practices that are beneficial to bees, but I don't think you can make a good faith argument that i.e. pesticides are the reason there are large numbers of bees.

I think I'm trying to say, talking about how farming practices have harmed American honey bees is a little like talking about how farming practices have harmed dairy cows.

I get what you're saying, and what you're saying is factual, it's just not useful information. Pesticides at least are a clear cause of hive collapse, and lumping pesticide use in with the larger monolith of "farming practices" only serves to obfuscate the problem.

No one is arguing that we should throw out all of modern farming practices, so there's no need to jump to their defense.

> hives are closer together and are inhibited from swarming

Can you expand on this? I've been thinking about getting a hive and coincidentally was wondering about this earlier today -- can you let a hive swarm without losing it? I.e. does a spritely new queen take half the hive with her? Is it healthier for the hive to do so?

If you have some trees around the hives the swarm will usually hang there for a few hours so it is entirely possible to catch it. These swarms are the best since they are ready to build new home and they build really really fast if you catch them and put them into new hive. What is left in the old hive are half of the bees and new queen.

Now about hive health. There is this thing called Varroa and if you let the hive swarm half of it goes with the swarm and the other half stays. Varroa I mean. What is really good with swarming is that the hive now has a virgin queen and she doesn't lay eggs right away and a lot of Varroa dies off because they can't reproduce. They need eggs and bee larvae to do so. The swarm with old queen has an interruption as well because they need to build comb and cells where the queen lays eggs.

In my beekeeping years ago I kept hives healthy ( fight against Varroa ) entirely with letting them swarm.

Just to write it once again since by your writing I think you are confused...Old queen leaves with the swarm.

To clarify the parent comment, Varroa is a parasite that lives on honey bees and can spread diseases harmful to the bees. It's one of the suggested causes of colony collapse disorder.

They also eradicated feral honeybees several decades ago (all honeybees in the US are alien to the continent; almost all today are livestock, not wildlife).

We manually spilt hives and get the same effect, without the swarming and worried neighbours and hunting down the swarm.

One of the ways is to manually split indeed.

Although I must say that natural swarms show greater vigor when building new comb than splits. Even packaged bees built faster than splits. That is of course my experience and you have to keep in consideration that I didn't add any foundation to new colonies so that was maybe one of the reasons. I let them build their own comb on a narrow strip in the frame/top bar and never tried with full foundation.

How do you catch a swarm?

You make it fall into a box. Shake the branch they are resting on, or brush them off until they fall. You cant tell if the queen made it into the box depending on the behavior of the workers already in there. If you missed it, goto step 1.

We had a swarm in our orchard at the weekend and I watched a local beekeeper do exactly this. The queen must have gone into the box as all the bees still left on the tree or flying around soon followed into the box.

You can just pick up gently and put it in a box, they do not sting in this phase unless you treat directly the queen.

During yesterday's evening walk past a corn field, it occurred to me that the impending roboticization (?) of farming may enable synergistic multiple plant fields/plantings on a large scale. What was the old (apocryphal, or not?) Native American combination: Corn, squash, and beans? (I'm just going by memory, as I was yesterday evening while walking.)

We may be on the edge of a new wave of a more organic farming, on a mass scale. Using plant communities and synergies to reduce or need for the more simplistic, mass application of chemicals.

Without even getting into all the genetic engineering and the like that is sure, however you feel about it, to continue.

I have also had that idea. Instead of giant machines only capable of harvesting monocultures, couldn't we downscale to small, autonomous vehicles that can farm efficiently on a vegetable garden at scale. Many cheap drones to farm the way our ancestors did using manual labour

That would be quite the change. In fact, it could enable many people to produce a lot on their own land, because they don't have to spend all the time doing it.

The sound is a problem in this plan. Bees are very sensitive to vibration. They would probably desert any cultured place with drones working continously. Can be avoided if you schedule the drone work, but must be adressed.

I wonder what the range of their sensitivity would be, for various scenarios.

If you have a bot passing through every couple of days, would they continue to visit the rest of the field where the bot is not currently present?

Very interesting factor to consider and be concerned about.

For any homesized plot the drone don't have to work all that much, and some of it can probably be done by night. Still something to keep in mind.

There's a few indie projects out there now that automate veggie-patch-scale farming. They more often use a large pick-and-place type system than a small rover, though.

(Example: FarmBot https://farmbot.io/ )

The Restoration Agriculture scene might be interesting to you.

I can't find a great page to link to, but this has a decent, short description of what they are doing:

https://www.forestag.com/pages/mark-shepard > Trees, shrubs, vines, canes, perennial plants and fungi are planted in association with one another to produce food (for humans and animals), fuel, medicines, and beauty. Hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts and various fruits are the primary woody crops. The farm is entirely solar and wind powered and farm equipment is powered with locally produced biofuels that are not taken from the human food chain.

The part that interests me is, they can grow half as much of a crop per acre as a monoculture, but they can do it for like 10 different crops in the same area.

And they don't have to spray it with poison, so there are cool things like tree frogs out there.

Except that American farmers pioneered long haul transport of bees. In many ways its due to American farmers that the bees even exist.

That the bees even exist so widespread in America, yes.

There had been more competing pollinators.

Further the trees that they polinate are "old world" plants:

    The almond is a species of tree native to the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and North Africa.

The narrative that somehow pesticides are bad because they unatural is disingenuous as it forgets that every part of this system is artificial.

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