Very misleading headline. The bees are not bouncing back, humans are splitting up stronger hives into weaker hives. Kinda like saying humankind is beating cancer by having more babies in third-world countries.
As other have noted, splitting is a natural process of beekeeping.
however, I've noticed a discernible change in the beekeeping profession in the last 10 years.
To take a step back - there is a huge variation in bee characteristics from hive to hive.
What I've noticed is that package and nuc suppliers (aka bee breeders) are far less likely to treat hives. And it has become near impossible to buy 'traditional' chemical bee disease medications.
The prevailing modus operandi these days is to leverage natural evolutionary processes. I.e. let weak hive fail and therefor let undesirable genes phase out.
Uh, splitting is very much not natural (at least, I'm taking this to mean artificial splits - if you're saying swarming is a form of splitting, which isn't unreasonable even if it's not the wording I'd use, then disregards this comment). It's part of 20th century beekeeping, yes, but swarming is natural bee behavior, and unnatural practices like splitting, queen clipping, brood cutting, sugar feeding etc. are creating fragile colonies with weak resistance that depend on human intervention (including chemical varroa treatment) to survive.
And this is not just ideology, this is the trend in all apiculture/bee entomology journals over the last say 5 years.
(for the uninitiated, good hives grow to the point that the queen and half the hive leave to make a new colony, then you have a 50/50 chance the original hive will raise a new queen, that the queen will mate and make it back to the hive without been eaten)
Let me expand my original statement for clarification. splitting leverages the natural process of swarming in the field of beekeeping.
As to some of the other 'interventions' you mention I politely disagree. It's sort of like saying cows are weak in Canada because farmers don't let them freeze to death in winter.
I recently had a hive attacked by ants. They lost a lot of food and brood. Do I let them head into fall and winter with little to no chance of survival? The fact the ants got into the colony was no fault of the bees, just bad luck.
There's survival of the fittest and there's animal husbandry. The two aren't completely incompatible.
Useing similar methods on fast breeding species where you keep the offspring is a very bad idea long term. The only way to keep things stable is to have breeders who focus on culling the weak. But, you need a large breeding population to maintain genetic diversity.
> “You create new hives by breaking up your stronger hives, which just makes them weaker,” said Tim May, a beekeeper in Harvard, Illinois and the vice-president of the American Beekeeping Federation based in Atlanta.
There are many ways to split hives, the way we've been doing it to combat CCD is creating weaker hives (and thus more susceptible to mites and other diseases).
You can read a brief overview here ... http://americanbeejournal.com/beekeeping-by-the-numbers-2/
> The number of hives lost to Colony Collapse Disorder, a phenomenon of disappearing bees that has raised concerns among farmers and scientists for a decade, was 84,430 in this year’s first quarter, down 27 percent from a year earlier. Year-over-year losses declined by the same percentage in April through June, the most recent data in the survey.
//edit: but idk, maybe I'm confused here too. At the very least, we've figured out a way to breed bees quickly so that we can outpace CCD?
Measuring colony survival is what is really important.
Having said that, there are wild bees, and bees 'escape' from beekeepers by swarming and forming new hives on their own. They try to reproduce by creating new hives as frequently as they can.
Bumble bees aren't honey bees just like buffalo aren't wild milk cows.
Some have recommended farmers replace pollination with hardier indigenous mason bees or bumble bees, rather than use domesticated honey bees, in response to CCD.
Yellowjacket or yellow jacket is the common name in North America for predatory social wasps of the genera Vespula and Dolichovespula. Members of these genera are known simply as "wasps" in other English-speaking countries.
I would say most people would easily be able to distinguish between a honeybee and any wasp (once shown what each looks like obviously).
It's highly unlikely that GP cannot tell the difference between a bumble bee and a honey bee.
Huh.
For me, the word "honey" in front of the word "bee" indicates a function it is performing for humans. If that's the case, then well, you can't have a "wild honey bee;" it'd be self-contradictory. It'd be like talking about a "wild milk cow" or a "wild show dog" or a "wild support animal."
It just sounds... off.
So, no, I didn't think you could have wild honey bees. You seem pretty certain I'm wrong though, so I'm thinking it over.
Also, n.b., maybe the confusion is partly about "wild" vs. "feral?"
http://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-feral-an...
Maybe you and I just use a few of these words in radically incompatible ways.
> It's highly unlikely that GP cannot tell the difference between a bumble bee and a honey bee.
It honestly wasn't very clear.
CCD is one of those topics where lay people and especially journalists get really confused or possibly just lazy about what bees are relevant to the conversation. So I took tp's comment way back as noting that we're mainly talking about domestic bees here, as a shot at focusing the discussion. He got a response about random bees found in parks, which, what with the comparison to chickens especially, seemed either sarcastic and missing the point or just deeply confused.
So I started at the lowest possible level of confusion and decided we could work up from there if necessary. Maybe I should have been more charitable to start, but I didn't want to risk another detour because we skipped too many steps ahead, which seemed to be the exact problem the first time.
Maybe the comment was literally just expressing excitement at the possibility that the apis seen in parks are related to backyard cultivation, and I read it completely the wrong way.
And of course, a honey bee is any apis that produces honey. While not species-specific, it is genus-constraining, instead of function-labeling. More like "sugar maple" (most of which are untapped, but they still produce), and not "milk cow".
Fair points on the confusion and ambiguity. My comment wasn't really worthwhile (and you obviously know all of these rejoinders) but the floated implication seemed absurd and a little pointed. Future self will endeavour to be more valorous.
I have no idea how common it is in the States but poking about suggests that here in NZ there are about half a million hives. There are about 5550 total beekeeping enterprises in New Zealand, of which only 803 were commercial. Anything less that 50 hives was considered hobbyist.
That's not really an accurate way of describing beekeeping procedure. Yes hives are split, but that's how hives reproduce in nature. "Weaker" hives just start smaller and grow.
Not that CCD isn't worth looking into, but it's not like the average hive comes out weaker.
Losses are made up for by splitting hives and introducing new queens, which are bought on an open market. You can see the price for a new queen right now; it's low tens of dollars.
Agriculture: security research as applied to biology.
It should not be surprising if some aspects of biology are analogous to aspects of computing. In fact it isn't even an analogy.