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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>we should encourage people to keep bees by limiting the amount of risk they have to take

or you know, by the beekeepers charging more for the service. if pollination is really that essential, they shouldn't have any problem getting farmers to accept the price increases. otherwise it's just another subsidy that distorts the marketplace (against other pollination methods, or crops that don't require bee pollination)

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You can't possibly be comparing companies subsidized by the government and the critical natural importance of bees. This can't be real.

Honeybees are not native to North America. They actually may have a negative impact on native species.

Not only honey bees polinate crops. In fact there are thousands of bee species around the world and particularly in Brazil, where they produce honey and the european/african honeybees are non-native as well. I think we both can agree that the Amazon and Atlantic jungles and rainforest managed to be polinated just fine without the bees you talk about. When you consider only honeybees you know in North America you are artificially restricting the problem that is much more widespread.

When you plant tens of miles in each direction with a single crop that needs to be pollinated at a specific time there is no way for native insects to pollinate it well. Where would they live? What would they feed on the rest of the time? It’s a green desert most the time then in need of massive pollination for a short, sharp period. Bringing in hives or other forms of pollination is how it gets done and it’s done this way because it works.

so you're saying we should subsidize beekeepers (keeping european honeybees, by the way) as a environmental protection program, because otherwise there's nothing else to pollinate the natural native plants?

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