Building a backup bee: A novel replacement for the embattled honeybee | Hacker News Reader

Building a backup bee: A novel replacement for the embattled honeybee

thefern.org

58 pointsnewman8r38 comments

In an ideal world, BOBs would be raised in the fields they pollinate. In Europe, farmers get a threefold to fourfold increase of European Osmia bees out of their orchards every year. Jordi Bosch, who used to work for the usda and is now at the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications in Spain, says this happens because European orchards tend to be smaller, contain a mix of fruit species and have a variety of weeds that bloom around them at various times. Those factors help bees live out their full adult life span, so they can lay many eggs. In California, large, weed-free, monocrop orchards provide only two to three weeks of one type of bloom—insufficient for maximum egg laying. Fungicides and pesticides can further reduce the number of progeny that an orchard produces.

So that is the real problem...

I don't think anyone really disagrees with your assessment. But you seem to be implying a solution of the form 'well then stop doing that' which typically doesn't go anywhere.

Which option do you think is more likely to happen politically?

A: Convince/coerce a huge population of people to change their growing habits against their own personal interests. A system that by construction rewards cheaters and would be extremely expensive to enforce.

B: Fund a concentrated series of research teams to help produce bees that can thrive in the current environment.

Good point, but I don't think it's as hard as you suggest, and no personal interest sacrifice is required.

For example, by growing clover, the orchards would not only attract bees, but also provide fertilization to the trees (when the nitrogen stored in the clover is released when the clover dies back a bit after each mowing).

Are there additional costs? Sure, but if viewed as an investment, those costs pay for themselves eventually. I think there are orchards already practicing this, but I would bet the majority aren't aware of such practices (market education needed).

From http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pesticide-bee-bird-deaths-ne...

"Neonicotinoids, also known as neonics, are nicotine-based pesticides commonly used by farmers to help keep everything from field crops to fruit orchards free of pests ... Bees were consuming pollen contaminated with neonics as well as flying through chemical-laden clouds of dust from farm fields ... since Europe began barring the use of neonics, there has been success at limiting the exposure honey bees have to the toxic chemicals, without a significant reduction in crop yields."

and

"beekeeping is a big business and without bees, billions of dollars of farm crops would go unpollinated. "Beyond honeybees, there are all the wild bees, all these pollinators and behind all these pollinators there are some other invertebrates, the ones living in the soil, flying invertebrates, the ones in the water," ... "Nobody cares about that. There is no money in these invertebrates. However they are giving a huge service to the quality of soil, to all the ecosystem services that we need."

I was relieved to find that this was not a particularly disturbing Black Mirror episode coming to life.

Don't worry, that's also under research:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2120832-robotic-bee-cou...

http://uk.businessinsider.com/bee-drone-pollination-japanese...

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-robot-be...

As a beekeeper I see the irony in that: monocropping (growing only almonds in large areas) is one of the causes of biodiversity loss. Honeybees are very lucky to have beekeepers like me to help them survive through troubled times. In my state there are more than 500 other bee species that we don't even hear about. Monocropping is one of their killers.

This is exactly what I came in here to ask about. I was reading this article and wondering whether one contributing factor for colony collapse is that these vast Almond farms alone simply cannot sustain the bee population in the areas they dominate.

Many wild bees are also specialists, and they will just raise a single generation each year during the appropriate flowering season. They hatch, go wild on their target species, and then lay a batch of eggs for next year. Many wild bee species are correspondingly more efficient than the generalist honey bees; a handful of orchard bees can pollinate an apple orchard faster than a hive of honeybees.

Some of these species are pressed more by climate change; at the talk I heard on the subject, these bees have a narrow latitude band they survive in, and as temperatures increase they tend to push up against their northern limit than shift north.

Agreed. In Europe i understand that the threat to the bees that are not part of beekeeping, is the real problem. Insect populations in general in Germany, as an example, have plummeted by 75% in three decades. Many insects beyond bees act as pollinators. The focus on honeybees brings it to attention, but there is a much wider problem.

The lobbying from the German chemical industry against stricter regulation is very strong, and we are seeing the result of that now.

Also a beekeeper.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/germany-s-insects-are...

Step 1: Pollute the environment, causing colony collapse disorder. Step 2: rather than solving the actual problem, make money off it.

It's like big pharma making money selling treatment drugs instead of developing the cure.

Disaster capitalism.

I've always wondered why American agriculture doesn't use more native pollinators. After all there were native angiosperms before the Europeans arrived.

I had assumed the problem was the native pollinators had only evolved to pollinate native plants, hence the use of alien bees for alien plants (e.g. almonds, apples etc). But according to this article that isn't the case.

Apparently the main remedy to colony collapse disorder seems to be to just order new queens via internet.

"In 2017 Wonderful needed about 76,000 honeybee colonies to pollinate its almonds (at two colonies per acre). But that number will diminish by 320 this spring because Wardell will put 128,000 female BOBs into the orchards—the largest deployment ever."

So 128000 BOBs equals the pollinating effectiveness of 320 honeybees? That's a 400:1 honeybee/BOB ratio. Or perhaps they're just using really high margins because it's so experimental.

76,000 colonies. A colonie is about 4,000 individual bees.

320 colonies at 4,000 are roughly 1,280,000 honeybees.

In fact BOBs are 10 times more effective than honeybees. They pollinate at a time where honeybees are still asleep.

And 4,000 is considered a small colonie. They go up to 70,000 and more in the right season.

Only about a dozen of the 20,000 or so bee species worldwide are managed. After the honeybee, Apis mellifera, only three species are widely used in the U.S.: two cannot be woken from their winter’s sleep in time for almond bloom, and the third is banned for open field use in California.

How does a species of bees get banned?

US Department of Agriculture or some corresponding department at the state level in California.

There are likely some good reasons for the ban.

it's probably non-native to California and would probably compete for the same ecological spaces as other native bees. FWIW, I'm guessing because I couldn't find anything with Googling.

I just drove the I-5 highway through California's Central Valley yesterday. There are hundreds and hundreds of almond and other orchards with thousands of trees each along the way. They are in full bloom. Just beautiful.

Each orchard had bee hives at the ends of rows. They're so crucial to our agricultural industry.

They're livestock, and an invasive species. Colony collapse is an economic issue for bee farmers, and not an especially difficult one.

It's an economic issue for hobbyists as well.

I don't want to have to buy new nucs every year, they're not cheap.

And so are cultivated crops. Food-chain collapse is also an issue, and it is an especially difficult one.

With the Indinian Leg Chewers DNA starting to spread to wild population we're seeing an increase in the over population (wild and professional hive). That's saying a lot in Ohio since most states that border us don't have mandatory inspections. We have to deal with a bad invasion from Varroa mites coming from Michigan due to their lax laws.

http://www.wtae.com/article/local-beekeeper-working-to-save-...

Or you can just perform manual pollination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-pollination .

This has actually been done in China due to their bee population declining.

https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/5193-De...

"This is clearly just possible for this high-value crop, but there are not enough humans in the world to pollinate all of our crops by hand."

We have so many crops that rely on bees. There is no way we'd ever be able to pollenate all our crops by hand and it would become incredibly expensive if we tried.

From where do we get the possibility of losing our bee livestock population? Colony collapse at its height was a double digit percentage increase in overwintering losses. Beekeepers react by splitting hives and buying new queens.

There was an interesting article in Science last month about looking at pollinators holistically - butterflies, flies, 20K species of bees, even some vertebrates - and contrasting to focus on one or a few of bee species.

Unfortunately the online link needs login http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6374/392

There's a great company from argentina (now going through IndieBio batch) that works on applying scientific knowledge to bee pollination: http://www.beeflow.co/en/

They are currently running a trial on almonds, but have already increased the yield of kiwi (among others) between 10 and 90%!

Article and podcast about using bumblebees for pollinating crops: https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/countrylife/au...

This hasn't gone well in the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee

I didn't get any indication from the article that these Blue Orchard bee's are being cross-bred, or genetically engineered. They're just being mass-bred in a controlled manner to get the volume necessary to start supplementing Honey Bee use.

Edit: It seems that the Afro/Euro hybrid bees are hardier and produce way more honey than the European bees as well, so I would expect to see more of them being used commercially.

Except the hybrid bees are notoriously aggressive, which is why they're useless commercially. Part of the reason European bees are so useful commercially is that they're quite docile.

European honeybees and African honeybees are the same species.

There are six different species of mason bee cultivated for agricultural use, and hundreds of wild species. As they are solitary, any hybridization would result in less than 20 hybrid offspring per female, rather than hybridizing an entire hive.

In any case, mason bees are solitary, and have no particular reason to be aggressive towards other animals, as they have no hives to protect.

the word "building" already scares me -- black mirror digital bee horror engage!

Full article URL: https://thefern.org/2018/02/building-backup-bee/

I should have linked to that one, it's much more detailed - thanks

We've updated the link from https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2018/02/23/backup-pollina....

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