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Comment by yawz | Hacker News Reader

As a beekeeper I can tell you that Neonics are a very bad and serious problem. I’m surprised that people are not much more outraged by poisoning themselves and their children.

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I grow a lot of crops that require pollination, vegetables for market, and I have several small fruit orchards. After European bee colony collapse in my area the european honey bees disappeared. Within one season they were replaced with native pollinators, including literally dozens of species of bees I'd never seen before (because the alien european bees were starving them out), as well as a panoply of wasp species which I hadn't realized were major pollinators. Some of the wasps that moved in have done things like eliminate the Japanese Beetles that were ruining my grape and berry crops. Losing the european honey bees was the best thing ever to happen to me. And these other bees don't seem to get mixed up in the problems with the neonicotinoids. I use neonicotinoids myself for my dogs and cats and for termite control and they are the least toxic solutions for both of these uses. I do not support the use of neonicotinoids as applied directly to flowering crops or lawns with clover etc and consider such use to be highly misguided if not fairly insane.

Loss of European honey bees means expensive honey. It doesn't mean a loss of pollinators despite various misguided claims to the contrary that have been promoted for years, some making completely hysterical and unfounded claims of global starvation and the end of humanity. To the contrary in my experience the result is greater pollination and yields following the loss of the alien bee species.

Does the use of neonicotinoids not also affect the native pollinators? I was under the impression that the issue is not solely honey bees but all insects. (Honey bees being a useful public face on the problem)

It's naive and misinformed to think that only European honey bees suffer from it. Many European countries have banned the Neonics, but in the US there's a significant resistance to it.

The first sentence in this comment seems to have nothing to do with the second.

The European Honey Bee is a species of bee which has been transplanted around the world. I don't believe the parent poster was referring specifically to bees who happen to be in Europe.

Again, the whole point of neonicotinoids is that they're less toxic to mammals than their predecessors (primarily organophosphates) and can be used in smaller amounts. The pollination industry does not appear to be collapsing despite the widespread, longstanding use of neonicotinoids. Who exactly is being poisoned?

Wild insects and birds: https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-09-20/birds-collaps...

> The pollination industry does not appear to be collapsing despite the widespread, longstanding use of neonicotinoids

Uhhhh, what? It won't happen overnight, just like smoking won't cause you to die after a few pulls. But regardless, there are reported declines from neonicotinoids.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12459

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/neonicotinoid-pesticide...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/widel...

You are responding to a different argument than I made. Your claim is that neonicotinoids are harmful to colony-forming bees. My argument is that the harm does not appear to be reflected in the pollination industry, which, in the US, is the essential purpose of those bees. Honey bees are livestock, not wildlife.

> Honey bees are livestock, not wildlife.

What's all this livestock doing in my garden?

Honey bees are a nonnative invasive species and American feral honey bee colonies were largely wiped out, not due to neonicotinoids but rather the Varroa mite, decades ago. There's a very good chance that if you're seeing honey bees in your yard, they belong to someone.

Just as likely, you're seeing bees that aren't honey bees but rather solitary native bees.

It's pretty debatable to call the common honey bee 'invasive' but I do still see them around. They might actually belong to someone. I don't know how far from home a bee can get, but several farms outside of town produce local honey. Feral honey bees are still kicking around though and seem to have adapted. There are even people tracking them to try and study how they've managed without treatments. I haven't seen a colony to report though, just one or two flying around from time to time.

This is not in fact debatable.

> "There are many species of honey bees. Apis Mellifera is the bee kept by beekeepers in the United States. It originated in Europe (though a recent archaeological dig may have found apis species that pre-date European colonization of the Americas.) Based on the current information, honey bees are a “non-native” species. They can, and do, escape cultivation and can live in the wild. In order to be considered “invasive” they would need to displace and prevent native insects from thriving. This is hotly debated. Most researchers have found that pollination by bees of different species increases fruit set, the number of seeds and subsequent flowers – thereby increasing forage for all insects. They do not fight with each other and rarely share diseases. Since adequate forage for all bees is on the decline, could honey bees be taking all the nectar and pollen – leaving nothing for native bees? It’s possible but not likely. Honey bees are most often kept in large commercial groups – moved between big orchards for pollination. Hobby beekeepers are fairly spread out. Native bees stay in their own habitat. They do overlap, but not everywhere."

source: https://duffymeadows.com/2019/01/21/are-honey-bees-and-invas...

Some of the issues in question are just how much of an impact they have in forcing out native bees due to competition for resources and how much of a nuance they are as a result of pollinating and thereby assisting in the spread of invasive plants. Answers to those questions vary by both location (with some having more fragile native bee populations to begin with) and depending on if the bees are from feral bee colonies which tend to be fairly small vs bees from giant commercial operations which can suddenly introduce extremely large numbers of bees to an area.

I can certainly see that there are cases where honey bees could cause enough of a problem to be considered invasive, but it does seem a little unfair to pin that on the bee if it's primarily caused by the actions of commercial bee keepers and not the bee's natural behavior in the wild. That is, it says less about the bee and more about the bee keepers.

This also only concerns the common honey bee. I don't think anyone would argue that the africanized honeybee wasn't a problem.

From a paper which falls on the invasive side of the argument but calls out the debate explicitly:

> Yet the extent to which this introduced species alters native communities remains controversial, reflecting ongoing debate over the importance of resource competition in regulating pollinator populations.

source: https://doi.org/10.1890/02-0626

Another commenter on this thread says that European honey bees were in fact a problem for their farm, outcompeting and suppressing native pollinators. I don't so much care. My interest in this branch of the discussion is simply in establishing that honey bees aren't wildlife, but rather livestock.

It's actually the pollination industry that's the root of the problem as I see it, and there's a lot of evidence to support it. There has been a major shift in the past couple of decades and now pollination services account for as much income for keepers as the honey itself. So just out of wintering, when they're at their weakest, they get all the hives together to pollinate the almond crops, and of course to trade the latest parasites and diseases. Once they've got all caught up to date on those, they load them back on the trucks and do a nice tour around the country, spreading the joy.

My parents kept up to 100 hives for almost two decades in northern Manitoba, where it gets down to -40C, and we rarely ever had overwintering losses. Farmers and keepers should treat their livestock well, feed them over the winter, give them a bit of shelter, and they'll do fine. Bees can survive almost any cold if they've got the fuel to burn to keep the hive warm.

That's super interesting, and glad to get a sanity check from someone with direct experience; I'm just an interested bystander.

Many European countries have banned the use of neonicotinoids, but in the U.S. the EPA has ignored the evidence and has turned a blind eye to the science. As a result the environmental damages in the United States continue to grow each year.

Here's an interesting study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Actually, here's the real story behind how the ban came about. The guidelines were manipulated so that all the realistic field studies had to be discounted. The lab studies basically amounted to "We fed insecticide to bees and it killed them."

https://risk-monger.com/issues/agriculture/beegate/

As for that Plos One study, take a look at who the authors are and where they work. They're all members of the pesticides action network and the last author on the paper is also a staff scientist for Friends of the Earth, another environmental NGO. Unsurprisingly, she had an article all lined up with The Guardian on the day the paper was released. The paper itself is nothing but a cludge of unrealistic assumptions and bad math.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/07/americ...

And also bear in mind that Neonics are relatively new: 25 years IIRC. They can last for years and minute doses over time will lead to death as surely as larger acute doses. So, our pollinators and we are being poisoned slowly and constantly.

We've seen around a 75% drop in insect population, and its continuing to drop at around 2.5% per year. They are some pretty scary figures

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/02/why-insec...

The article you're citing does not attribute a 75% drop in insect population to neonicotinoids.

Not collapsing, but keeping bees healthy is a challenge and their death rate is much higher than it used to be (40% up from 15% according to https://pro.bloombergenvironment.com/business-of-bees-podcas...)

There is a big decrease in the overall mass of flying insects and with it of the number of birds.

Really? I find that hard to believe seeing as not one in fifty beekeepers blame pesticides for their losses. Would you prefer the reintroduction of pesticides that actually do for certain kill bees? It's the mites and the diseases they carry.

Stamets et. al have been doing amazing work saving bees with fungal remedies https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-32194-8

They seem bad because they are everywhere and neither you nor the bees can escape.

If we employed more variety, then some areas would be good for bees and bad for owls, other areas would be good for owls and bad for bees, and things could sort themselves out a bit.

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