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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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