Bees are essential to the almond industry, and billions are dying in the process
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I'd be interested to know why almonds (and avocados) are usually highlighted here. Are other flowering crops typically grown in more diverse environments?
It’s remarkable what California almond industry has achieved. It’s also unsustainable and harmful to bees.
This to explain why you see almonds growing essentially in dirt. Other flowers would outcompete.
Personally I suspect there are plenty of plants that don’t overlap much with almond flowering that you could use.
In Europe it has become common to seed a headland around crops that is bug friendly, for one example. There are financial incentives for this in the subsidy too.
fro bees to sruvive winter its
vetch mustard goldenrod alfa
that will supply the full spring to fall diet for bees
I put it in my father's garden every year as farmers have killed all that by the roadside
Googling it brings up this thread and your comment as the top hit...
s/alfa/alfalfa/
Anderson Almonds clearly thinks differently and has none of the issues, but makes less money per acre so that would not interest the big growers. Maybe someday only Anderson will have almonds to sell...
But consumers are used to pouring it from a carton. Consumer education is so essential.
It’s really a mess. Google ‘Resnicks’ and water in California.
Ok: here is one..there are so many other articles https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/lynda-stewar...
Its something I have posted here on HN before.. it’s really complicated. Short answer: we are not out of water scarcity.
If everyone is insistent that the drought is still continuing, can someone please point me to some (current) data that indicates it?
[0] : https://www.drought.gov/drought/states/california
[1] : https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...
They were all uprooted and replaced by cultivars that are dwarf and early yielding. Two reasons: the root stock takes care of resistance to certain soil disease and secondly harvest.
Almonds are harvested by mechanical ‘shakers’. Giant ‘arms’ that shake the tree and then vaccum the fallen nuts.
So what we need is uniform height dwarf trees that are disease resistant and are spaced optimally for equipment and machinery for spraying, banding, harvesting etc.
You have to think of these commercial orchards as open air factory assembly lines. This isn’t nature. This is factories without safety and environmental rules to follow. Because there is no OSHA for bees.
https://www.paesta.psu.edu/podcast/how-much-water-does-it-re...
Also: remember that while water is part of a natural cycle, aquifers are used up and don’t get replenished.
For example, Texas's Edwards Aquifer, near San Antonio, has a large recharge zone.
> become irreversibly contaminated
Well if you're spraying pesticides and fertilisers the water is likely being contaminated.
>A few years back, number crunchers at the California Energy Commission tried to add up how much electrical power (and other forms of energy) goes into using water in California. The bottom line number they came up with: 19%. That is, nearly a fifth of all the power generated in California — as well as huge quantities of natural gas and diesel fuel consumed in the state — goes into water-related uses.
http://ww2.kqed.org/climatewatch/2012/06/10/19-percent-calif...
Irrigation is a CO2 emitter - especially when water is transported all the way from the Colorado River to California farms.
Luckily there are some promising developments on this front. Research efforts led by Paul Stamets [1] have developed an extract derived from mushrooms that, when fed to the bee colonies, have been shown to drastically reduce DWV and Lake Sinai virus.[2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformed_wing_virus [1] https://fungi.com/pages/bees [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-32194-8
Ok, lets make an almond tree that doesn't need bee's.
Now we'll have less bee keepers, since they will lose the work they are doing, and less bees.
Tomorrows article will be about bee collapses and how that matters.
Nothing in the article points to the almond process that's killing bees. It implies other activities in California are responsible perhaps we need to look there.
If they are trying to make a claim a bees life matters, then why does it matter over a grasshopper that's also killed by the pesticides?
Pesticides are used for all kinds of crops across the state, but the almond, at 35m lb a year, is doused with greater absolute quantities than any other. One of the most widely applied pesticides is the herbicide glyphosate (AKA Roundup), which is a staple of large-scale almond growers and has been shown to be lethal to bees as well as cause cancer in humans. (The maker, Bayer-owned Monsanto, denies the cancer link when people use Roundup at the prescribed dosage. So far this year three US courts have found in favour of glyphosate users who developed forms of lymphoma; thousands more cases are pending.)
On top of the threat of pesticides, almond pollination is uniquely demanding for bees because colonies are aroused from winter dormancy about one to two months earlier than is natural. The sheer quantity of hives required far exceeds that of other crops – apples, America’s second-largest pollination crop, use only one-tenth the number of bees. And the bees are concentrated in one geographic region at the same time, exponentially increasing the risk of spreading sickness.
Maybe they meant it's lethal to bees if you drop the bottle on one.
1) https://www.nd.gov/ndda/plant-industries/apiary-honey-bees
2) https://www.nd.gov/ndda/sites/default/files/legacy/resource/...
This bee originated from Africa or Asia, before it got domesticated.
Something to think about in an arid region.
If those animals were tortured your wouldn't expect them to approach us almost like pets would do and generally behave as if they liked us.
Edit: added "that exists" Also, FWIW since I grew up there's been introduced a number of regulations to improve animal welfare so I expect it to be better today that it used to be.
You might say it is voluntarily but I know that isn't the entire truth and I'm tempted to say as my socialist friend that slavery is still slavery even if it is wage slavery and the slave got to take responsibility for a whole lot more than they used to like feeding themselves, choosing a prtner in life and making sure they have a place to live.
The OP was referring to "torturing" cows for milk, and you are referring to "torturing" women with respect to maternity leave.
What is your definition of "torture"?
Well-off women with good jobs get a few months of paid leave (at most); poorer women with crappy jobs do not get paid leave, just a right to get their job back after 12 weeks of unpaid leave most of them can’t afford to take.
*Hotly-debated because my friends (married, with well-paying jobs they really like) got varying amounts of pressure from their extended families and social circles not to work.
IIRC cows can feel postpartum depression, so it makes sense that this would be torture. But if we did this to bacteria (maybe even bees), the moral dilemma seems to disappear.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/animal-emotions/2017...
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2015.080...
But, you know, if you assign human ethics to animals, there's relatively little we do to animals that's less than abhorrent. Pets are okay to a significant degree. But just about everything else falls out the window if you start to consider the idea that animals may be sentient and have thoughts, feelings and emotions the way that humans do.
I guess what I'm saying that in an ideal world I'd be a vegan, but for now it's challenging enough to go through life eating everything nature has turned out to make possible. Nature is absolutely cruel (well, doesn't care at least), and humanity is just another part of it.
Furthermore, it's unclear how your argument is fixed at the human/non-human boundary. Nature is cruel intraspecies as well, so your line of thinking also challenges the notion that slavery and race- or clan-based oppression is wrong.
But that the world isn't ready to make that moral judgement yet, because the alternatives to meat and animal products aren't convenient enough. We like to consider morality absolute, but it's strongly affected by a society's requirements.
As a side note, vegans probably have a more sound moral judgement than the rest of us.
There have obviously been cultures that considered slavery and various forms of oppression morally right, but I don't think my argument states that this is okay; quite the opposite.
Whoa! That's what is call generalisation... On the other hand diet had nothing to do with moral, it's all about health! None of the extremes are good, our body still have the hunter-gatherer digestion system
It's not at all a challenge for an individual any more except in certain areas (e.g. northern Norway).
In most major cities vegan food is everywhere. In some countries McDonalds has vegan stuff for christ's sake. We arrived.
It's about as much of a challenge as putting a differently coloured shirt on in the morning. Of course, you have to want that colour first.
If you don't care, that's fine, but this shifty "oh but we're not ready", "falls out of the window" nonsense doesn't really come across well at all. Who are you trying to convince?
It is obviously less convenient to be a vegan than to be omnivorous because, at the very least, you actually have to think about what you eat. Both from a purely pragmatic perspective ("does this product contain any animal products?") and wrt. healthy nutrition.
It is practical to do this, but it's not convenient. And that makes a big difference in a society where time and attention is at a premium. Pragmatically, there needs to be a big shift in attitudes, probably prompted by the trivial availability of ingredients equivalent to the main classes of animal products, before the moral view that exploitation of animals is immoral will become mainstream.
I strongly disagree that it's not convenient.
By that line of argument making any active choice at all is "not convenient".
You specifically call out nutrition as an example. You can pretty much literally directly switch out meat for substitute meat.
It's not convenient to say, cycle 30km to work instead of driving, without making major life changes. It takes substantially more time, changes the way in which errands are done, etc.
Buying a different thing from the supermarket and cooking it is trivial. If anything eating meat is more faff because the risk of food poisoning is way higher if you e.g. cook chicken badly.
I don't like coffee so I tend to drink tea. Is that inconvenient? It makes no sense to me as a concept; even if it is (it's really not), who cares? I don't want the coffee?
The unsettling conclusion would be to ignore ethics for convenience.
The problem is over population. We have far surpassed carrying capacity and you can’t feed the billions with humane animal food. Especially when everyone thinks dairy and almonds should be cheap and available to all. Add capitalism on top of it as gluttonous consumerism thrives in a world burdened by overpopulation..when people don’t consider that resources are limited and having excessive progeny is akin to stealing shared resources from the commons, there is no polite way to point it out to them except to ask them to procreate responsibly. Each according to their means. But even better 1/2 surviving child/ person for long term comfortable survival of our species. Less than optimal: 1 surviving child per person for long term bare maintainence of our species.
And then killing the children. And doing that again and again.
https://theirturn.net/2016/06/15/2016061420160613the-rape-ra...
(It’s not a cow running towards a yodeling Swiss milkmaid)
[..] The “rape rack” is a narrow, chute-like device in which female cows are restrained while they undergo a process the dairy industry euphemistically refers to as “artificial insemination.” During artificial insemination (AI), a dairy worker inserts one of his arms into the rectum of a restrained cow and, with his other arm, inserts a rod-like device called an Al gun into her vagina. The Al gun, which contains bull semen, is pushed in further until it reaches the cervix (the entrance to the uterus). The semen is then injected into the uterus.[..]
My comment was just about the article's characterization of almond milk drinkers. I wonder who would benefit from demonizing one of the few alternatives to cow's milk?
Oats aren't animals that produce milk for their offspring.
The propensity to lie in marketing is why there are rules against such behaviour in many jurisdictions. For example, in the US the term "ice cream" is reserved for frozen dairy desserts with a minimum fat content of 10%. Any less and you can't use the word "ice cream".
Similarly, in the EU one would have to call the abomination you call "oat milk", oat drink or something similar, since "milk" is a protected denomination reserved only for mammary secretions.
I've bought almond milk and oat milk in the the UK, which is still the EU for a couple of weeks.
> words are supposed to mean things
Indeed.
What doesn't take a ton of resources to produce while still being nutritious? What's unethical about taking natural resources to produce food in the first place? Nature is all about eating itself, perpetually.
> You cannot live without bees in the world.
That's a myth.
Absolutely? Nothing. Relatively? Just about anything but animals and nuts.
Per gram of protein, nuts require more water than even beef:
https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...
Also, water in and of itself isn't an exhaustible resource. If it becomes too expensive, water-hungry foods like almonds will simply price themselves out of the market.
Freshwater, on the other hand.
> If it becomes too expensive, water-hungry foods like almonds will simply price themselves out of the market.
This macroeconomic argument hasn't played well. I've heard people say that carbon-based fuels will price themselves out if externalities become too severe. The end game is brimksmanship, and macroeconomic reasoning says its fine to deprive a local poor population of drinking water if local businesses can make greater profits selling almonds.
Nobody I know drinks almond milk. We drink oat milk. The best manufacturer of oat replacement products for dairy is from this region of Sweden, Oatly. They make oat drinks, creams and ice cream.
Personally at 35 I've stopped drinking milk altogether because it's a drink for juveniles. So I only use oat milk replacement in cooking.
No it doesn't. The bees that pollinate almonds are bred by beekeepers and sent out for this exact purpose. They will be replaced as long as the demand for their service remains.
> By October, 150 of Arp’s hives had been wiped out by mites, 12% of his inventory in just a few months.
> Commercial beekeepers who send their hives to the almond farms are seeing their bees die in record numbers, and nothing they do seems to stop the decline.
> This is more than one-third of commercial US bee colonies...
> In the early 1980s, when Arp was just selling honey, he would lose about 5% of his hives per year to disease or weather conditions. Around 2000, Arp’s bees started dying in greater numbers.
> First, he experienced a nearly 100% loss of his hives from an infestation of tracheal mites.
It doesn't. These losses will be replaced by the keepers.
> In the early 1980s, when Arp was just selling honey, he would lose about 5% of his hives per year to disease or weather conditions. Around 2000, Arp’s bees started dying in greater numbers.
If this guy has been losing 5-10% of his colonies for forty years, how is he still in businesses? The bees/colonies get replaced, of course.
For example: "glyphosate ... has been shown to be lethal to bees as well as cause cancer in humans"
Neither clause is true.
I don't feel like doing a line by line of the rest, but this is a garbage article.
Glyphosate/RoundUp etc has been shown to have high toxicity for bees and many other animals including humans.
It _was_ considered safe, new data and better science has changed that stance. The article isn't garbage.
Today the situation is a lot more nuanced.
...and as I write this I think I could feel the smell of roundup or another herbicide, so yeah I've been exposed it :-/