Helping Native Bees Thrive in a Honeybee World | Hacker News Reader

Helping Native Bees Thrive in a Honeybee World

e360.yale.edu

91 pointschmaynard17 comments

'The bees are dying so we should all become beekeepers!' is imho, one of the biggest failures of science-communication in the past decades.

Honey bees are doing comparatively OK, for honey bees to die out it would require a much greater catastrophe than what we're seeing right now. Honey bees are quasi-domesticated with humans pushing colony size, it would be like milk-cows dying out.

It's native bees that are being killed off by pesticides, monocultures, and loss of habitat (due to humans encroaching, or feral honey bees pushing out native bees).

Some examples:

>On organic farms near natural habitat, we found that native bee communities could provide full pollination services even for a crop with heavy pollination requirements (e.g., watermelon, Citrullus lanatus), without the intervention of managed honey bees. All other farms, however, experienced greatly reduced diversity and abundance of native bees, resulting in insufficient pollination services from native bees alone. We found that diversity was essential for sustaining the service, because of year-to-year variation in community composition

from https://www.pnas.org/content/99/26/16812.short

>Recent studies suggest that the presence of large numbers of introduced [honey bee] managed colonies can threaten wild bee populations. Therefore, proposals to exclude A. mellifera colonies from protected areas have arisen.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016953471...

and so on

Exactly, and don't get me wrong, I do keep honey bees, but they aren't in danger in most countries. The Danish beekeeping association reported on a survey two or three years ago that showed little impact on honey bee from farming. The native bees aren't doing nearly as well.

A large portion of my garden is just stuff I don't touch, or where I planted bee friendly plants. There are hundreds of bees living under our side walk, but only the part in front of a single house on the street, mine. The neighbors a obsessed with keeping weed and insects way, so the their part of the side walk is sprayed relentlessly. Funny enough they don't care to shovel snow in the winter.

Whereas I've been seeing less honeybees over the last several years, my garden this year seems to be teeming with native bumblebees, mason bees and a few others I do not know the identity of. Perhaps a decline in honeybees will actually help native bees to recover?

'The bees are dying so we should all become beekeepers!'

Another aspect, similar in origin: 'The bees are dying so we should plant flowers' which then gets misinterpreted and implemented as any flower, native or not, apt for the local population of wild pollinators or not; specifically using the term pollinators here because yet another aspect is some people only think of bees and not everything else.

As a result I can buy seeds everywhere of species which a) are not useful for any species except super generalist ones (e.g. honeybees) or b) are sort of native but are grown in other countries and have slight genetic variations resulting in them not being visited by native pollinators because e.g. the pistil is just a bit deeper so pollen is too far to reach. Shops where I can get seeds from local plants which also have been grown locally on the other hand are very rare.

But that's theoretically not a problem since proper grassland/meadow management normally automatically results in the plants needed by the native pollinators (this is backed by science, but anecdotal evidence of which I'm still too excited not to share it is that after changing the mowing cycle on land we bought we easily managed to get less grass and more flowers like Campanula on which last month we found a couple of specimens of Andrena Pandellei which is extremely rare here). But in practice we're then back to the original problems of habitat loss, too much fertilizer, ... making the amount of decent meadows and other types of habitats way too rare to be sustainable. tldr; we messed up in the past, and are still doing so, though on the upside I do see changes here and there, also by governments.

Open a local seed bank/marketplace then?

See last paragraph, and sibling comment: not really needed (except for extreme cases like preserving the last of a species). Plus I have a job and hobbies already :) Moreover, it's still not a very sustainable solution: you can get all the locally grown seeds you want, if you sow them in unfit soil (pH/moist/minerals/...) and/or soil which is just too rich in nutritients it's still no use and they either won't grow at all or get overgrown by grasses/nettles/... Especially the nutritiens are a common problem can usually also be solved by proper management (which more often than not starts off simply by mowing 2-3 times a year and removing the cuttings).

Or maybe just stop cutting your lawn so often. With proper management it will get colonized by local species in a few years.

Genuine question: what is proper management?

Genuine answer: it depends. I guess you just have to be present and observe what is going on and try to get closer to what you try to achieve.

What works all the time is to not cut the whole place at once: so insects have another places to move to. I am also trying to make sure grasses don't take over the place.

But the thing is: even on my few acres spread in diameter of few kilometers I am getting very different results.

Few kilometres, amount of shade, amount of water in the soil, different type of soil, different history (e.g. used to be farmland or used to be forest) can all be reasons for different results. But yes definitely don't cut everything at once, that ruins the habitat. For the rest main problem is usually nitrogen deposition so key is cutting and removing cuttings to compensate for that i.e. remove nitrogen again. And the time at which mowing gets done is pretty crucial as well and requires some experience with the specific terrain as you point out. But there's way to much nuances to all explain here. By far the easiest way to gain knwoledge imo is finding a local nature organization which manages grasslands in your neighbourhood and see what they do/talk to them. I did that a couple of years and it's amazing what I learned from them (though in all honesty the people there are true specialists when it comes grassland and it's fauna specialists, it's also their daytime job, and there's like nothing they do not know - not everybody is that lucky)

A moving target! :)

Not suggesting this is for your lawn, but you might find this [0] to be an interesting read.

It's subject is people whose job descriptions are to answer your question, and how they are currently grappling with the subject of human-stewarded ecology.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/can-farming-ma...

Two big things that help are don't fertilize it and don't water.

I wrote this little speculative story about honey bees out competing native ones (with an analogy to goat herding) in a HN comment back in Feb, 2019 [1]. Interesting to see some research supporting it.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19207657

Some resources, if you want to make a bee hotel.

https://www.foxleas.com/make-a-bee-hotel.asp

https://entomologistlounge.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/insect-h...

In French, but has some good designs:

1. https://www.abeillessauvages.com/nichoirs-a-abeilles/chalet-...

2. https://www.abeillessauvages.com/nichoirs-a-abeilles/dortoir...

Shameless plug: https://www.beehome.design/ I worked on an app that lets you design your own Bee Home and let it be fabricated at a local makerspace. This way you can help the population of solitary bees.

What kind of file does that process spit out for you to use?

dxf

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