Bees Are Now Considered the Most Important Living Thing on Earth | Hacker News Reader

Bees Are Now Considered the Most Important Living Thing on Earth

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74 pointselorant23 comments

Note that this is a pretty 'shallow' article, and links to one that is even more sparse in details. A quick search turns up dozens of very similar clickbait articles claiming the same thing around July last year.

It seems that if this 'declaration' happened at all, it was around 11 years ago[0]

[0] https://www.poynter.org/tfcn/2019/bees-voted-most-important-...

As a wannabe beekeeper myself i can tell you honey bees aren't without their problems. Farming of honey bees has put other wild bee species into decline, and they make up a significant portion of pollinators of flowers bees don't go for. I don't think it's a huge deal and i'd rather more of them than no bees at all, but it's worth looking into because ecological diversity and natural ecosystems are very important.

Agreed, I've often read that wild bees, and wasps and most other insects in general are really important, more than honey bees. To support them, we simply need to stop cutting trees and plants. We should plant public fruit trees everywhere possible, instead of concrete ground. We should support permacultures instead of mono-cultures (they impoverish the ground, plowing or burnings are just earthworms massacres) and other kind of farming. Yet, the recent emergence of vertical vegetable farms seems interesting.

just as personal note: I kinda stopped eating honey, mostly because it's good but it's highly concentrated goodness, and as I tend to eat one thing at a time, I could end up eating too much. Eating fruits, leafy vegs is more natural for me, mostly raw, you hit satiety more naturally and get plenty fibers.

Paul Stamets gave a great presentation on how giving bees access to the appropriate fungi helps their autoimmune system (cytochrome P450) eject toxins and prevent/reverse colony collapse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZPkCozuqM8

I'm a beekeeper and amatuer mycologist. It's very interesting how different hobbies can interconnect like this.

This headline feels like an extreme exaggeration.

> They declared that bees are the most important living being on the planet, and for good reason.

Why not cyanobacteria? You can have bacteria without bees, but you can't have bees without oxygen.

> The Science Times reports that 70% of the world’s agriculture is dependent on pollination that happens exclusively by bees. Bees may do many different things but pollinating plants, allowing them to reproduce is by far their most important. Without pollination, those plants would disappear quickly.

Wheat, rice, maize, cassava, and potatoes don't depend on bees for reproduction. These plants account for a majority of humanity's caloric intake.

> Bees are the only living thing on earth that doesn’t carry any type of pathogen, including bacteria, viruses, and fungi.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformed_wing_virus

Obviously a bit of hyperbole. The honey bee (dozens(?) of subspecies around the world) is indeed important, you can tell because the largest entomological society in the world (Entomological Society of America) more or less treats them as their own section in their annual conferences, on par with sections for all insects like "Insect Evolution and Systematics". "Most important living thing" though, that assertion is not terribly meaningful/useful in a biological sense.

Bees are certainly one of the most important species for many NSF grant targeting PIs at the moment,"bees"referring to hundreds of different species. These grants often emphasize the importance of "native" species. There is $ in pollination studies, bee genomics, natural history collection digitization etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions#...

It sounds like they mean "the most important living being that benefits humans, other than humans themselves".

It follows that cities should allow backyard bee keeping. To make it safer to people allergic to bees, someone should invent a hive on a pole that can be raised or lowered like a flag.

That is like saying someone should get a goldfish because salmon are going extinct. Backyard bee keeping is not helping the global native bee population (this is the one that matters in the long run).

Yes, exactly, we should just plant trees, fruits trees, plants (and eat them! so many people ignore their fruits in their gardens, or worse, cut them), vegetables, that's all needed, and insects will be back contributing

Not sure I agree with this. Most fruit trees need 2 of them and wind or bees/insects. If we spray insecticide or anti-fungal on the fruit tree, which many people do, then we reduce the bees, and get no fruit. The insecticide seems to be the unnatural addition that impacts the ecosystem.

I would argue for reduced use of insecticide.

Of course not using insecticides! that was implicit, how could they come back else. You're right to mention it, I kinda forgot people used them, it sounds so useless and terrible

We have kept Italian and Russian honey bees in our suburban backyard. Both came out of their hive, flew up 20 feet and left the yard, and even the neighborhood we think, most of the day. Stable base, near a source of water, and in the sun worked best for them not swarming on us. A lawn mower bumping into a stand meant 20 mins of angry bees, then back to business. Moving the hive on a pole would make me nervous for 20 minutes.

What killed two hives outright (we think) are lawn services going after mosquitoes in the neighborhood. Didn’t kill them but weakened the hive. They were subsequently taken over by fire ants and small hive beetles, each time after a split.

Bee keeping is so easy and fun and can be done through the mail. I agree with you, duke, if we could solve for allergies, beekeeping could easily be as commonplace as growing tomatoes.

》Bees are the only living thing on earth that doesn’t carry any type of pathogen, including bacteria, viruses, and fungi.

That is simply not true. Bees have many parasites, fungi, diseases ...

It’s such a weird wrong sentence to throw in the article. I’m just confused how they got that incorrect tidbit and how no editor didn’t go “hmm I wonder if that is right”

I'm a beekeeper and agree. Even healthy bees can carry pathogens. For example, nosema is only an issue once you get past a specific count when analyzing a deadout using a hemocytometer and microscope.

Agreed, this article is terrible, and simply repeats a lot of inaccurate tropes about bees environmentalist groups like to parot.

I don't remember voting on this.

After humans, I suppose?

Well, humans are quite an invasive species, we're not lacking in them

There are so many false claims in here

No, the bee population isn't down 90%

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