Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse? | Hacker News Reader

Whatever happened to the bee apocalypse?

backreaction.blogspot.com

318 pointsnsoonhui178 comments

This article buries its lede, which is about how honey bees get all the attention but are at less risk than wild bees:

> And that brings us to the actual problem. The honey bee (Apis mellifera) is only one of about 20 thousand different bee species. The non-honey bees are usually referred to as wild bees, and each location has its native species. According to an estimate from researchers at Cornell University in 2006, wild bees contribute to the pollination of 85 percent of crops in agriculture."

> [...]

> But last year the magazine Cell published the results of a study with a global estimate for the situation of wild bees. The authors looked at the numbers of bee species that were collected or observed over time using data publicly available at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. They found that even though the number of records has been increasing, the number of different species in the records has been sharply decreasing in the past decades.

> The decline rates differ between the continents, but the species numbers are dropping steeply everywhere except for Oceania. The researchers say there’s a number of factors in play here, such as the expansion of monocultures, loss of native habitat, pesticides, climate change, and bee trade that also trades around pathogens.

> So the problems that wild bees face are similar to those of honey bees, but they have an additional problem which is… honeybees. Honey bees compete with wild bees for food and habitat and they also pass on viruses. Now, a big honey bee colony can deal with viruses by throwing out the infected bees. But this doesn’t work for wild bees because they don’t live in large colonies. And worse, when honey bees and wild bees fight for food they seem to both lose out.

I think the colloquial term for (edit; the most commonly well-known) many wild bees in English is "bumblebees". They're often burrowing species that don't have honey producing hives (They do stuff like make little caves in moss, dirt, and underbrush), and are often crucial pollinators of certain species of plants which are specifically attractive to certain wild bees (Orchids are a good example here) but which domesticated honeybees might not even touch.

I was once dreaming how cool it would be to get into beekeeping but after realizing it might be at a greater detriment to wild species in my area those dreams have become somewhat faded.

Hi, why would beekeeping harm wild species please?

Domesticated bees might eat the same food that wild species eat.

They spread diseases like mites to the wild bee species chiefly, as well as out-competing them for food.

Details are in the parent comment and in the article but if watching a video is more captive of your attention here's a report on Deutsche Welle which I found pretty good and more to the point. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSYgDssQUtA

GGP contains a quote from the article explaining why. To summarize, honeybees compete with wild bees for food, and can spread illnesses that they can’t defend against.

For the same reasons that domesticating any animal leads to the extinction of the wild variant

  - habitat displacement  
  - competition for food  
  - disease

Aren’t there still some wild dogs, cats, horses, sheep, goats, and everything else humans have domesticated? Or are you being very specific about what went extinct, or maybe predicting future extinctions (in which case I’m curious more about what you mean?)

Edit: sorry if the question came off as rude and that’s why it was downvoted, I was sincerely curious what you meant.

The aurochs[1] has sadly been hunted to extinction. The last one was killed in Poland during the 17th century.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs

If there weren't hunters around to hunt them to extinction, they would have depleted natural resources and starved and been a lethal danger to people on future roads and highways. Hunters are entitled to our eternal gratitude for providing these services.

I don't know, maybe one day we will see that we are part of a balanced ecosystem, and that this balance is ultimately more important than having good roads.

> balance is ultimately more important than having good roads

...or ever-increasing numbers of humans living an ever-more-consumerist life.

>we are part of a balanced ecosystem

we're really not though. Extinction is about as natural as anything else. We've had many in our planet's history some wiping out 90% of life, for a variety of reasons. Your car runs on dead dinosaurs and trees that have been pressed and liquified into the sediment and we didn't bury them there, nature is hardcore that way.

Which is not to say that a balanced ecosystem isn't a great idea, but recognize it's an artificial one. Condemning hunters or humans or roads and just letting the Aurochs run wild is no guarantee for some kind of balance.

I did some light searching, and it would seem that your examples don’t support your viewpoint. I didn’t look into all of them, but there is only 1 truly wild horse species, which was actually extinct in the wild at one point. The rest are feral horses. Canis familiaris is the descendent of an extinct species. Many (most?) wolves and other wild dog species that do not live well among humans are either currently or were until recently endangered.

Thanks for the explanation, I was definitely including animals like bighorn sheep, bobcats, mountain goats, wolves, and so on which wouldn’t really qualify.

This is a problem very specific to North America.

In Europe, the honey bee has always been there, and is no threat to anything else.

Not really true, bumble bees are the furry fat ones, but there are lots of other types of wild bees.

Yeah you're correct, I'm just making clear the example of wild bees that most people know. There's a ton of really interesting species that don't even really look like bees (Different coloration like iridescent and black) for sure.

It's a very useful example. I didn't know that bumblebees were separate from honeybees or that they didn't produce honey

Worth noting that carpenter bees are also furry fat bees, and often confused for bumble bees.

Carpenter bees tend to be a bit shinier, and at least around me, bigger. Which is how I can tell them apart.

Bumblebees are a genus[1] (_Bombus_) of (wild) bees. There are many more genera of bees (taxonomic superfamily _Apoidea_) out there. They are, however, adorable chubby fluffs.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank

I believe they prefer to be referred to as fluffy chönks.

I always called them flying cotton balls. They're also not aggressive, so working around them isn't likely to get you a sting, as opposed to those damn yellow jackets. I get all species are important but I hate those things.

They make some pretty effective traps for them. I caught about 14 yellow jacket queens in the spring. That should hopefully mean fewer nests later this year.

Same here on our tiny farm. I don't need any more hobbies, but I often entertain keeping bees. But I also have a bias towards native plants and native insects. So I cultivate lots of flowering plants, and leave areas wild, but have never done anything with honeybees.

I kinda wish there was a native Northeastern American bee that had some of the utility of honeybees for sugar and/or wax production.

TIL that bumblebees actually have a history of domestication but that international movement of bees led to serious health issues and transmission of pests that decimated both wild and domestic populations: https://www.sare.org/publications/managing-alternative-polli...

Consider caring for some other solitary bees. Personally, I like leafcutter and mason bees, which mostly just means providing homes (hollow tubes), construction materials (leaves & mud respectively), and flowering plants. In late winter, you harvest the cocoons to remove parasite-ridden or diseased (fungal, usually). They are aggressive pollinators and if you grow fruit & vegetables you will see increased yield that makes up for the lack of wax & honey.

Other bees include mason bees, leafcutter bees, carpenter bees. Other pollinators include green flies, hoverflies, and some beetles and wasps.

Random trivia I learned from a visit to a fruit farm a few weeks back: Fruit farmers much prefer bumble bees to honey bees because they're much better fruit tree pollinators - bumble bees start much earlier in the day than honey bees (e.g. 07.30 vs 12.30), will work at much lower temperatures, and will pollinate 6 flowers in the time a honey bee takes to do 1 (because the honey bees tend to stick around longer on a flower to get more nectar out).

They're loved by crop farmers where I live too (I also learnt recently), but they're illegal to cultivate because they're an introduced species.

(Now that I write that, I assume honeybees are too, but perhaps the honey industry is well entrenched)

> They're loved by crop farmers where I live too (I also learnt recently), but they're illegal to cultivate because they're an introduced species.

Unlike the crops?

As an Australian, I hadn't really heard the term "wild bees". We call them native bees, following our usual pattern of distinguishing native animals from exotics/introduced species.

I met the reigning Aussie native bee expert in 2020 and it's dire. The best things you can do as an individual are plant many endemic native flowering species, nix lawns, don't use pesticides and certainly don't keep urban honey bees.

We always called them spicy flies. Colloquial phrases can be pretty diverse.

The whole point of being alarmed of the Bee Apocalypse is that you look at the honey bees as an indicator, just like the lichens on trees are an indicator of air pollution (few lichens mean a bad air quality).

When honey bees are dwindling, pretty much all the insects are too.

The Bee Apocalypse has not gone anywhere, it's just still here, and it is in fact an Insect Apocalypse, which is many orders of magnitude worse.

I don't know what's driving it but I've been observing sharp changes in insect populations that visit our balcony which has been completely taken over by some kind of huge black wasp/hornet monsters.

These bastards seem to hunt baby grasshoppers all day long and butcher all kinds of other wasps and bees, too. I used to find piles of chopped bodies but until competition got the message and show no more. I even found a stash of dead spiders they've managed to build inside a cupboard.

I am starting to get worried.

I do observe other changes in different species but this one is the wildest I've got. Haven't seen a big grasshopper in a decade. My cat used to hunt them all night. What changed? I don't know. Firebugs used to cover some trees in red 3 summers ago. Haven't seen one in months.

Edit: as to why I am replying to your post? I liked it so much, I decided to share my extremely limited experience.

The decline of insects has brought an unbalance that may make some species over-represented as a consequence.

But what you are seeing can also be a case of climate change moving the habitats of species around, and make them live where they did not live before (because also prevent them from living anymore where they had always been living).

Edit: thanks for the compliment :D

Just for the record, I'm an insects lover (also more generally a lover of Nature). And the situation is making me very, very sad.

Also, and I’m not saying this to deny climate change: variations between the coldness of a given winter and when spring onsets will, in general, greatly affect insect populations. Climate affects both how many survive the winter and how they migrate. Add oscillating patterns to that as predatory animals react delayed to that.

Some years you will see huge winged ants, other years will be heavy with mosquitoes, other years will have giant hornets.

I’ve lived in a particular location for 22 years. This year is the very first one that I can recall seeing mosquitoes. Where did they come from and why are they here now? Your comment has me wondering if they are moving in because of climate change.

That sounds really alarming to have to be around (no pun intended). What part of the world is this in, I was hearing something about the pacific northwest experiencing invasive Japanese giant 'killer' hornets at some point in the past couple of years, I thought the course of action in that case was calling the wildlife authorities to try and stem the spread?

I have seen an other wasp (I'm in Japan) than the 'giant killer hornets' killing (decapitating) what looked like either another wasp/bee either a bee-looking fly.

It was quite a small-scale wasp, a black one with narrow white stripes, but its technique was very good. It just dropped next to where I was sitting holding its prey which was trying to escape.

Densely populated city in Bulgaria. I tried searching for the thing but aside from "$some_kind_of_asian_wasp taking over easter Europe", I've got nothing. I don't think it was the same species.

Not the Japanese one, but there is an invasive Asian hornet in Europe since 15 years ago or so

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_hornet

Not the same creature. The one I am talking about is all black, with slightly bluish tinted wings. There considerably bigger than most wasps/hornets. I don't know what I am dealing* with.

* Not yet, and hopefully I won't have to

You probably oversaw the fact that Great Britain again gave away the atomic bomb secrets to the hornet monsters. Before it was Pakistan, which delivered it to North Korea and Iran. If the hornets gave it the wasps is not yet proven, but everybody is very worried.

>honey bees are dwindling

It seems they are not dwindling.

That was one of the clarifications of the piece. The bigger concern is the number of species rather than the number of honeybees.

I'd say that it is difficult for me to agree that the honey bee apocalypse is getting any better at all, as, in Europe at least, everybody is deploring a huge mortality in bees, and explicitely pointing the pesticides as culprits.

But in case it would "seem to get better" (e.g. in the US), I agree:

if honey bees are dwindling at some point (the wake up call), it shows that there is a bigger concern, but the bigger concern is still there even if we see again honey bees, it's an insect apocalypse (and we'll always see honey bees anyway, because they are actively bred by humans using nutrients grown with intrants from good ol' fossil fuel energy and all).

Why would I do that? Closely related species compete for the same resources. 9 out of 10, one species "dwindling" just means another is gaining.

In this cas it does not. The insects as a whole are in decline.

I've not heard insects like ants, beetles or flies being in decline. I've heard of bee colony collapse and declines in grasshoppers and monarch butterflies. But there are tons of other insects, some of which seem to do quite well around humans, whether we like it or not.

Maybe you've heard of the "car windshield observation": we used to find so many dead insects on windshields some decades ago, and now it is obvious that there are way fewer.

This is caused by the insect apocalypse.

It's because the harm caused to the bees is from factors that strike as well other insects: mainly pesticides, and global warming.

I think one of many issues with the car windshield observation is we don't have a good baseline. So we notice that in 1990 there were more bugs on our windshields compared to 2020 after a drive through Kansas. But maybe 2020's insect levels are actually a return to normal, preindustrial levels after an anomalous century of high bug populations? We don't have a bug windshield strike stats from 1890.

Honestly it's such a dirty metric with so many compounding variables I'm shocked that anybody is seriously considering it as a meaningful data point beyond the most basic, surface-level understanding of the issue. To be honest the whole thing reeks of the usual hacker-news crowd issue where people want to pretend they know about a topic (e.g. systemic issues in pollinator/agricultural pest population management in high-intensity modern industrial agriculture) but are underestimating the complexity of the issues by a huge magnitude.

No. There is no suspected cause for any such "anomalously high insect population in the past", while we have a lot of suspected causes, verified by the way (so rather culprits than suspects) for the insects decline. The "anomalously high" "is possible" but is actually pure baseless speculation. Also, there is no such observation in the available litterature, scientific or layman.

You know, it is just a matter of knitting all of our knowledge bits together. Lots of nasty chemicals in the environments, especially design to harm insects. Add to that anormal temperatures and rain levels.

> just like the lichens on trees are an indicator of air pollution (few lichens mean a bad air quality).

Lichen indicators for air pollution are fascinatingly more complicated than that. Certain lichens respond positively to air pollution due to excess nutrients like ammonia and nitrates in the air. Imagine an algal bloom but the nutrient pollution is in the air instead of in the water. The US Forest Service produced an interesting video overviewing these phenomena.

Air Pollution & Lichens: A Tour of the Columbia River Gorge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3dPrgAkN3M

The call for action at the end is also not great. From what I can tell, these people are your best bet, assuming you want to help local wild bee populations. (If you have other suggestions, please let me know!)

https://xerces.org/

Around here honeybees do not compete with wild bees for much. Honeybees are a domesticated non-native species incapable of pollinating most native plants. Native bees are well adapted to pollinating native plants but have trouble with the non-native plants.

The problems that native bees here have are several.

o Insecticides (aka pesticides) applied to agricultural crops affect all insects, good and bad, including bees.

o Loss of, for lack of a better word, habitat. Native species of plants are displaced by introduced species that the native bees can not harvest nectar from. Note that urbanization isn't really a big problem for bees because there are plenty of flowers in the city. But are they the right kind of flowers? Orchards full of foreign plants like tree nuts on the other hand, is loss of habitat.

o Introduced disease. Not only are foreign bees brought in (eg. honeybees) but foreign honey is brought in from far away continents chalk full of spores of varieties of nosema or foulbrood or other threats. Honeybees catch these diseases, and bring varroa and tracheal mites and other problems, and spread them to the native bees.

o Honeybees are domesticated agricultural animals like beef cattle and pigs. If the numbers decrease we just breed more until market demand is met. It takes 21 days to breed a new queen and split a colony. Native bees, well, they rely on natural methods of reproduction. The birds and the bees, literally.

As to how a big colony of honeybees deals with a virus: they don't just "throw out the infected bees" since it usually affects the brood more than the workers. If the brood dies, there will be no more workers in a few weeks and the colony collapses. How it usually gets dealt with is the beekeeper medicates the hive. Or, in the case of foulbrood, digs a pit, burns the hive and all nearby hives and all equipment, and buries it like so much nuclear waste.

There is no threat to honeybees. No such luck for wild bees.

(1) Stop using neonicotinoid pesticides. There are plenty of alternatives for protecting food crops from insect infestations, such as neem oil applied as a foliar spray or a soil soak in response to infestations. Neonictoninoides are based on the tobacco nicotine molecule structure, but are typically chlorinated and modified to make them more persistent and toxic to insects relative to animals. There's a good argument for banning the entire class due to their persistent ecological effects on beneficial native insect populations.

https://organic-center.org/research/neonicotinoid-pesticides...

(2) Have undisturbed habitat set aside for wild bee populations. This can be something as simple as maintaining undisturbed hedgerows on the sides of agricultural fields, but in general means maintaining a fair amount of undisturbed native habitat.

https://www.planetbee.org/planet-bee-blog//native-bee-series...

Demonization of neonics is misplaced. You can spray at night when bees aren't active. You can spray when your plants aren't in bloom and attracting bees. Oh well, the 2 minutes hate have emerged against neonics and farmers pivot like they ways do.

If we're talking about trying to stem the destruction of wild species here (The problem really isn't about domesticated honeybees), then you should definitely consider the fact that spraying at night won't help those wild bees which are nocturnal [1], nor does your point of view on these address the fact that these pesticides have a degree of environmental persistence. [2] This isn't demonization, it's just straight facts when there's plenty of alternatives out there which aren't feeding the giant agri-industrial complex behemoth.

[1] https://www.buzzaboutbees.net/do-bees-fly-at-night.html

[2] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b06388

You're mistaken. only big ag can pivot. The smaller your are, the harder it is to keep up with all the regulation. Notice also the phenomenon of regulatory capture.

If you want to stop getting downvoted try refuting my central points directly, I'm not really sold

Down vote to -infinity. I don't care about your internet points.

> Demonization

This is a dramatic overstatement. You’re disagreeing about neonics, I’m sorry if that’s hard not to take personally but it seems like something than could be discussed without the vitriol.

I don't understand how you can parse my sentence and think that the object being demonized is either me or farmers. Yes, neonics are being demonized.

They don't think that. They're saying that your use of the term 'demonization' is over-dramatic and unhelpful.

The word "demonization" is an apt description of the rhetoric being applied to this topic.

Is neem realistic for large scale farms?

We use it in our personal garden, but you need to continually re-apply every 4-5 days with really good coverage for a period of time for it to be effective. It has been hit or miss for us. If neem doesn't work then its oh well, plant something else, but we aren't selling a crop.

It seems to have worked without many problems in France, they had a ban in 2018:

https://cen.acs.org/environment/pesticides/France-bans-uses-...

but there has been a recent exception made for the sugar beet crop:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/france-sees-no-easy-fix...

But did the ban have the hoped for results?

When I checked this last, it doesn't seem to have made any difference to insects. Is there new data?

neem in my experience is most effective when applied to both sides of the leaf as well, since most critters like clinging under the leaf.

There was the documentary 'nicotine bees' (2010) too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnAoOPiimfw

Colony collapse to some degree is also supposedly normal, see 'beepocalypse nah' (sarah taber) https://soundcloud.com/farm-to-taber-podcast/farm-to-taber-0...

I appreciate that she draws the link between monoculture crops, land use, and the health of ecosystems upon which agriculture depends.

Organics are important not because GMOs are the enemy but rather because the land use change is inherently bad for all life in that area. GMOs don't have to lead to monoculture crops that span acres or rampant neonicotinoid insecticides, but they often do, and it's precisely at that point we can see drastic changes in a biome's stability and therefore the health of bees among many other pollinators. That's why we need to be talking about insect numbers at large and not only bees.

The study of biodiversity has an extremely difficult time modeling these kinds of changes, and that's probably why many scientists won't go to bat against this kind of land use change. A self-respecting scientist won't say that converting croplands to monocultures ready for insecticide use lead to biodiversity die-off because it's hard to actually track the fluctuations between species. It takes so much time to collect data to analyze before we even get an inkling of the interplay. We understand so little about the microscale interactions and how it fits into our larger understanding of agriculture and land development.

For those who think this is all overblown and alarmist, go sit on the grass -- if you can find a patch -- and stare at a spot until it comes alive. Things are moving around and teeming with a multitude of species of plants and insects. The reality you see escapes unnoticed until you stop to think about the ecological systems that underpin our fragile existence. Our health depends on a functional biosphere. If we cannot figure out how to share the earth with its other inhabitants, what the fuck are we doing going to Mars?

While I heartily agree with most of your comment, I must strongly disagree with the third paragraph (this is exactly what I'm doing my PhD on):

> many scientists won't go to bat against this kind of land use change. A self-respecting scientist won't say that converting croplands to monocultures ready for insecticide use lead to biodiversity die-off because it's hard to actually track the fluctuations between species

Although you are correct that the details are complicated and different species respond in different ways, the overall picture is abundantly clear. Intensive agriculture with large monocultures, simplified landscapes, and heavy fertiliser/pesticide input is wreaking havoc on biodiversity around the world. The scientific literature has been very explicit about this for over twenty years [e.g. 1-5], and lots of scientists (including my colleagues and I) are actively engaging with farmers, NGOs, and policy-makers to find workable solutions to ameliorate the problem.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2005.00782.x [2] https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1253425 [3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.03.002 [4] https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14606 [5] https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abg6995

Apparently (and probably unsurprisingly) weed/grass killers like Roundup can also affect bees:

https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2021/04/roundup-s...

Roundup also seems to be bad for humans, which is probably why it has been the subject of various lawsuits and settlements and is also banned or restricted in a number of US cities, though not yet in the US as a whole.

The bee apocalypse is still here. The bees haven’t come back.

Other fauna have declined as well, without us noticing.

I go to northern Maine a few times a year and I’m always looking for moose. I used to be able to find them. Now I only see them when I’m in the air (from a plane).

My friend showed me a study the state did tracking 60 newborn moose calves. Due to overwhelming winter tick population, 90%(!) did not survive the first year, and therefore could not reproduce. This problem has led to a massive decline of moose.

Do you have a link to the study? I’m curious how that survival rate compares to the past.

I found an article about it because I was also curious.

https://www.mainepublic.org/environment-and-outdoors/2022-05...

Hobby beekeeper here... I kinda disagree with her final summary... I get her point, but there are benefits to encouraging more people to keep them:

-- Additional pollinators.

-- Awareness. I've witnessed for myself in my own backyard the effects of our unusual weather this spring (ahem: climate change) through observing how my bees are interacting with my garden and trees.

-- Overall benefit: Personally, tending them makes for great therapy and my neighbors love the honey.

-- Advocacy. When you are in-tune with the impact of climate change, pesticides, herbicides, and overall aware of the ecology around you, you are more likely to make political and consumer choices based on those learned / observed experiences.

Perhaps its a coincidence, but I noticed more native bees in my garden now too. I don't think I've done anything net-new in terms of flowers or trees since I started keeping honey bees, but maybe I'm just more aware of the native bees now? Disappointed I've not been able to attract Mason bees, but I've got at least three other varieties buzzing around regularly and I've identified the hive of at least one of those types.

It probably helps that millions of people are helping insect and bird populations by planting stacks of wildflowers, doing No Mow May, and being a bit nicer to local wildlife which all adds up.

Just as a note, it is important that people plant native wildflowers and not just any wildflowers.

If you're trying to help bumble bees, they tend to like to build their nests in the ground under/around rocks, or occasionally in dense duff like straw bales/wattles.

Last year I had a plant to move a flat stone behind a masonry retaining wall on my property to be a hat on a low stone wall that extended off of the end of it, hoping to create some bee habitat. The rock turned out to be too heavy to move, and as soon as I started jostling it, bumble bees came out from under it to see what the ruckus was. So apparently that rock was working just fine where it was. Instead I bought some new stone, but I haven't observed any bees so far this year.

Some people use old pots for this task, but I know people, and an upturned pot is going to be inspected, potentially destroying the hive. Kids in particular would be both more prone to this, and more traumatized to learn what they'd done. A big ol' rock is less of an attractive hazard.

I unwittingly disturbed a solo bumblebee who made his winter home in my compost pile. I wasn't quite sure what I came across, I'd unearthed a wildly vibrating ball of fine fluff, once I teased it apart out flew a big ol' bumblebee. I've got dozens of bumblebees around my yard this part of the summer as our comfrey goes to flower. I believe they winter among my raspberries where its basically an undisturbed hugelkultur mound. Besides bumblebees and carpenter bees I'm pretty much unaware if I'm looking at a wild bee or some type of fly. There are at least a dozen probably closer to two dozen different bee/fly species on the raspberries alone this time of year. I also see honeybees but they stick to the clover, I will see more of them when sunflowers and stonecrop flower. I feel very fortunate to see that kind of variety, we even get monarch butterflies enough to cause the branches to move under their collective weight, I wasn't aware that happened outside of Mexico.

Sometimes I just stand at arm's length and lean over an stare for a bit. The bees in such cases are too busy to bother with you (and indeed I've used this exercise as exposure therapy for myself and two kids who were all previously nervous around bees) and seeing three or four species in a five minute span, you can start to tell them apart in a way you won't get if you spread that duration out over a month.

Lavender and rosemary are very good stages in this regard, roses and the whole rose family (including blackberries, apples, cherries) are also good. If you're on the west coast the ceanothus bush is pollinator paradise.

> However, the numbers may sound more alarming than they really are because honey bees are efficiently bred and managed by humans.

Could that be part of the problem, they mention diversity loss in habitat, how about diversity of honeybee genetics. At the same time, HoneyBees are basically barnyard animals, we don't monitor the collapse of pig populations as they head to the slaughterhouse. I understand its not quite an apt analogy because that is the known causative agent and nobody is trying to slaughter their HoneyBees. All the same, they are not natural, I wonder if the public realizes that.

Honeybees are basically an invasive species that humans brought to the Americas in order to pollinate old-world crops (and also harvest honey). The thing is, we've replaced a lot of native new-world ecosystems and foods with old-world crops that depend on old-world bees.

There are a few separate problems that the media often mixes up:

One is that our old-world crops aren't getting enough old-world bees to meet their pollination needs.

Separately, new-world bees (what the article calls "wild bees") are also being replaced by old-world bees, losing out in competition, and not being cared for by professional beekeepers. They're more vulnerable, less protected, and less monitored.

To top it all off, many kinds of bees, old-world or new, are also suffering from the cumulative (and unfortunately complex) domino effects of habitat loss, pesticides, climate change, etc.

I think what's happening in the media is that journalists, knowingly or not, are using #2 and #3 to amplify the concern of #1 even though they're not always aligned (e.g., old-world bees are often one of the reasons contributing to the decline of native new-world bees).

It's relatively harder to get the public to care about an industrial economics problem (#1, where farmers have to resort to expensive human manual pollination instead of cheap bees), so trying to sell that as environmental crisis a la Silent Spring gets more eyeballs.

To which old-world crops do you refer?

(Not my knowledge, just repeating sources): almonds, some apples, melons, alfafa, plums, avocado, blueberry, cherry, pear, cucumber, sunflower, cranberry, kiwi, etc.

Source: PDF page 4: https://www.beyondpesticides.org/assets/media/documents/poll...

Background, in order from "most readable" to "scholarly":

https://www.museumoftheearth.org/bees/agriculture

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

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.262413599

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8396518/

Corn beans and squash?

https://www.reneesgarden.com/blogs/gardening-resources/celeb...

Blueberries, sunflowers, and cranberries are all native to North America. The things Europeans sometimes call "blueberries" (bilberries) are an entirely different species.

Yes, the old world bees sometimes do pollinate the native crops too, and vice versa. It's not a completely separate Venn diagram. The studies discuss and analyze the degrees of crossover.

Remember "Killer Bees"? People killed a lot of wild honeybee hives from fear they'd hybridize and introduce new genes into the domestic population.

There's a few people who will talk about the lack of diversity in domestic bee genetics. AFAIK they're not popular, everybody wants to blame anyone but regulators.

What happened is that the apocalypse did happen, is still happening, and will continue to happen until such time as people quit using tons of pesticides.

Worse is that warmer air usually means more oxygen is available which should make insect and arachnid populations explode, and should result in physically larger insects and arachnids. That we do not see this speaks to the health of these populations.

So an apocalypse can happen for an indefinite period of time? I'm calling BS on the use of that term. A decline in some insect populations is not an "apocalypse". An apocalypse would be a massive extinction level event on a global scale, like when a giant rock slams into the Earth, or there's continuous volcanic activity for a million years.

I thought this was going to be about the impending doom of the Mexican killer bees we were all warned about in the 80s but that never came. It was in the news for months about a cloud of killer bees.

One problem with the news is that every issue of concern gets blown way out of proportion in the news until it sounds like some kind of existential disaster, and then when total disaster does not come, people think the issue wasn't nonsense. But in reality many of these things are a real problem, just not quite at the scale the news has made it out to be. But what I see time and time again is people dismissing issues of concern because of how the media treated the issue, when what we should really be doing is trying to read through the media's sensationalism to the underlying facts. But I don't think enough people have really internalized how much of the media is sensationalism and lies. People know it when you ask them, but then they go on and believe it all anyway.

I thought they were the Africanized ones? Those were the ones I read about as a kid in my school library, and the way they depicted their projected spread across the USA made it look like a pestilence worthy of Revelation. I honestly thought I wasn't going to live to become an adult because we'd all be over taken by super aggressive bees.

They were supposedly spreading north from Mexico if I remember. To kill us all indeed.