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Comment by jamal-kumar | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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