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Comment by mandelbrotwurst | Hacker News Reader

Hi, why would beekeeping harm wild species please?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com