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Comment by davidkuennen | Hacker News Reader

Having lived in the countryside in Germany my whole life (34 years), I noticed a dramatic decline of insects.

When I was a child, there were so many butterflies, bees and more in the summer. Today I barely see them anymore.

Fellow German here. I go out for mountain biking and gravel rides a lot. Every time I pass agriculture fields in summer, there is no "noise" anymore, it's totally quiet. No birds, no insects, nothing, it almost seems dead. As soon as I come to places where nature can be itself, there is an abundance of sounds, nature is thriving. Unfortunately the former prevails the latter several times.

I guess I don't need any studies of WHAT is killing these insects...

If you have a garden you can let a little bit of it go wild. One garden isn't much, but millions of gardens with wild patches can make a difference.

That's exactly what I do. 1/2 of my garden is wild with wild flowers, habitats for insects and birds and on the other half no pesticides are used, I just weed by hand. Great diversion if you're stuck with a programming problem...

Yup! I always thought it was me staying inside more as I got older, but I rarely see butterflies and bumble bees anymore.

This terrifies me more than climate alarmism.

You don't think it might be related?

They're related in that both are downstream of industrialization, but changing climates aren't lessening insect biodiversity as much as overuse of various chemicals are.

Warmer climate should be better for insect populations. This is mostly about pesticide overuse.

And habitat loss? Crop monocultures are not great for most insects (or animals or birds).

Insects can be very sensitive to drought

what got me is that over the past 10 or more years, I've continually seen dead bees on the ground.

and I think... what a small creature to *notice* on the ground. How many dead bees escape my notice? there must be a LOT.

Bees live less than a year, so the number of dead bees can surely only be used as an indicator of changes on around that time-scale or shorter. Eventually fewer bees means fewer dead bees.

Do you think insecticides are altering where the bees die? Otherwise it sounds like you're describing a large population of former bees.

Remember getting so many mosquito bites, but then after growing up you almost never see mosquitos any more in the same location. Was many years since I last saw one now.

+1 to that. Car windshields are clean today after a long ride on the autobahn.

I have apple trees in my garden and if you dont physically shield the apples, wasps and other insects will just eat them up in no time. Nearby there are enormous apple tree fields. Nothing touches their apples. I wonder why.

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