Does America suddenly have a record number of bees? | Hacker News Reader

Does America suddenly have a record number of bees?

washingtonpost.com

118 pointssoftwaredoug110 comments

I might have missed it, but this article seems to be making the common mistake of conflating native bee species with cultivated bees. I'd be interested in knowing how native bee species are doing, especially since my understanding is that cultivated bees often compete with native bee species.

All the research I’m hearing around North America would indicate the fear about competition is overblown. Honey bees, not being native, don’t necessarily go after the same pollen sources as native bees. Some good research out of Alberta showed that native bees were for example going after native plants whereas the honey bees were shown to fly farther distances to find things like canola. In my own yard (hobby guy, not commercial) I have at least three types of native bees and I watch them cohabitate with my honey bees very similar to what the research in Canada demonstrated.

This is important. Swamp the land with a monoculture of disease-prone bees. Of course this is going to have an impact on wild species. Probably massive, but no one seems to care. Rally strange.

The last five paragraphs are about this.

Honeybees are not native to USA only bumblebees are.

I suspect the US has the usual complement of solitary as well as social bees. A quick search brings up plenty of results.

You missed it. The latter half of the article is about the difference between captive honeybees and wild ones, and also how the population has only increased due to aggressive expansion to counter colonies dying from disease and yellowjackets.

> Grames said the consensus holds that pollinators, like all insects, are in decline — losing probably 1 to 2 percent a year.

What if the cycle is simply due to predator/prey dynamics? More captive honeybees mean more well-fed yellowjackets and thus more predatory pressure on both captive and wild honeybees.

https://www2.nau.edu/lrm22/lessons/predator_prey/predator_pr...

>the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn’t count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over.

Feral != Native. There are no honeybee species native to North America; all honeybees, including the feral ones, are descended from colonies imported from Europe (e.g. the "Western honeybee" apis mellifera).

There are a lot of non-honeybee bee species native to North America though, and they now face competition from feral domesticated honeybees. It's unclear exactly how much impact they have- some research does treat honeybees as a harmful invasive species (similar to many other human-introduced species).

Native bee species have a harder time getting good PR because they don't directly work for us, even though they are important pollinators for some native plants.

I think there at least used to be honey producing bee species in the southern US. I believe some are extinct now and others are only present in South America now.

Mayan honeybees are native to the Yucatan, FWIW. They've also spread to Cuba.

South America has the stingerless variety and I’m very jealous.

Feral honey bees (European honey bees living in a non-beekeeper-managed colony) are different from North American native bees: https://bugguide.net/node/view/475348

Feral honey bees may be thriving but native bees are collapsing.

When I was a kid, it was pretty normal to get stung by a bee when out playing/picking dandelions/making clover chains, and just a walk around one's neighborhood would have more bees covering various flowers than one could easily count.

A local school system has an annual project where school children gather insects --- bees dropped precipitously in number two decades ago, and children have since been cautioned not to capture any sort of stinging/biting insect (mostly out of liability concerns), but it seems to only apply to wasps and yellowjackets.

There's an article on this sort of thing:

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

> When I was a kid, it was pretty normal to get stung by a bee when out playing/picking dandelions/making clover chains, and just a walk around one's neighborhood would have more bees covering various flowers than one could easily count.

I bought an online pollinator friendly garden kit. $150 later (and a few dead plants that didn't make it through shipping) I now have an absurd number of bumble bees around.

Bumble bees are incredibly gentle, you can walk through entire fields of them and they will just ignore you. I was actually pretty worried about planting a pollinator garden while having a toddler around, but it has gone surprisingly well (meaning he hasn't gotten stung).

When we moved to our current home two decades ago, there were a lot of honey bees (apparently visitors from the local apple orchard) and only a few bumble bees --- since then the apple orchard has been replaced by McMansions and it's quite rare to see a honey bee, but there are still a few bumble bees.

Similarly, our garden, which is in an urban area, is always full of bumble bees. They especially love the oregano.

The real reason is buried pretty far down in the article:

> In 2012, the Herbert Hypothetical gave rise to a new law: Your plot of five to 20 acres now qualifies for agriculture tax breaks if you keep bees on it for five years.

> Over the next few years, all 254 Texas counties adopted bee rules requiring, for example, six hives on five acres plus another hive for every 2.5 acres beyond that to qualify for the tax break. Herbert keeps a spreadsheet of the regulations and drives across the state to educate bee-curious landowners.

Economics, who knew?

The interesting bit is more that there's still an ongoing severe problem with bee colonies dying that hasn't been solved despite the apparent increase in overall numbers:

"Sadly, however, this does not mean we’ve defeated colony collapse. One major citizen-science project found that beekeepers lost almost half of their colonies in the year ending in April 2023, the second-highest loss rate on record.

For now, we’re making up for it with aggressive management. The Texans told us that they were splitting their hives more often, replacing queens as often as every year and churning out bee colonies faster than the mites, fungi and diseases can take them down."

It's pretty common knowledge in the beekeeping world that losses are about 50% annually. Most beekeepers request every year or two as well.

The past couple years I've had high losses. Mostly due to yellow jacket pressure. But I'm also treatment-free and expect some losses from colonies that are less varroa hygienic and too late in the year to requeen.

"I'm treatment-free" is a particularly smug way of saying your apiary management strategy is to continuously bomb every surrounding apiary and whatever native pollinators may be in your area with parasites. There is a reason that professionals loathe hobby beekeepers.

Can you expand? Doesn't treatment free mean that their apiary is self-selecting? How does this mean cross-contaminating neighboring, treated apiaries?

(I know very little about this. Just honestly asking for more info because I'm curious)

Not the other guy, but presumably 'treatment free' means that you have hives full of diseased bees or bees infested with mites. Those sick/infested bees then spread those things to wild bees and to other apiaries. Even if the neighbors are willing to treat, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll survive being constantly reinfected by the non-treatment hives.

Treatment-free should mean that you're using IPM methods. It should not be self selecting, but selection aided by the beekeeper heading off problems (requeening, brood breaks, and even treatment when absolutely necessary - like burning your hive if you get AFB, or treating for EFB). You still need to be monitoring your hives.

"Even if the neighbors are willing to treat, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll survive being constantly reinfected by the non-treatment hives."

This is not really how it works for most of the diseases and parasites. Yes, things like foulbrood would act this way. But the stuff that is commonly treated for are mites and parasites like nosema. Even if you treat for these, there will still be a level of it present in the hive. Even healthy hives have bees with one or more of the nosema species present in their guts to some degree. That's why diagnosis of nosema relies on concentrations counted under a hemocytometer.

"Even if you treat for these, there will still be a level of it present in the hive."

True, which is why all hives need to be actively managed to optimize survival rates, but this comment coyly fails to acknowledge that mite counts in surrounding hives do measurably spike when a neighboring hive craters.

Show me the data.

If you define surrounding hives as those within 30 feet or so, yes due to drift they will see a spike. More distant hives should not.

Actively managed and treatment-free are not antonyms. If someone thinks they are, that's a problem.

I like that you're pretending in two places in the comments that sick hives don't get robbed out during their collapse. I posted some reading material for you elsewhere in the thread. Give it a once over, it looks like you might learn something.

"I like that you're pretending in two places in the comments that sick hives don't get robbed out during their collapse."

Nice strawman. I make no such claim. Most hives that get robbed out are predominately done so by the hives in the same apiary.

"Give it a once over, it looks like you might learn something."

Based on my interaction with you, I highly doubt it has anything to offer.

Treatment free is euphemism for the owner deciding it was cheaper to accept 50% losses then to manage the hive with treatment. It’s basically impossible to do treatment free unless you are on a island

You get 50% losses even if you treat. You can still manage a hive with IPM and be treatment-free - management strategies are not the same as treatments (even experts list IPM strategies separate from treatments in their books/websites).

50% losses are too high for commercial keepers. Backyard hobbyists though definitely within normal ranges

> doesn't necessarily mean they'll survive being constantly reinfected

Also known as nature.

On the other hand, the natural hives have to deal with resistant parasites and microbes, due to the prophylactic treatments not being 100% effective, creating an evolution chamber for the illness-causing agents.

Sure, but it's not really nature when you essentially have one keeper constantly raising and introducing extra disease and mites into the environment. It'd be like if you had an infectious disease and constantly went out into public instead of staying home to recover. Sure all the other people getting sick from your infection could be handwaved as being natural, but ultimately it's because you hung around them.

This is great explaination for why commercial beekeepers should not be migrating hives - turning epidemics into pandemics.

Exactly, and even worse because the analogous disease would have no easy vaccine everyone else can use to ignore it.

In other words, less like measles and more like drug resistant tuberculosis.

> Sure, but it's not really nature

Yeah, bee keeping isn't really nature, it's agriculture (humans harnessing nature). That doesn't mean we have to go 'hardcore' because it isn't nature. We can try to keep it close if we want, and I think we should bias that way, where feasible.

Not really, no. The population is being artificially propped up by managed hive splits and a continuous influx of stock from breeder mills. To exert real selection pressure requires careful husbandry at industrial scale in an environment isolated from introduction of unmanaged genetics.

The VSH bees fit that description as they are created from artificial insemination. Yes, it will take generations to make an impact due to feral colonies and the breeder mills not using VSH stock effectively.

"There is a reason that professionals loathe hobby beekeepers."

Most hobby and small scale commercial beekeepers loathe the major beekeepers, and for good reason - trucking around diseases, exposing bees to fungicide and pesticides, creating unhealthy hive densities, etc. But I guess the large commercial outfits need someone to point the finger while the industry dies out due to cheap imports and the willingness of those large producers to subject their bees to active spraying during the pollination of many crops.

You do realize the parasites and diseases that affect native bees are not generally controlled for by commercial beekeepers, right? Even when they are practicing prophylactic treatment, the treatments are not effective at completely eliminating the parasites nor their transmission. Honeybees are a transmission vector for many diseases and parasites regardless of if they are large scale producers or not.

I would also hope that you realize that that just because someone says they're treatment-free doesn't mean thet are just bombing the surrounding areas with problems. IPM techniques can be effective at controlling pests and diseases. They simply aren't economical for the large commercial producers and they may not be as effective when those large producers subject their bees to the commonly poor conditions.

If the large scale commercial practices were really better, we'd see it in the survival rates. But the numbers don't support that.

Nonsense, every word.

Commercial beekeepers aggressively manage for varroa and other diseases, if they didn't the resulting dieoffs would bankrupt them. Backyard hobbyists don't have more skin in the game than folks who literally pay their mortgage off their hives, and they sure af don't have more experience with any aspect of hive management than individuals who are successfully managing hundreds if not thousands of hives.

IPM isn't "treatment-free" beekeeping which I think we'd both agree is gross neglegence. IPM techniques are also rarely used effectively. Don't agree? Figure out what percentage of hobby beekeepers in your area have reached the level of experience/education of a journeyman beekeeper. If it's 20:1 I'll kiss your ass. Regardless of treatment strategy one management fuckup leading to a single hive collapse absolutely sprays the surrounding 2-3 mile area with diseases and parasites. Given annual failure rates all beekeepers are bombing their surroundings with problems, hobby beekeepers just do so for their own personal amusement regardless of which treatment strategy they employ, and treatment-free beekeepers are way WAY worse about this than any other segment of the industry.

Lastly, I advanced no claim that commercial practices are particularly superior at keeping bees alive, although they and related government ag programs are the only credible sources of ongoing breeding to improve varroa resistance, an effort that is vastly complicated by having to geographically isolate breeding operations to try to avoid cross-breeding from unmanaged populations (read backyard hives).

Just a note from a random, uninformed bystander that your posts are coming off as bizarrely aggressive, rude, combative, and dismissive (regardless of what your intent may be).

You may be 100% right about what you're talking about (I don't know either way), but I'm not particularly inclined to take you seriously based on how you're conversing. I'm much more inclined to believe the person you've been having back-and-forth with.

"Commercial beekeepers aggressively manage for varroa and other diseases, if they didn't the resulting dieoffs would bankrupt them."

Who is speaking nonsense now? Yes, they typically treat for some pests and disease. Those pests and diseases that they generally treat for do not affect native bees. Even when they do treat, they don't have full elimination and are still transmissible. You can see they they still suffer about 50% colony loss like the smaller producers.

"and they sure af don't have more experience with any aspect of hive management than individuals who are successfully managing hundreds if not thousands of hives."

And the people keeping hundreds and thousands of hives for commercial purposes don't have as much time to spend on full inspections. If they know so much about management, then they must be making intentionally poor decisions on how to manage when we talk about things like colony dirft and hive densities, transporting bees all over the place (accelerating any existing spread), and subjecting the bees to active spraying during pollination.

"One management fuckup leading to a single hive collapse absolutely sprays the surrounding 2-3 mile area with diseases and parasites."

Have any data to back that up? You do realize that many of the pests and diseases are routinely present in most hives, right? That's why you need actually concentrations for diagnosing things like nosema. I'd love to see an example of an apiary that has zero varroa too...

"Given annual failure rates all beekeepers are bombing their surroundings with problems, hobby beekeepers just do so for their own personal amusement regardless of which treatment strategy they employ."

This makes zero sense. You claim that all beekeepers are problems. But you only have a problem with small scale producers because they aren't paying their mortgage with it. Interesting distinction which bears no matter on the end result. So it appears this conversation is moot.

"an effort that is vastly complicated by having to geographically isolate breeding operations to try to avoid cross-breeding from unmanaged populations (read backyard hives)."

This is complete nonsense. The breeding programs rely on artificial insemination. You can't control the feral bee populations either, so you must do it in a lab. Most of these government bodies and ag extensions have resources (and requirements) for small scale beekeepers, and even encourage it. Most states have mandatory licensing and inspections too. Most beekeeping associations openly welcome beekeepers of any size operations. It seems you just have an axe to grind.

You need data to confirm the assertion that collapsing hives spread disease? Since you're so married to whatever chip you've got on your shoulder you apparently need a reminder that sick bees drifting to other hives and robbing out deadouts are both a thing I've appended a list of follow-up reading for your benefit.

Martin SJ. The role of Varroa and viral pathogens in the collapse of honeybee colonies: a modeling approach. J Appl Ecol. 2001;38(5):1082-1093. [doi:10.1046/j.1365-2664.2001.00662.x] Rosenkranz P, Aumeier P, Ziegelmann B. Biology and control of Varroa destructor. J Invertebr Pathol. 2010;103 Suppl 1:S96-S119. [doi:10.1016/j.jip.2009.07.016] Graystock P, Blane EJ, McFrederick QS, Goulson D, Hughes WOH. Do managed bees drive parasite spread and emergence in wild bees? Int J Parasitol Parasites Wildl. 2016;5(1):64-75. [doi:10.1016/j.ijppaw.2015.12.001]

With that out of the way not -all- breeding programs rely on artificial insemination, maybe you've heard of Mike Palmer? You know, the guy that basically singlehandedly mainstreamed keeping nucleus colonies as an apiary management strategy? Or Randy Oliver? No? Your loss I suppose.

Go salve your feelings somewhere else, I'm done.

"You need data to confirm the assertion that collapsing hives spread disease?"

Nope. What I need is data backing up your claim that it's a disease "bomb" for everything in a few mile area. I've seen some of those papers and other like them, but they do not support your hyperbolic claims. Had you claimed something reasonable, then they might be what you need.

"With that out of the way not -all- breeding programs rely on artificial insemination, maybe you've heard of Mike Palmer? You know, the guy that basically singlehandedly mainstreamed keeping nucleus colonies as an apiary management strategy? Or Randy Oliver? No? Your loss I suppose."

Of course I've heard of them. Both of them do promote IPM and genetic strategies for varroa. They might do open air breeding, but they also aren't strict about thier genetics. If you get a production queen they're not guaranteed to be VSH, but there's a good chance they are. Any beekeeper should be evaluating their stock regardless of claimed providence.

"Go salve your feelings somewhere else, I'm done."

Good, your insulting, close minded, and illogical discourse does not belong on HN.

I wonder if it's possible for one farm to put up a literal screen, a physical barrier, to keep out neighboring bees. It might not have to go all the way around, but maybe just block most of the major flight paths from one to the next.

Seems like it wouldn't need to block 100%, but maybe 80-90% would be a big help.

As someone who knows zero about this, I'm just curious if something like this would be feasible.

Bees typically fly at tree top levels and have a typical range of about 2.5-3 miles. This is part of why certified organic honey produced in the US is non-existent. The USDA is working on an organic certification for honey, but without being able to certify the food sources within a 2.5 mile radius (the draft mentioned this as the likely cutoff), it's practically impossible in most areas.

However, hive spacing can have a big impact. While some transmission does happen at shared flowers, the transmission is very likely between hives due to worker or drone drift. If you have 4 hives on a single pallet (common commercial practice) you will see a lot of bees returning to hives that were not their own. Increasing hive spacing can reduce the number of drifting bees, and possibly reduce transmission.

Yeah, I don’t give a damn about European honeybees (which are imported cattle), it’s the native pollinators I worry about. Ironically “hooray more bees!” headlines just mean more stress on natives due to disease (which isn’t just mites, but imported virus complexes and possibly fungi as well) and sometimes even local food source depletion by honeybee hives.

> I don’t give a damn about European honeybees

Do you like to eat "American" apples?, or almonds?

Other types of bees that are more effiecent at pollination could be used, such as Mason bees. It would require a little more more work to change things over and there wouldn't be the benefit of honey.

Mason bees have their own set of problems. Like the need to breed it and import the insects each time in some areas where they can't survive winter, or favouring some ornamental trees over most common cultured fruit trees.

It seems they're already in limited use.

https://extension.psu.edu/orchard-pollination-solitary-mason...

In alfalfa, leafcutting bees are used, which are also “solitary” (often gregarious). Honestly they’re much more pleasant to be among when walking alfalfa.

Honeybees (or at least the old “guard” bees) which are used in the blueberry fields here, can become angry when large clouds move and cause things to suddenly go from shaded to full sun. If it’s consistently either they’re fine, but I’ve been run out of fields a few times before I fully realized what to avoid.

Asking as someone not in the beekeeping world, do you get the impression that the colony loss rate is stable or increasing/decreasing?

It's extremely variable on an individual basis. I've had years with 100% survival and then others with 0% survival (small sample of under 10 hives), with other beekeepers experiencing similar losses.

There are some studies/surveys out there about survival rates (the population rate studies are less helpful). My understanding is the survival rate plummeted after the introduction of varroa but has been mostly stable around 50% survival nationally for over a decade.

Varroa mites are a vector for diseases and fungus and most likely the distal cause of most of the dying colonies. If they are not aggressively managed, they eventually lead to the death or absconding of almost every colony.

Can anecdotally confirm. I've had 100% surviving hives and continuous queen lineage now for 6-7 years. Before that I did minimal mite treatments (powdered sugar washes are nuts) and had 75% of hives abscond every year requiring new queens. My "neighbors" (>2mi away) rarely have a single hive survive a single winter.

My preference is to alternate "natural" thymol/oxalic treatments with Apivar. You can really see the reduction in virus laden malformed bees in a hive turnover (~6 weeks). Apivar treatment lasts a full year, but I'd rather not develop resistance (don't leave strips in the hive longer than 8 weeks!) so alternate years. The best time I've seen for treatment is right before large population booms (since there are fewer mites in brood). That usually means early winter after supers are removed, or after a queen swarm leaves in late winter/early spring.

One major challenge to resistant queens is that they tend to be more aggressive and their resistance is diluted unless you requeen (resistant) every year or two due to interbreeding with local non-resistant drones.

If you have the stomach for the extra work and your apiary goals can support it consider adding brood breaks to your varroa management strategy.

That's an excellent method! It just requires capturing all the queens and removing any queens and queen cells. Spring swarms and supersedure do something similar although not of a very controllable length.

I'm not worried about the amount of honey.

It can be done with push in cages to trap the queen inside the hive. Because there's still a queen they won't start new cells. Because she's limited to a very small area the brood break is almost complete. I think a two week break is enough. The national honey show had a great video explaining this method. Apparently commercial beekeepers are going that route now that varroa treatments are becoming less effective.

That's likely to be an even bigger win for commercial guys beyond suppressing varroa. It's startling how quick a hive stacks up resources when there's no brood present to tend.

They've measured that too. Here's the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuJlgzcQWAg

It's an hour long and very informative. The research seems well backed up.

A lot of it's genetics over management in my experience. I've seen treatment-free colonies go multiple years with low mite numbers and treatment free yards overwinter 75-100% of colonies. I've also seen heavily managed hives take losses anyways, or abscond after treatment. Including some that take 75-100% losses. Many times the same apiary can go from one extreme to the other in a year or two.

The problem with the genetics is that it's extremely hard to maintain continuity of a colony beyond a few years because eventually they need to requeen. Those future queens are made from a variety of contributions of other gene lines due to the way the mating happens.

Sounds like the usual issues you see with an aggressive focus on monoculture.

I wonder if this is helping weed out the "africanized genes" (bees that will far more easily sting), or have southern beekeepers given up in that regard?

I’m not in the region where they have Africanized bees, but following the research and stories from active keepers, it seem like it’s a combo of both keepers learning how to manage them plus shifts in genetics causing them to mellow some. From what I hear, there are small scale and hobby keepers in the southwest that are actively keeping and working them

The way it would be weeded out is through selective queening. That's how the European honey bee has become so docile - pinching the agressive queens. So it could influence the genetics of the feral bee population, but I would guess it will be minimal.

Likely also economics, who knew?

That which you incentivize you get more of. That which you tax you get less of.

Or, as Charlie Munger famously remarked, Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

This is why it's important to have a robust base tax rate. Plenty of headroom for incentives when they're needed

You could also have no "true taxes" and just print money and have everyone else pay for it in inflation (tax) to give handouts to incentivize what you want.

Right now we do both!

Yes! People, irrational and misinformed as they may be, respond to incentives.

Florida has similar tax breaks for cattle grazing, and Washington has them for managed forests.

Managed forests are greenwashing. The term itself is a ridiculous illusion. It's like this bee article - it gives a process and metric by which things are improving while ignoring more general collapse that those same economic processes are generating

How so?

idk what the previous commenter means by it, but to me, a forest is more than a collection of trees that are planted in a grid, ready for clearcutting in a decade or so. A forest is an entire ecosystem that takes decades to build without the disruption of human intervention. Some of these "managed forests" are little more than tree farms, lacking the wildlife and diversity that comes with natural forests. Monoculture tree farming does not create a diverse ecosystem and the benefits that come from that.

It depends on what you're trying to do - some of those tax breaks are because the land is taxed "as if it grew corn" normally, but if people choose to grow trees you want to tax it at a lower rate, because trees are a lower profit crop.

If you're trying to preserve actual forest, you want to do something more like the land trusts that have come into existence (which already exclude the land from taxes usually anyway).

Yes though it's forgiving to say that it does not create benefits instead of that it destroys those needs without making up for them

Also, even further down, the large increase in almond cultivation in California.

I would be curious to see if these bee hives in Texas are mostly actually extant or whether people are just claiming bee hives for the tax benefit.

In 1987 the nation lost 7 million children for similar reasons.

In 1986, when taxpayers had only to provide the names for children they were claiming as exemptions, 77 million dependents were listed. But then the law changed, and in returns filed for 1987 only 70 million exemptions were identified.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-11-me-33-sto...

My first thought on that:

How many of those missing 7m were split custody cases where both were claiming them. Then with the new law it's "Oh hey, [parent allowed to claim tax for the child] can I have their social for taxes? Whatdya mean you won't give it to me?"

Some podcast did an "update" on Freakonomics and according to them the majority of the difference could be explained by double custody/double claims and people not getting SSNs in time.

10% of all children had double custody claims? That seems surprisingly high to me

There's an and in there. SSNs weren't automatically issued at birth until relatively recently.

August 1987 specifically. So everyone the rule change affected would have been born before. Since most people got SSNs only when they started working, a good chunk of these dependents likely didn't have SSNs at the time.

Might be the case but I remember the day I got one as a kid, unknown to me this was the reason. Oh the stress of signing my name in permanent ink on this very small piece of light cardstock to which I needed access if required by the government and yet must not be lost. How can something so small not go missing? How could I possibly sign my name again like that to prove that I am me or that I am the legitimate bearer of more numbers than my parent’s telephone?

Same here. A rich family sold a lot of land where our homes are now, but kept a little private pond with a house in the back. The only folks I ever see back there are either landscapers cutting the grass or if the owners come out for a big party; no one lives there. Curious if their agriculture exemption for bees is actually legitimate.

buttloads of honeybees everywhere around here. Hate em. Eating bumble and carpenter foods, boo. Leave my white sage alone. https://bugguide.net/node/view/7698

Depends on the location. Many times they do not compete for food as the tongues of the bumble and carpenter bees are able to reach nectar sources the honeybees cannot. Also many of the native bees will work the flowers earlier in the day, giving them a headstart on the honeybees.

I'm a fan of the honeybees, except they keep invading my house. Currently addressing a nest in our attic... Thats the 5th incident in 3 years in this house, 3 of which were hives being built in the home...

You like carpenter bees? They're a pain in the ass

I have a very large garden area near my patio with plants that flower from Spring through Fall. I bump into the full assortment of bees going for the flowers and wasps for my food, but the main harassers in my yard are male carpenter bees that dive bomb me and the occasional female coming out of nowhere to sting me.

There's always a crisis you need to be ultra-worried about, even if you can't do anything to fix it yourself. One day it's too few honeybees, the next it's too many. It goes from being exhausting to being silly, the more cycles you've seen.

I think the bigger question is: why has squab fallen so much in popularity in 15 years?

Works where archive.is is blocked:

https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=3048629111976&w=yisrFjabHB...

A record number of honey bees, maybe? But how are all the other equally (or more) important species of wild bees doing?

BEADS!?!?

This better not be an april fools joke

I can't access the article (paywall), but I hope it makes the difference between wild bees and cultivated bees.

another great day of saving the beeeeeeez

our backyard in California is full of native plants, lavender, fennel, and tons of other pollinator friendly plants.

There are quite literally hundreds of bees basically working in our backyard every single day, 365 days a year. And it takes almost no effort other than some basic gardening. It's outrageously simple to support bees. It's comically absurd how difficult the world wants to make it seem.

Exactly this. Thank you. I have a bee friendly yard in suburban neighborhood with HOA. I keep the front streetside nice and neat for the HOA, but the side yard and back yard is full of clover, a plot of wildflowers, blueberries, blackberries, apples, and a lot of flowers for birds and butterflies. The total amount of effort and cost for all this? Maybe a few hundred dollars over a few years and very minimal work. Turns out that the stuff bees like are basically weeds and will establish and come back with basically no effort at all. The hardest part is stopping the stupid bermuda grass from overtaking it.

I cannot wait for my wildflower plot to shoot up. This year I turned over about 10m x 10m of bermuda grass and sewed a southeastern wildflower mix. I left the center of it grass and a path into it. I plan to go lay down and meditate in the wildflower patch while the bees zoom over head.

I mean, yes and no. If you live in a humid climate where pests like roaches can breed easily, then you either have to live with them, or use pesticides. In which case, say goodbye to bees (and other beneficial insects).

this is such a wild and perversely wrong take. living in a humid climate means you have to drench your backyard in pesticides? what?

Not your entire backyard. Just the perimeter of your house. Trust me, otherwise you’ll be drowning in roaches.

Because agribusiness were making up the “bee crisis” to begin with.

This is one of those fairly obvious situations where you can simply go outside and observe a collapse of insect populations. You may be too young to remember not being able to drive without windshield washer fluid due to the large number of insects that would be on your windshield in a single drive from place to place. Consider leaving your basement.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com