Bumblebee queens choose to hibernate in pesticide-contaminated soil | Hacker News Reader

Bumblebee queens choose to hibernate in pesticide-contaminated soil

phys.org

78 pointsandai33 comments

It could be something like what happens with honey bees in chimneys. Honey bees think they've found a great hollow tree home with it even smelling like a tree due to creosote, but creosote levels are so high that it makes sick bee colonies. With bumblebees it might be something where bees are naturally attracted to smell thinking it's a good thing without being able to recognize there can be too much of a good thing, so will make them sick.

Like humans and sugar.

Or like humans and beer.

Or humans and people who agree with them.

Or humans and HN

Or humans and scratchy lotteries

Or humans and putting too much money on the ponies

Bees are plagued by mites and parasites. It could be that pesticides lead to fewer attackers for the bumblebees.

Makes me wonder if it could be that some of the pesticides attract the bumblebees, but not because of the absence of parasites.

Presumably clean soil also has no mites or parasites in it.

I don't think that's a safe assumption considering how many mites live on skin, or how many ticks live in pristine wilderness.

They actually mention this as an alternative explanation other than missing fungi and parasites after rereading the article:

> Another possibility is that the queens could have developed an "acquired taste" for pesticides, as researchers put it, due to prior exposure in their environment.

the key might be that durring the torpor of hibernation the bees are less vulnerable to toxins than there parasites first question is do the parasites also hibernate or do they continue to feed on the bees,while the bees have crawled into a chemical spill and put themselves into suspended animation for 3-4 months and keep in mind that many insect species feed on toxic plants to deter preditors, monarch butterflys and milk weed is top of the list

In one place I lived, there was some residue on the windows from stickers the previous tenants children had put on the windows.

There was a wasp nest on the roof and the wasps kept going for the part of the window where the stickers had been. Must have been something in there that attracted them.

many larger animals self medicate and apply external anti pest substances I watch my horse roll and rub herself on bayberry shrubs,of which there are many in her 10 acre paddock,the bay berry is very aromatic and the seeds are so wax covered asnto be a useable source of candle wax. The paddock is also full of many many kinds of bees wasps and hornets,which I watch closely to see what they eat and where they shelter,with the idea to learn.how to create ideal habitat in areas with struggling bee populations,got a few pointers from watching,but the tid bit above is trurly facinating

I understand that's why cats like catnip.

I'm pretty sure they like catnip because it gets them high.

The would be the evolution cause and effect

It's easy to make claims when it comes to evolutionary biology - there's patterns everywhere - but it's almost impossible to prove anything, and most of the things that are "obvious" won't turn out to be true.

As a counterpoint, there's loads of things that get humans high that don't have any obvious benefit, why shouldn't other animals be the same?

And there's certainly loads of other plants that work just as well as pesticides, and yet they don't get cats high.

It does, but I read an article that said it’s a natural insect repellent, and that it was important (especially for big cats, who also like it) that cats not be plagued by insects, while hunting, so the conjecture was that their desire to roll in it was an evolutionary advantage.

Kinda like enjoying sex, means we do it more often.

> many larger animals self medicate and apply external anti pest substances

It seems like some birds use cigarettes butts to prevent parasites so it wouldn't be a first

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cigarette-butts-h...

That was my first thought on reading the title.

Before we consider this a problem we should be looking at the survival rate in contaminated vs uncontaminated soil. I wouldn't be at all surprised of the queens are making the right choice.

Those error bars are pretty wide, so I wouldn't read too much into this.

I agree. From the research paper:

> Soil treatment (n = 6; χ2 = 11.13, p = 0.049), but not contamination level (χ2 = 1.67, p = 0.196) nor the interaction between both variables (χ2 = 6.04, p = 0.302) had a significant effect on the proportion of queens found in soil crates.

It's easier to see the graphical representation: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972... . The error bars has too much overlap, and all of them overlap with the mean and the bars of the control group.

Sounds like it'd be an effective way to develop genetic tolerance for these pesticides after several generations of this behaviour.

With "several" probably doing some heavy lifting there. ;)

If it's harmful to the bees, natural selection will weed out this behavior pretty quickly.

About a decade ago, TIME Magazine published A World Without Bees [1]

Since then, many people seem to think bees are on the edge of extinction.

In fact, there are more bees now than ever before [2]

[1] https://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,20130819,00.htm...

[2] https://www.marketplace.org/2024/05/16/honeybee-populations-...

I believe the problem was always with wild bees (versus honeybees that were grown for commercial purposes).

Wild Bumblebees are not commercial honey bees.

I used to run in a stretch of road on the outskirts, grass fields on both sides, from a certain sunny week every year, you could see quite a number of dead bees on the sidewalk, like 1 or 2 every 2 metres for 400 metres. Something that never noticed anywhere else

That's where you are supposed to see them, kind of, no big surprise here. It may sound surprising to some, given that bees travel by air, but they aren't good at crossing roads. When returning home after collecting the nectar they fly low and get literally hit by cars. So, apparently that place where you were running had a colony of bees on one side of the road, and their preferred food on the other, so a lot of bees were commuting daily over that dangerous place.

and then the whole phenominon moves up the food chain to crows, specificaly young crows that discover that they can get easy pickings along certain stretches of roads,only to become road kill themselves,see it each year about this time anapolis valley to HRM

sadly, the bees where not able to work remotly to avoid commute induced stress

> many people seem to think bees are on the edge of extinction.

There are 20000 species of bees. Europe has a 10% of the bee diversity with 1965 species present. Only in the European Union, a 9.1% of those have a status of endangered and another 5% are near endangered, this means that more than 100 species have troubles to survive, just in Europe.

Is a fact, not a just a though, that Ammobates dusmeti, Nomada siciliensis or Andrena labiatula, among other, are critically endangered.

But the real problem is that for the majority of all European species of bees (EU + rest of Europe) we just don't know what is happening. A 56% of the European bees are tagged as "Data Deficient". Even worse, there are 300 species of bees that are endemic (not found anywhere out of Europe). Most of them in the Mediterranean.

About trends on population, we know that 150 species are in a declining state and 13 are growing. For the rest, a solid 79% of the European species, we don't even know if they are increasing or decreasing its population in the last decades.

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