Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

Saw a bee lecture recently [1].

Honeybees aren’t native to North America [2]. The native pollinators, such as bumblebees, are outcompeted by honeybee hives [3]. Those honeybees then selectively pollinate certain plants, reducing biodiversity further [4].

Honeybees, however, unlike local pollinators, can be industrially distributed to industrial agriculture. So they get a lobby. Meanwhile, well-meaning folks put a honey beehive in their backyard and inadvertently wipe out the local bumblebee and butterfly populations.

[1] https://uwnps.org/event/6-26-25/

[2] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/are-honey-bees-native-north-americ...

[3] https://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/em-9524-impact-bee...

[4] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002...

View on HN

Mason Bees are hilarious bees native to North America that don't fly very well, so they just kinda dive-bomb flowers to get pollen. This is important because that heavy slam (well, heavy for a flower) is enough to distribute pollen into the air. These bees are fat, fuzzy, and winter over by crawling into holes and sealing themselves inside with some mud-spit.

It's VERY easy to create homes for these guys - if you've ever seen someone with a large log that has lots of little holes drilled in it, they were likely prepping a Mason Bee habitat. Ideally, they burrow into hollow, dry grass stems that broke off at some point in the fall.

I try to tell people about this bee because it's so easy to make homes for them. Just make sure to move the home every year, or it becomes too easy for predators to find them.

edit: also worth mentioning this bee is so docile, it usually only stings when it's squeezed or wet, and its sting is very light, and the hook is unbarbed. Better than honey bees in so many ways.

Just to go off of this, carpenter bees are closely related to mason bees and are another kind of solitary (non-hive bee). I think carpenter bees are the greatest and I can't stop thinking about carpenter bees. They are a bee, which is cool, but also a lone wolf, also cool. In my wooden house I have several carpenter bee nests. My neighbor Mr. Grubb hates all my carpenter bees because he says all the holes they are making in his walls will make his house collapse, but he doesn't see it, he doesn't see carpenter bee magic. 10/10 please consider adopting some carpenter bees!!

I'm not familiar with American carpenter bees, but I have made it my mission to feed the European ones. They are extremely fond of clary sage and from what I have read online [0] this is true for all Xylocopa on the American continent too, so please consider planting some.

[0] https://www.fountainofplants.com/post/clary-sage-salvia-scla...

Edit: yet another typo I give up!!

This is so interesting. A while back I took an online course about native bee species in Brazil. We have more than 700 different species of stingless bees.

There's a few interesting common species whose response to being threatened are worth mentioning. The jataí (small, wasp-like bees) run away to hide when threatened; the arapuás (small, completely black bees) try to bite you. The mandaçaias have a similar behavior to the jataís.

And one thing I learned as well is that we have a native bee species called "lemon bee", which they are predatory bees that invade hives and release a substance that smells like lemon (hence the name), which intoxicates bees in their hive. The attacked bees either leave their home or die, to which the lemon bees just invade their colonies and steal all the food. They literally make a gas chamber inside the hive.

I am fascinated by the amount of bee diversity we have in Brazil. If anyone's interested to check them out, search for "melipona".

I wonder what it would be like to have a giant Mason Bee hotel in a riparian buffer strip alongside a plot. One problem would be as you point out that predators could find them easily. Another might be that pollinating one crop doesn't do enough for a mason bee all season long.

It looks like some folks use them for berries though: https://backyardbeekeeping.iamcountryside.com/plants-pollina...

We have some of those in our wild crazy yard. I gotta build me some homes for them because you're right they are so cute.

I thought you meant "Giant mason bee" which is not native in north america, is an endangered species and whose jaws might not appeal to the uninitiated.

Wow, that is one large bee.

Looking into these guys, I find it pretty funny that one of the only "sightings" of this bug were a couple of specimens for sale on ebay.

During the season we had a bunch of mason bee nests inside the hollow metal of our porch furniture. Supposedly, mason bees can sting, but the sting is barely perceptible.

You have now convinced me to be the biggest supporter of mason bees now, thank you.

Welcome to the rabbi-- er, bee hole

I’m urging for someone to write «welcome to the rab-bee hole», and now someone did!

I have a line of big orange flowers lining the border of my front lawn. Sometimes ill just sit in the mulch and watch a dozen kinds of bees I’ve never seen before happily moving amongst them. Green bees and all sorts. Never a lot of any species just a wild variety

Here is a video tutorial on hosting Mason Bees - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQhg82f-OPI

You can start out simple, but you might need to be more involved if you want to prevent the spread of parasites since they are more easily spread when all the mason bee larvae are in one place.

I've got a ton of mason bee tubes. They are awesome.

To use a silicon valley analogy, nobody has figured out how to scale out mason bees. Not to the > 200sq miles of pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds owned by the Resnicks. The Resnicks funded some in-house research and apparently considred it a failure.

It's probably possible. Might not even be hard once you know the trick, but it's certainly not a slam-dunk.

Supposedly, it only takes 250 mason bees to do the same pollination as 10,000 honeybees. I think there are people working on scaling this. The honey business is secondary to the pollination money, so having pollination done without having to truck around large hives, could be a big deal.

Not to be confused with mining or carpenter bees that also like logs. My mom's yard has some carpenter bees that live in the ground. They are as big as bumble bees but more black and a male drone hovers around in a certain area above the females and will dive bomb other male carpenter bees. The male bees will follow you around if you go into their area but they never stung anyone.

I love native bees, I've been trying to find ways to incorporate native bee facts into my tech talks. The "Insect Crisis" book was a nice overview of issues like overuse of honeybees, plus others. Highly recommend planting native pollinator-friendly plants in garden if you want to meet adorable, hilarious, beautiful native bees!

My current fav is the Fine Striped Sweat Bee, where the females are 100% turquoise. Dazzling! https://bsky.app/profile/pamelafox.bsky.social/post/3lv3eycl...

To me, one of the most fascinating facts about pollinators in general is their interconnectedness, which spirals off into a myriad of everyday touch points for most people.

One fact a friend shared recently was that magnolia trees pre-date many modern pollinators.

>> At the time of their evolution, many common pollinators we think of today, such as bees, butterflies, and moths had not evolved yet. As a result, magnolias developed flowers for pollination by beetles and flies, which were the primary insect pollinators 100 million years ago. https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/garden-scoop/2018-05-05...

If you pay close attention in Seattle, you'll find that bumblebees are particularly fond of making nests in the hollows of the loose boulder retaining walls that are still in fashion in the region. It's hard to catch them because they have much smaller numbers per nest and thus less traffic per minute, but they do.

I let the wildflowers grow in my lawn, and in the summer there's a constant hum from the bees. I enjoy the sound and their industriousness.

My only problem is the invasive plants which are determined to overwhelm everything.

Out of left field, but do you have any sources on developing small riparian environments to promote dragonfly populations?

I recently learned that a popular anti-mosquito trick by painters in my area is to put a fake dragonfly on their cap. Which led me to wonder where the actual buggers have gone.

They're all in my yard, and I honestly don't know why. I'm almost half a mile from the nearest wetland. I think it's tall weeds. They seem to be like cats and want to perch on high spots.

> They seem to be like cats and want to perch on high spots

I love this.

Unfortunately, so do ticks... (grass blades)

I don’t believe we have ticks in the same way that the east coast has lime disease-carrying ticks though?

Convincing hipsters to switch their urban hives to more obscure bees actually seems achievable.

So what you're saying is that honeybees just have good bee-R?

"The native pollinators, such as bumblebees, are outcompeted by honeybee hives"

... in urban environments, and it' still debatable. Your #2 source provides additional details.

There are a lot of other dubious claims here that the sources seemed to contradict each other.

Something you didn't bring up is that people raising honeybee can benefit other pollinators due to changes in human behavior such as planting beneficial plants and refraining from pesticide use.

> in urban environments, and it' still debatable

In all environments.

The source argues this competition is fine in urban environments because we’ve already displaced the native pollinators there.

Please read your #2 source. That one says competition is fine in rural areas because carrying capacity is still sufficient. This might be different than your #3 source, hence the comment about contradictory sources.

> read your #2 source. That one says competition is fine in rural areas because carrying capacity is still sufficient

Do you mean No. 3, the Oregon State University article?

No. 2, the USGS article, explicitly says "honey bees are also significant competitors of native bees and should not be introduced in conservation areas, parks, or areas where you want to foster the conservation of native plants and native bees."

(As for the Oregan State University article, the word rural never appears. It's focussed on urban areas, where honeybees have a smaller foraging radius and native bees are largely extinct. The carrying capacity argument only applies "during periods of abundant pollen and nectar.")

Yes,my prior comment reversed numbers 2 and 3.

"Only half of the studies pointed to a negative impact of competition, and most of the negative impacts were studies where wild bees changed their visitation rate on certain flowers. It has yet to be demonstrated how competition may result in a long-term change in the composition of bee species in an environment."

You wouldn't find the term rural because they use the term wildlands.

The studies used in the Oregon article are not all urban focused and included studies investigating increased competition in varying habitat, finding "As the California study demonstrated, increased competition may cause bee species to switch their foraging patterns, resulting in little impact on their overall reproductive success."

And yes, any conservation area will not promote the inclusion of non-native species regardless of their impact. Just becuase they are competitors doesn't show that they have negative impacts.

> wouldn’t find the term rural because they use the term wildlands

These are different environments. National parks are wildlands. Farms are rural. A lot more of America is rural than wildland.

"A lot more of America is rural than wildland."

Rural is a larger identifier which encompasses wildlands. It also depends on what you classify as wildland. According to the dictionary it's uncultivated land. If we were to measure uncultivated and undeveloped rural land, how would that compare to the cultivated and developed rural land? If 17% of US land is cultivated and less than 10% is urban, do you really think that the majority of the US or even the majority of the rural area are not wildlands? Either way, it makes no difference to the argument. Some of the sources in your links even look at various crop lands. It just seems at this point you're grasping at irrelevant and unsupported straws.

People can plant beneficial plants without introducing invasive competitors.

They can, but they don't. You missed the point. Awareness through exposure to beekeeping can change human behavior in a beneficial way. If you read some of the previously linked articles, you will see that it is still debateable if the competitors are actually causing any real problems for native bees. If the problems are debatable and on a low scale, then it's possible the benefits are a net positive.

> can, but they don't

Do we have evidence backyard beekeeping promotes these behaviours better than directly messaging folks to plant pollinator-friendly gardens? (Genuine question.)

I don't know of any studies looking at this specifically, but there are numerous groups and programs that use honeybees as an outreach tool for environmental education. There are studies about the effectiveness of experiential learning vs classroom only learning. One indicator that this is working is the fact that most people in general think about honeybees when you say the bees or pollinators are dying. The steps of reducing pesticide use and planting pollinator friendly yards is universally beneficial.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/how-bee-...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8569223/

If you were ever wondering why (us) vegans don't eat honey: this is one of many reasons.

It's true but honey bees are still extremely economically important. And very useful because their hives are large and portable.

The billionaire Resinick pomegranate/pistachoi/almond oligarchs put quite a bit of effort into native bees which seemed quite successful but they shut it down I think about 5 years ago. I can't find the article now. Gen X+ might remember them as owners of the 'Franklin Mint' hawkers of knickknacks you either are or soon will be throwing into a dumpster.

They are BTW also largest renters of honeybee hives in the US.

> And very useful because their hives are large and portable.

I have no proof of this, this is just my theory, but the "portable" might be the issue. I think industrial beekeepers in the US might be part of the problem. Yes you can technically move the bees, but should you? You're moving around disease, you might be overworking and stressing the bees. Meanwhile you have farmers create massive fields with nothing but corn, grass, wheat, whatever, leaving you with essentially green deserts from the pollinators perspectives.

Again just a theory of mine, but the reliance of "portable" bees is what's causing the problem. Other countries have beehives for rent, but they aren't moved constantly. Often they stay in the same location all year and the bees are allowed to follow their natural cycles.

Trucking around hundreds of hives always seems rather stupid.

Right, it's interesting from a technical perspective, but it's a story about battery-farmed livestock, not about North American ecology. My guess is they'll figure out how to keep growing more bees. The prices of honey bee queens have been pretty stable for the past 15 years.

I think it is not a great analogy. As Jeremy Bentham wrote, “The question is not: can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But can they suffer?”

I have relatives that do or have raised bees (as a hobby). Can bees suffer? I don't know. I kind of think a bee can experience suffering in a small degree. I'm not going to run the experiments on that because I'm not a sociopath. Also arguably the hive is the basic unit of the honeybee organism, not the bee itself.

I do know for certain hogs can suffer. I'm a farm boy from Iowa. I've been around them from a young age and I hate everything about them. I hate the smell, I hate the way their meat tastes to me like they smell, I hate how if you are small enough and don't take care, they are mean enough to knock you down and eat you.

I'm probably one of the few people on HN who have actually experienced in person what a hog confinement facility looks and smells and sounds like. I wouldn't wish it on my worst hog enemy. It is a vision of hell, illegal to film in Iowa, and in no way comparable to how we treat bee hives.

Meanwhile: https://www.sciencealert.com/fish-suffer-up-to-22-minutes-of...

I am for complicated reasons unusually familiar with battery hog farms. I'm not making an ethical comparison; I'm just saying: ecologically speaking, American honey bees are an industrial product, not part of our fauna.

Yeah, that was an odd turn.

Yes thank you, we're supporting the wrong bees!

> we're supporting the wrong bees

Our farms don’t work with bumblebees. Honeybees are fine. The problem is thinking we only need honeybees. We need more bees of all kinds. And in some cases, yes, that may mean fewer honeybees.

the non-native honeybees used in commercial farming are responsible for the diminishing numbers of native honeybees that co-evolved to pollinate native plant life

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81967-1

we've been screwing up the global ecosystem for hundreds of years at this point with farming techniques spread by european colonization

I mean, somewhat true, but probably a touch oversold? I don't think people putting in a single beehive are doing much to impact a neighborhood. Probably less than having a house cat. Which, is not nothing, but is not ecosystem changing, either.

I'm reminded of how much we were taught that monocrops were bad things in grade school. And yet, you'd be hard pressed to name a popular food that isn't grown in giant monocrop fields.

> probably a touch oversold? I don't think people putting in a single beehive are doing much to impact a neighborhood

Probably not, especially if they’re in an urban environment. The bees being shipped to farms, on the other hand, are ecologically destructive (as well as economically invaluable).

My takeaway is not that honeybees are evil. It’s that we need more pollinators in more stripes, and that the agricultural industry has successfully confused pollinators in general with honeybees in particular.

The damage is largely already done because the non-native bees are now a feral invasive species that have out competed natives, and the invasive honey bees haven't co-evolved to pollinate native plantlife

My understanding is that there are in fact very few feral honey bee colonies in the US ("if you see a honey bee in your yard, chances are someone owns it") and at some points over the last 20 years feral honey bee colonies had essentially been eradicated by the Varroa mite.

I get swarms trying to establish new colonies every summer, and I'm in a major city where most people don't have any yard space.

Industrial farming scales. And that scales better (until it breaks) with fewer variables. Aka mono crops.

Similar to many, many other things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com