A new survey says America's honeybee hives just staggered through the second highest death rate on record, with beekeepers losing nearly half of their managed colonies. But using costly measures to create new colonies, beekeepers are somehow keeping afloat. Thursday’s University of Maryland and Auburn University survey says that even though 48% of colonies were lost in the year that ended April 1, the number of United States honeybee colonies remained relatively stable. Honeybees are crucial to the food supply, pollinating more than 100 of the crops we eat, including nuts, vegetables and fruits. Scientists blame parasites, pesticides, starvation and climate change for large die-offs.
it is also not easy to replace them in agriculture. Many wild bees (like mason bees) are incredible better pollinators than honey bees, but most of them are solitary (making them grow in large numbers almost impossible) or pollinate only specific types of plants.
Honey bees have no business being in the USA in the first place. They are an invasive species. They cannot pollinate our local plants, and they displace our native pollinators. They are harmful to our ecology in North America. The only reason they are here is to be exploited as agricultural animals, but you’ve been manipulated into fearing that your entire food system is predicated on an insect that in reality produces nothing but sugar syrup.
I used to have several hives in Texas until moving out East. The heat and droughts were brutal for them. We were constantly trying to split healthy hives to increase success for our queens.
This coming spring I’ll try to add two hives to our backyard as the city allows for up to 3 hives per residence. I’m hoping the more temperate climate and docile queens will help our area.
@darknavi@vlemmy.net Surprisingly, there is not that much maintenance on beehives. They are incredibly efficient and sufficient on their own. When I add my two hive boxes next spring, I’ll be present enough at home to periodically check hive activity and do minor hive body inspections.
The most active you’ll be in the care of the hives is during winter (your climate may vary). In colder months when flowers don’t bloom, we cook sugar water to have for hive feeders so they are well fed. Outside of that, let nature take its course. It’s very rewarding and fun to provide a means for you and your neighbors to have pollinators and local honey.
There are plenty of “starter kits” or “garden kits” that allow for ease of entry into beekeeping.
Flowers attract bees. The best sources of food for bees are wildflowers native to your area. Bees especially like blue and purple flowers because they see this color range particularly well.
Native flowers attract bees and offer pollen + nectar for them :)
Don’t forget that honeybees aren’t the only bees nor the only pollinators. Ask your local university or beekeepers / native plants association about what you can do to help out in your area!
Even worse, honeybees can compete with wild local bees… Best solution is indeed flowers (local plants are usually better choices) and providing a good environment for wild pollinators
I don’t think most people even know honeybees aren’t native to North America. Native bees are the ones at risk, and non-native honeybees aren’t helping.
Honeybees moved into my backyard recently. I guess they somehow attract a lot of different wildlife in some mysterious way, because we now have cardinals, blue jays, possums, chipmunks, and marble lizards living back there too.
For context, I live in Ridgewood Queens, so this feels absolutely insane. Loving every second of it but god damn
I’ve found that it’s bringing the bugs back in general that causes this wave. Perhaps you or someone near you has planted some new stuff, or let some stuff grow wild. Like someone stopped mowing, and suddenly the bugs have a place to live and explode.
The USA can take this large losses, they have relative few hives and can easily import bees if needed.
IIRC there are 2 million hives in the USA with 100 Million managed hives world wide. A lot of the 2 million hives in the USA are managed by big commercial beekeepers (1000+ hives) and I doubt a lot of them take the survey. While I’ve heard about higher winter losses from commercial beekeepers I doubt they are this high.
I work with/for a european commercial beekeeper and we had low winter losses ~3%. While the hobby beekepers had a record high loss according to the national survey ~30%.
Isn’t the high death rate an indicator of problems with the general insect population? While bees are important pollinators, so are wasps, flys, butterflys and many more, that cannot rely on active measures to recover.
I personally disagree with the sentiment that going child-free is the solution to ecological catastrophe. Any individual’s decision to have children, or not, hardly compares to the systemic issues within agriculture and natural resource management which are causing it.
I thought beehaw was supposed to be the “nice” instance. You and others have done a wonderful job proving that otherwise today.
Well, the original comment in this thread which upset you came from your own instance. From where I’m sitting, that comment has been pretty much the only not-really-nice interaction you’ve had all day on here. Don’t really see where this strawman is coming from.
This is “don’t have kids” taken to its logical conclusion. Nothing absurd about this.
Pains me that more people are unable to follow the chain of thoughts and reach this conclusion.
Let me entertain a hypothetical solution. Would you suggest to Palestinians to “not have kids” to solve the ethnic conflict in that area?
what is with kbin posters and takes like this man
If anything, this is a non-sequitur.
But maybe there is a grain of truth in there. People who were horrified that the lemmy dev and main mod of lemmy.ml was a proponent of hard left stayed away of lemmy (both SW and instances) and went to kbin instead. And since “don’t have kids” is mostly popular on the more extreme left… you get self-selected opinions.
(honestly, I had no clue that I was not beehaw, just saw a braindead post and replied)
Telling one person that they can help out by not having kids is rather different from, as the dictionary says
Your definition seems to be quite limited. Many acknowledged genocides would not be treated as such. According to Wikipedia, the UN Genocide Convention is much broader:
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people[a] in whole or in part. In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.[1][2]
Spreading an ideology according to which one shouldn’t have kids, thus preventing births, would fall into this definition.
Even suggesting to a whole group of people not to have kids is not the same as killing them.
You are correct, it is not the same as killing them, but no one was arguing that. Again, limiting genocide to the deliberate killing of individuals would be quite a lenient definition, and various laws that targeted various ethnic minorities would not be considered genocides, despite them being considered as ones and having the same exact effect. Consider forced sterilization. You don’t have to forcibly kill anyone, yet probably everyone here would agree that it is a genocide.
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people[a] in whole or in part. In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.[1][2]
Spreading an ideology according to which one shouldn’t have kids, thus preventing births, would fall into this definition.
Even with this extended definition, your argument fails the most important criteria for genocide wtih the UN definition which is:
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.
And it also fails to mention that the argument being made is voluntary and so it wouldn’t fall under the act of :
You appear to be unable or unwilling to distinguish between “preventing births” and “voluntarily choosing not to have children.”
Not sure why you’re quite so interested in escalating the rhetoric here (forced sterilization? in a thread that started with individual action to save honeybees? really?) but in view of the first rule of Beehaw (“Be(e) nice”) I’m not interested in joining you.
One concrete thing to do is to get your governing body to promote diverse crop rotations. Ask them to end subsidies for single-crop farms, especially crops that don’t serve as a food source for bees or have been made toxic by pesticides (frequently found on massive corn farming operations).
I’d honestly have to do the math, but I suspect we’d be able to get rid of synthetic fertilizers if we actually wanted to. Afterall, what do you think happens to the nitrogen after we eat it? We pee and poop it out, for the most part. Yes, there are losses to the air when you till the soil, but a proper farm that focuses on soil health has ways to deal with that problem.
Right now we use the system we have because it’s cheap and easy to do so on an individual level. Growers want to simplify their workflow; they don’t want to actually manage the health of the land they work. It’s too much effort.
Plus, there’s a bunch of government policy that encourages bad farming practices and discourages good ones. Corn subsidies, banning the use of treated sewage for fertilizer, blatant blind-eye enforcement of labor laws, price-dropping policy instead of price-stabilizing policy, etc.
It’s not that we would starve, not in a properly structured system, anyway. It’s that food would become more expensive and some of us would transition to careers in agriculture. The pay would become seductive when the farms become desperate for labor. A farm that actually takes care of the land and the animals is absolutely more labor-intensive, and that’s why very few modern farms do it.
Edit: I should also say that the plants and animals we have today are not the same as the ones we had when the Haber process was invented. We wouldn’t be going back to the yields of the early 1900s. Even if we did everything exactly the same as they did back then, we’d still get better returns and have a more robust food delivery system. Hell, they didn’t even have refrigeration back then.
Another data point to fight against the deluge of “but it is not 150% established and shouldn’t we also look at <distraction>” “science” peddled by the pesticide industry:
Cuba has zero problems with its bees. Literally zero. They gave up on pesticides first out of necessity (fall of the USSR), then leaned into it, pesticides are generally outlawed and only see very rare use on state-run rice fields, a tiny fraction of their total agriculture.
The result is a very healthy bee population and flourishing honey exports. All of it passes EU organic certification with flying colours and tropical honey tastes real good so it’s not cheap stuff, either. Expect at least 30 Euro/kg as opposed to domestic rapeseed honey at 10 Euro/kg, or forest honey (generally the most expensive German stuff) at 16. EDIT: Actually the most expensive I could find was heather honey, 21 Euros. Never had it nor seen it in a supermarket.
Despite big annual losses the situation is a far cry from 2007 when many bee experts expected an end to managed pollination said U.S. Department Agriculture research entomologist Jay Evans, who wasn’t part of the survey.
“There are threats certainly in the environment and honeybees have persisted,” Evans said. “I don’t think honeybees will go extinct but I think they will always have these sort of challenges.”
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And then consider the part of the US non-honeybees that died without any beekeepers to stabilize their population.
Note: honeybees are not a native species in the US
Is this true? I never knew this. Is there another primary insect in the US that’s a pollinator?
Other bees - who they can outcompete and kill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kf2-86o5S1o here’s a video about it.
The US has countless pollinators.
Thank you!
it is also not easy to replace them in agriculture. Many wild bees (like mason bees) are incredible better pollinators than honey bees, but most of them are solitary (making them grow in large numbers almost impossible) or pollinate only specific types of plants.
Honey bees have no business being in the USA in the first place. They are an invasive species. They cannot pollinate our local plants, and they displace our native pollinators. They are harmful to our ecology in North America. The only reason they are here is to be exploited as agricultural animals, but you’ve been manipulated into fearing that your entire food system is predicated on an insect that in reality produces nothing but sugar syrup.
I used to have several hives in Texas until moving out East. The heat and droughts were brutal for them. We were constantly trying to split healthy hives to increase success for our queens.
This coming spring I’ll try to add two hives to our backyard as the city allows for up to 3 hives per residence. I’m hoping the more temperate climate and docile queens will help our area.
How much work per month do you find them?
I’d love bees on our property but I don’t have the time to do lots of maintenance.
On that note I wonder if I can pay a keeper to colocate a colony on my property…
@darknavi@vlemmy.net Surprisingly, there is not that much maintenance on beehives. They are incredibly efficient and sufficient on their own. When I add my two hive boxes next spring, I’ll be present enough at home to periodically check hive activity and do minor hive body inspections.
The most active you’ll be in the care of the hives is during winter (your climate may vary). In colder months when flowers don’t bloom, we cook sugar water to have for hive feeders so they are well fed. Outside of that, let nature take its course. It’s very rewarding and fun to provide a means for you and your neighbors to have pollinators and local honey.
There are plenty of “starter kits” or “garden kits” that allow for ease of entry into beekeeping.
Lemmon Grass attracts bees! Use this information as you will.
Flowers attract bees. The best sources of food for bees are wildflowers native to your area. Bees especially like blue and purple flowers because they see this color range particularly well.
Native flowers attract bees and offer pollen + nectar for them :)
Don’t forget that honeybees aren’t the only bees nor the only pollinators. Ask your local university or beekeepers / native plants association about what you can do to help out in your area!
Even worse, honeybees can compete with wild local bees… Best solution is indeed flowers (local plants are usually better choices) and providing a good environment for wild pollinators
I don’t think most people even know honeybees aren’t native to North America. Native bees are the ones at risk, and non-native honeybees aren’t helping.
A friend of mine moved to Texas and became a beekeeper. Doing what they can!
Taking the hard path!
Not the bee news I was hoping to see on Beehaw ☹️
Honeybees moved into my backyard recently. I guess they somehow attract a lot of different wildlife in some mysterious way, because we now have cardinals, blue jays, possums, chipmunks, and marble lizards living back there too.
For context, I live in Ridgewood Queens, so this feels absolutely insane. Loving every second of it but god damn
I’ve found that it’s bringing the bugs back in general that causes this wave. Perhaps you or someone near you has planted some new stuff, or let some stuff grow wild. Like someone stopped mowing, and suddenly the bugs have a place to live and explode.
You just became a Disney princess.
I’M A BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLY
But can you paint with all the colors of the wind?
The USA can take this large losses, they have relative few hives and can easily import bees if needed.
IIRC there are 2 million hives in the USA with 100 Million managed hives world wide. A lot of the 2 million hives in the USA are managed by big commercial beekeepers (1000+ hives) and I doubt a lot of them take the survey. While I’ve heard about higher winter losses from commercial beekeepers I doubt they are this high.
I work with/for a european commercial beekeeper and we had low winter losses ~3%. While the hobby beekepers had a record high loss according to the national survey ~30%.
Isn’t the high death rate an indicator of problems with the general insect population? While bees are important pollinators, so are wasps, flys, butterflys and many more, that cannot rely on active measures to recover.
deleted by creator
Don’t have kids…
deleted by creator
It’s understandable that that’s a sensitive issue for you, but the advice honestly is pretty accurate
deleted by creator
I personally disagree with the sentiment that going child-free is the solution to ecological catastrophe. Any individual’s decision to have children, or not, hardly compares to the systemic issues within agriculture and natural resource management which are causing it.
Well, the original comment in this thread which upset you came from your own instance. From where I’m sitting, that comment has been pretty much the only not-really-nice interaction you’ve had all day on here. Don’t really see where this strawman is coming from.
deleted by creator
It is only “nice” if you agree with the ideology of the owners completely, otherwise you are banned.
If your country doesn’t make it too hard, don’t forget adoption may be a solution for both.
Ah, so you support genocide.
…what? this is such an absurd non-sequitur. how do you arrive at this from “don’t have kids”. what is with kbin posters and takes like this man
This is “don’t have kids” taken to its logical conclusion. Nothing absurd about this.
Pains me that more people are unable to follow the chain of thoughts and reach this conclusion.
Let me entertain a hypothetical solution. Would you suggest to Palestinians to “not have kids” to solve the ethnic conflict in that area?
If anything, this is a non-sequitur.
But maybe there is a grain of truth in there. People who were horrified that the lemmy dev and main mod of lemmy.ml was a proponent of hard left stayed away of lemmy (both SW and instances) and went to kbin instead. And since “don’t have kids” is mostly popular on the more extreme left… you get self-selected opinions.
(honestly, I had no clue that I was not beehaw, just saw a braindead post and replied)
Telling one person that they can help out by not having kids is rather different from, as the dictionary says
Even suggesting to a whole group of people not to have kids is not the same as killing them.
So no, it’s not a logical conclusion. It’s illogical rhetoric. But you do you, I guess.
Your definition seems to be quite limited. Many acknowledged genocides would not be treated as such. According to Wikipedia, the UN Genocide Convention is much broader:
Spreading an ideology according to which one shouldn’t have kids, thus preventing births, would fall into this definition.
You are correct, it is not the same as killing them, but no one was arguing that. Again, limiting genocide to the deliberate killing of individuals would be quite a lenient definition, and various laws that targeted various ethnic minorities would not be considered genocides, despite them being considered as ones and having the same exact effect. Consider forced sterilization. You don’t have to forcibly kill anyone, yet probably everyone here would agree that it is a genocide.
Even with this extended definition, your argument fails the most important criteria for genocide wtih the UN definition which is:
And it also fails to mention that the argument being made is voluntary and so it wouldn’t fall under the act of :
You appear to be unable or unwilling to distinguish between “preventing births” and “voluntarily choosing not to have children.”
Not sure why you’re quite so interested in escalating the rhetoric here (forced sterilization? in a thread that started with individual action to save honeybees? really?) but in view of the first rule of Beehaw (“Be(e) nice”) I’m not interested in joining you.
It’s not genocide if you just decide not to have kids
Just would like to note that honeybees are not native to the US, we have tons of native pollinators
Still sucks though
One concrete thing to do is to get your governing body to promote diverse crop rotations. Ask them to end subsidies for single-crop farms, especially crops that don’t serve as a food source for bees or have been made toxic by pesticides (frequently found on massive corn farming operations).
We really do need to just straight-up ban pesticides, antibiotics, and synthetic fertilizers in agriculture.
If there was a way for legislate that all farms needed to be mixed use, I’d go for immediately.
Yeah, I’m aware of the Haber-Bosch process.
I’d honestly have to do the math, but I suspect we’d be able to get rid of synthetic fertilizers if we actually wanted to. Afterall, what do you think happens to the nitrogen after we eat it? We pee and poop it out, for the most part. Yes, there are losses to the air when you till the soil, but a proper farm that focuses on soil health has ways to deal with that problem.
Right now we use the system we have because it’s cheap and easy to do so on an individual level. Growers want to simplify their workflow; they don’t want to actually manage the health of the land they work. It’s too much effort.
Plus, there’s a bunch of government policy that encourages bad farming practices and discourages good ones. Corn subsidies, banning the use of treated sewage for fertilizer, blatant blind-eye enforcement of labor laws, price-dropping policy instead of price-stabilizing policy, etc.
It’s not that we would starve, not in a properly structured system, anyway. It’s that food would become more expensive and some of us would transition to careers in agriculture. The pay would become seductive when the farms become desperate for labor. A farm that actually takes care of the land and the animals is absolutely more labor-intensive, and that’s why very few modern farms do it.
Edit: I should also say that the plants and animals we have today are not the same as the ones we had when the Haber process was invented. We wouldn’t be going back to the yields of the early 1900s. Even if we did everything exactly the same as they did back then, we’d still get better returns and have a more robust food delivery system. Hell, they didn’t even have refrigeration back then.
My impression is the problem is primarily pesticide use is too ubiquitous. Help normalize pesticide free environments and you help bees.
In the case of bees, Neonicotinoids are a particular problem.
Edit: Another article
Another data point to fight against the deluge of “but it is not 150% established and shouldn’t we also look at <distraction>” “science” peddled by the pesticide industry:
Cuba has zero problems with its bees. Literally zero. They gave up on pesticides first out of necessity (fall of the USSR), then leaned into it, pesticides are generally outlawed and only see very rare use on state-run rice fields, a tiny fraction of their total agriculture.
The result is a very healthy bee population and flourishing honey exports. All of it passes EU organic certification with flying colours and tropical honey tastes real good so it’s not cheap stuff, either. Expect at least 30 Euro/kg as opposed to domestic rapeseed honey at 10 Euro/kg, or forest honey (
generally the most expensive German stuff) at 16. EDIT: Actually the most expensive I could find was heather honey, 21 Euros. Never had it nor seen it in a supermarket.Starting bee gardens and planting bee-friendly seeds wherever you can (provided they are not invasive to your area!)
But lots of seed companies offer “bee blends”, westcoastseeds offers seeds for this purpose. - Im sure similar wildflower mixes are available in different regions and countries.
I know this doesn’t eliminate pesticide use but every pesticide free patch of flowers helps
A good portion of that half that died are the fuckers I stumbled upon in the woods that ended up stinging me.