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U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high
- orf 11y agoSo the solution is to... buy more bees of the internet? Thank god we solved CCD
- tptacek 11y agoCCD is an economic problem. The varroa mite wiped out feral North American honey bees --- which are not native to North America --- a long time ago. Supposedly, any honey bee you've seen in the wild for the past decade has been part of a proprietary hive. So, ordering more honey bee queens off the Internet seems to be a pretty reasonable response to the problem of a 10-20% increase in overwintering hive failures.
- thrownaway2424 11y agoWhat would a non-native honey bee in the wild look like? I live in California and the bees in my garden and in the local parks are various. Some look like bumblebees and some look like just bees but I don't know bees from bees.
- tptacek 11y agoHere's a good starting point: http://www.pollinator.org/PDFs/MontanaBeeGuide-Final.pdf http://www.pollinator.org/PDFs/MontanaBeeGuide-Final.pdf
- recusancy 11y agoIt would look like a honeybee https://www.google.com/search?q=honey+bee&safe=off&espv=2&biw=1709&bih=915&site=webhp&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAWoVChMIye2YrMyXxwIViUGSCh0idAsZ https://www.google.com/search?q=honey+bee&safe=off&espv=2&bi... A lot of what you're seeing are probably wasps (the yellow jacket being one variety).
- wang_li 11y ago> What would a non-native honey bee in the wild look like? It would look like a honey bee. None of them are native. Native bees are orchard mason bees.
- kaitai 11y agotptacek has a very efficient guide to bees posted. Another nice national one that is very comprehensive is the USDA's guide at http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5306468.pdf http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb530646... . Scroll to page 17 or so to start looking at illustrations of particular bees if you don't want to read about their habits. But the best for CA is the Berkeley Bee Lab's page on native bees at http://www.helpabee.org/common-bee-groups-of-ca.html http://www.helpabee.org/common-bee-groups-of-ca.html There was a great art & education & science installation on native bees at the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley a few years back (http://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/article/Shirley-Watts-Mouthings-at-Botanical-Garden-2325642.php http://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/article/Shirley-Watts-Mo...). I know they still have a beehive, and they might have some exhibits on native bees.
- thrownaway2424 11y agoThe Berkeley site is neat, but it's got a picture of the european honey bee right at the top and no mention of it being non-native.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- orf 11y agoI might be missing something, but surely that's not a sustainable solution?
- tptacek 11y agoIf honey bees in the wild are an invasive species decimated by another invasive species, and pollinating honey bees in practice are all proprietary, than discussions of honey bee populations in the US aren't much different from discussions of dairy cow populations. So, no, I don't see how this is unsustainable.
- pingou 11y agoAccording to the article, the number of colonies is bigger than before because bee keepers simply buy more bees as replacement, but it doesn't explain where they come from. Also: "put half the bees into a new beehive, order them a new queen online (retail price: $25 or so), and voila: two healthy hives." Does that mean you have 100% more colonies but the same number of bees? I suppose not, but I think it would be interesting if we could see the evolution of the numbers of bees instead of the number of colonies.
- c-slice 11y agoA small number of bees when placed with a queen will quickly produce a full size hive. Bee hives have a size limit, so dividing them into two smaller hives produces rapid population growth. A queen bee can lay 1000 eggs a day.
- StavrosK 11y agoThis is the most outlandish attempt at a proof of the Banach-Tarski theorem I've heard so far.
- maratd 11y ago> but it doesn't explain where they come from. Sure it does. They come from the Internet, it explicitly stated that. Joking aside, from my understanding, the issue with bees is a combination of multiple factors, such as pesticides, disease, parasites, etc. Those are primarily local issues. So it's perfectly feasible to find some isolated spot in the US, grow a ton of bees, and ship them across the country to wherever they are needed to make up for any local losses. We can easily engineer around this issue, by increasing the bee population, genetically engineering them to be more resistant, wipe out parasites, or change the formulation of pesticides. It seems the market is responding by simply growing more bees to make up for the losses, which should be a viable solution in the short-term.
- antidaily 11y agoIt's mostly pesticides.
- c-slice 11y agoLife finds a way. I think in some ways, CCD has probably "pruned" the bee population in a good way. Beekeeping allowed weaker hives that would have normally died off in the wild to continue to spawn new hives. CCD has reversed that trend, and may have improved the overall strength of the bee population genetics.
- maratd 11y ago> CCD has probably "pruned" the bee population in a good way A reduction in the population is never a good thing. Is this some sort of neo-eugenics viewpoint? Pruning the population will not create some sort of super-bee. That's not how it works. It will enhance whatever qualities are being selected for, but it will reduce the genetic diversity in the population, making it vulnerable to a hole raft of new diseases and disorders. Ideally what you want is for the genetic variant that protects against a specific disease to be already within the population and for that variant to simply spread, without any population loss. If you're losing population, that is a BAD thing. That means things are happening too quickly and you're in for a world of hurt in the long-term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck
- pauloday 11y agoWell I wouldn't say population reduction is never a good thing, but it's probably pretty obvious when it's needed.
- vlehto 11y agoBut the way it should be reduced would be by limiting "family size" not "family number". This allows for higher genetic diversity among the population. Which is always a good thing for long term survival or future genetic engineering experiments.
- rrss1122 11y agoIt seems that the way beekeepers raise bees, spreading positive genetic variants happens often. They split healthy colonies into two to hedge their bets against bad colonies bringing down the entire population.
- ZeroFries 11y agoWhy was this downvoted? Does CCD selection pressure help or hinder bee genetics?
- stephengillie 11y agoPlease resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tlarimer 11y agoEven when it is paired with a question asking for clarification on the subject matter at hand?
- dang 11y agoYes, because you can always delete the downvote noise and keep the clarifying question.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dang 11y agoExcept it was decisively upvoted, not downvoted, in the end. It's pointless to ask why there was a bit of downage in the vote stream. Maybe someone misclicked. Maybe someone was mistaken. Most of these cases sort themselves out rather quickly; meanwhile a comment about it sticks around inaccurately forever.
- dang 11y agoWe've detached this subthread from its original parent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10023994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10023994) and marked it off-topic. You're welcome to repost the on-topic part if you want to.
- nostromo 11y agoSo was that the solution all along? Just breed more bees to replace the ones that die? If that's the case, it seems like a mountain was made out of a mole hill in the media. I read multiple times that I may never eat a pollinated fruit or vegetable again.
- rrss1122 11y agoIt really was. Colony collapse disorder was bad for the colonies and breeders that experienced it, yes. But the honeybee industry has been going strong, contradicting all the apocalyptic warnings.
- happyscrappy 11y agoDoom sells. You will never sell any newspapers saying all flights landed safely.
- Beltiras 11y agoNo, the article is just putting forth very misleading and cherry-picked data. It's a little bit amazing that he actually mentions splitting and higher hive count close to each other without realizing that this will not increase the pollinator count by twofold. A real beefarmer has a comment on the article that everyone should read, it's illuminating. """ Mr Ingraham---do not assume you can read a few papers on CCD and bees and make cogent, authoritative remarks in a newspaper piece----this piece fails miserably. I AM a beekeeper, in Los Angeles, using feral honey bees, making public presentations, teaching beekeeping and selling honey. I am going to fill in your ignorance here with a few salient points. Making splits causes a yield of TWO WEAK hives, which is not the same as having the vigorous, healthy original hive. And just so you know, the splits the commercial folks are making from the survivors of pesticide, fungicide, herbicide exposure on industrial crops are the already weakened colonies that happen to make it. So, the splits are not especially fated to thrive, either. Your little tables showing statistics does not tell the real story of the insults being suffered by ALL pollinators from monocrop, industrial agriculture. The typical Consumerist answer to a problem---"just buy more" bees and queens is not addressing the real problems which are decline in clean forage from toxic chemical exposure, lack of forage diversity, trucking bees all over the country, narrow in-bred genetics. The loss of all pollinators, as well as decline in overall ecosystem diversity from the same insults, is the REAL issue. Your piece is also old ground previously plowed over by that corporate apologist and booster at Forbes, Jon Entine, another geek behind a computer who writes about beekeeping with a singularly narrow and uniformed arrogance. Like your ballyhooed Tucker and Thurman, the "economists" (never far from pontificating for the beauties of the "free market") the people weighing in on the loss of pollinators and trying to urge us not to be concerned are akin to Climate Change denialists. """
- rrss1122 11y agoInteresting that the government put together a policy framework to "save the bees", but the market corrected itself anyway. Also interesting that you can buy a queen bee online for $25.
- floatrock 11y agoThe 'market corrected' itself by increasing prices because that's the only way you can keep up with a high leaky churn. We haven't 'corrected' anything, we've only found a new (more expensive) equilibrium because the inputs are still dying off at a higher rate. The correct thing to do is to address WHY the inputs have become more expensive... my understanding is that research now points to a certain class of destructive pesticides.
- nonameface 11y agoBuying more and more bees is a very expensive solution. Perhaps I'm just a poor beekeeper (maybe true?) but I would have to sell my honey at untenable prices if I was looking to make money on my beekeeping. For example, I've spent $1600 on bees and equipment, I've harvested 3 gallons of honey. I would have to sell that honey at $44/Pound to break even. Now hopefully over the long term this goes down a lot as the upfront capital investments spread out over the years. My bee losses have been huge though. The first year I had 3 hives, lost 2. The second year I had 5 hives and lost 3, last year I had 5 hives and lost 4. Buying bees at $130/hive isn't sustainable (except through my charity) if I wanted to actually make any money at this, especially on a small scale.
- stephengillie 11y agoHoney sales aren't your only revenue source. You can also charge farms for transporting your bees there and pollinating their crops. And I believe the article said this price point is also increasing.
- nonameface 11y agoThey are your only source on the small "hobby" scale (maybe wax and pollen too but that is more labor intensive) but pollination contracts aren't open to you until you're doing this full time. Now, Hobby scale honey can usually be sold for more than wholesale honey that the pollination guys use to offload their crop so hopefully that makes up the difference. For me, I'll never catch up if I keep having the massive losses I've been having -- even if I sell my honey for $7/lb ($8 total including the jar and label). The wholesale price is around $2-2.50/lb
- tptacek 11y agoIf reconstituting new hives from annually purchased queens was economically non-viable, pollination prices --- which is where the money in honey bee husbandry seems to come from --- would show that. But while prices have risen, it doesn't look like they've done so at a historically unprecedented rate. Irrigation is a much bigger economic threat to pollinated crops than pollination.
- floatrock 11y agoThere's a little bit of dodging going around in this article... What's really going on is we still have a high amount of churn in the funnel, we're just spending more to hide it. > "The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies -- that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers -- is now the highest it's been in 20 years." So the absolute numbers are up, great, but that did not come for free: > "The average retail price of honey has roughly doubled since 2006" Or, put in startup lingo, the churn is still high, but we're just hiding it by paying more to acquire a larger number of bees. CCD is still killing off bees, but we're just spending more to compensate. This is the dodgeyness: any good HN reader knows that it's your churn that kills your finances in the end. And that's where the insanity lies: I believe that CCD has basically been conclusively traced to a certain class of pesticides... what sounds insane to me is we have created a toxic environment that has increased the leaking in the boat, but it's okay because we can just spend more money on bigger bilge pumps instead of addressing the underlying cause of the leak.
- tptacek 11y agoYou're referring to neonicotinoids. Let's stipulate that neonicotinoids are in fact the root cause of CCD, which is defined as the increase in overwintering colony losses. Honey bees are a livestock animal, tied directly to agriculture. Neonicotinoids are popular in part because they're a narrow spectrum pesticide targeted at insect biology, and have fewer ill effects on other mammals than other pesticides. Here's the question: if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture, and CCD can be mitigated by more aggressive colony generation strategies, why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all? The market seems to have already done that.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago> Here's the question: if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture, and CCD can be mitigated by more aggressive colony generation strategies, why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all? The market seems to have already done that. I'm concerned that we haven't proven yet that we can properly mitigate CCD long term with aggressive colony generation strategies, at least not long term. We need more data.
- abakker 11y agoFrom Wikipedia: The pollination of California's almonds is the largest annual managed pollination event in the world, with close to one million hives (nearly half of all beehives in the USA) being trucked in February to the almond groves. Much of the pollination is managed by pollination brokers, who contract with migratory beekeepers from at least 49 states for the event. This business has been heavily affected by colony collapse disorder, causing nationwide shortages of honey bees and increasing the price of insect pollination... Does anyone feel that transporting livestock from this many places to a single place where they can all commingle is a needlessly risky strategy? Assuming that CCD is caused by pesticides, this seems to guarantee exposure to a large number of bees that might otherwise live in pesticide-free areas. Additionally, if CCD has a fungal/parasitic component, then this would be an ideal way to infect as many hives as possible, in as short a time as possible.
- tedunangst 11y agoWow. 49 states implies that at least one of Alaska or Hawaii is involved.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoWhy would you be surprised that they grow things in Hawaii. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_B._Dole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_B._Dole
- zevyoura 11y agoThe surprising part is that they're shipping live bees back and forth overseas.
- pdknsk 11y agoThis is shown in detail in the Swiss documentary More Than Honey. http://morethanhoneyfilm.com/ http://morethanhoneyfilm.com/
- STRiDEX 11y agothe beekeepers are what migrate
- breischl 11y agoSo the proffered solution is ordering new bees from the internet. That seems like magical thinking. I don't think Amazon has figured out how to fabricate bees from base atoms, so presumably somebody, somewhere is breeding those bees for sale. Don't those breeders have the same problems? What's preventing the magical internet bee source from having their colonies die off?
- chrissnell 11y agoI'm not so sure. I have a large backyard garden and I'm surrounded by neighbors who also garden. I was chatting with some of them the other day and we've all noticed a significant drop in fertilization amongst our plants this year. My tomato plants are typically overloaded with fruit by this time of year but now only have four or five tomatoes each. Same story with the tomatillos, the squashes, the cukes and the watermelons. Production is less than half of a typical year. My neighbor kept bees but lost his colony last year. I can't say for sure that CCD is the root of our problems--home gardens are more popular around here than ever and perhaps the bees have an overabundance of food--but it certainly feels like something is wrong. Obviously home gardeners and beekeepers don't have the funds to bolster the bee population like a large commercial grower might.
- eric_h 11y agoSounds like you need to fashion a bee stick [1] so you can do the pollination yourself. We used these in a high school science project to pollinate fast plants. [1]http://www.fastplants.org/how_to_grow/pollinating.php http://www.fastplants.org/how_to_grow/pollinating.php
- schiffern 11y agoEven easier: plant wildflowers to feed and attract pollinators. Borage is a good one (and it repels bunnies too), or just find a good native wildflower mix.
- rpenm 11y agoInterestingly, European bees hybridized with African bees seem to be quite resistant to CCD. Makes me wonder if one of the problems afflicting American honeybees is a lack of genetic diversity.
- dejv 11y agoWell there are other factors in this debate. European-African hybrids are much more aggressive to the beekeeper and there are different conditions that kills the colony. Another factor is the honey production rates for these hybrids. There are many different species of bees in use, with different characteristic in areas of amount of honey produced, aggression, tendency to get different forms of illness and so forth.
- dayaz36 11y agoA comment from a real bee farmer on the article: " Mr Ingraham---do not assume you can read a few papers on CCD and bees and make cogent, authoritative remarks in a newspaper piece----this piece fails miserably. I AM a beekeeper, in Los Angeles, using feral honey bees, making public presentations, teaching beekeeping and selling honey. I am going to fill in your ignorance here with a few salient points. Making splits causes a yield of TWO WEAK hives, which is not the same as having the vigorous, healthy original hive. And just so you know, the splits the commercial folks are making from the survivors of pesticide, fungicide, herbicide exposure on industrial crops are the already weakened colonies that happen to make it. So, the splits are not especially fated to thrive, either. Your little tables showing statistics does not tell the real story of the insults being suffered by ALL pollinators from monocrop, industrial agriculture. The typical Consumerist answer to a problem---"just buy more" bees and queens is not addressing the real problems which are decline in clean forage from toxic chemical exposure, lack of forage diversity, trucking bees all over the country, narrow in-bred genetics. The loss of all pollinators, as well as decline in overall ecosystem diversity from the same insults, is the REAL issue. Your piece is also old ground previously plowed over by that corporate apologist and booster at Forbes, Jon Entine, another geek behind a computer who writes about beekeeping with a singularly narrow and uniformed arrogance. Like your ballyhooed Tucker and Thurman, the "economists" (never far from pontificating for the beauties of the "free market") the people weighing in on the loss of pollinators and trying to urge us not to be concerned are akin to Climate Change denialists. "
- ChuckMcM 11y agoNice to see the other side of the story for a change. While the 'extinction threat -> loss of all pollinated food -> disaster' narrative gets a lot of fear views, if we actively assist honey bee colonies in growing on a large scale we can replace a lot of bees quickly.
- dmritard96 11y agoThis 'other side of the story' is incomplete. Sure commercial outfits will just pay more and buy more honeybees, but nature won't. Given that the entire problem is being caused by a dragnet insect poison, it would seem the wiser approach would be to find an alternative or improvement to the poison in its current form.
- tehchromic 11y agoThe bottom line is there are huge corporate interests willing to spend money to bury the fact that their investments in toxic agricultural pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are having a permanent, devastating effect on the planetary biome. The collapsing honey bee is the poster child of the irrevocable damage they are perpetrating on the planet, which is the mostly silent holocaust of our times. So take any positive media on the recovery of the honey bee that isn't result of curbing industrial agricultural practice, with a big grain of organic salt.
- the8472 11y ago> irrevocable damage That seems a bit hyperbolic to me. The damage seems revocable if actual effort were put into it instead of just papering over the symptoms. Of course such things often require policy change, change that some people might oppose. But that does not make the damage itself irrevocable. It just means that people are prioritizing other goals over it.
- tehchromic 11y agoIf the monarch butterfly goes extinct like the passenger pigeon, that's irrevocable. And evidence is mounting that we are at the edge of an man made extinction event, and by evidence I mean the number of species that go extinct per year. I don't think the big concern here is hyperbole, but rather the papering of it over, on which point we agree.
- terminado 11y agoSo, we're "buying" new bees to offset the bees that die? Uh... forgive me if I seem a little dense here but... where the hell are these store-bought bees coming from then? The moon? If the mass hysteria of CCD continues unabated, does that mean that bees WON'T go extinct because we can simply "buy" more bees from God at the God® store? Are we back in the 1800's when spontaneous generation still held some ostensible sway over mother nature? Do they spontaneously materialize and transmogrify from some other form of matter? Do flowers transform into bees because the two are actually the same?
- dennisgorelik 11y agoQueen-bee sale page is an interesting read too: http://wildflowermeadows.com/queen-bees-for-sale/ http://wildflowermeadows.com/queen-bees-for-sale/
- dejv 11y agoSo, we have learn how to produce bee queens on industrial scale, package them to sealed bag and sell them for 100 bucks. We replaced the natural way with industry and the author call it success.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]