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There'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 spendin

There'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 ago
You'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.
  - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
    Use of the three most common neonicotinoids has been severely restricted in the EU since 2013. If they can withstand the lobbying pressure from Bayer, who makes literally billions of dollars selling these, we'll hopefully have good data in a few years time.
- anon1385 11y ago
  Because honeybees are just one of many pollinating insects whose numbers are falling dramatically. They just happen to get talked about a lot in the press because there are people with a direct economic interest in them.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Can you cite statistics showing that e.g. mason bee populations are collapsing?
    - anon1385 11y ago
      I'm not in the US but this seems to be the biggest study there http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6127/1611 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6127/1611 >Using historic data sets, we quantified the degree to which global change over 120 years disrupted plant-pollinator interactions in a temperate forest understory community in Illinois, USA. We found degradation of interaction network structure and function and extirpation of 50% of bee species. Network changes can be attributed to shifts in forb and bee phenologies resulting in temporal mismatches, nonrandom species extinctions, and loss of spatial co-occurrences between extant species in modified landscapes. Quantity and quality of pollination services have declined through time. The historic network showed flexibility in response to disturbance; however, our data suggest that networks will be less resilient to future changes. News article: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/28/wild-bees-pollinators-crop-yields http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/28/wild-bees... Pesticides are far from the only factor, but adding that to habitat loss and climate change is hardly helping.
    - mohawk 11y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Other_wildlife https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Other_wildlife REVIEW: An overview of the environmental risks posed by neonicotinoid insecticides http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12111/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12111/f... Forget about the bees, it doesn't sound like something i would like to have on my food...
- galago 11y ago
  Is the answer partly that its a classic Pigouvian property rights issue? The pesticide users are not compensating the bee users for the damage to their property. There may be some overlap in the forms of agriculture, but I'm guessing its not 100%.
- g8oz 11y ago
  So brutally rapid market driven natural selection of the honey bee population is a good thing, hmm. Darwinian both financially and biologically, and fits with prevailing American economic philosophy. I venture that we're performing an uncontrolled experiment with known benefits and risks we are just beginning to understand. Not worth it. One can only hope the E.U invades in Operation American Freedom and imposes the Precautionary Principle on us.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Honey bees are not American. They're livestock brought into the country by settlers.
    - hughw 11y ago
      As I am not American. My forebears came here as settlers.
    - earleybird 11y ago
      This is a narrow view. As go the honey bees, so go the indigenous pollinators.
      - tptacek 11y ago
        That does not in fact appear to be the case.
  - happyscrappy 11y ago
    The EU should concentrate on keeping themselves viable, I am not sure they can afford to worry about Americans. Edit: I have a lot of sympathy for the EU, they are in a tough situation.
- floatrock 11y ago
  > why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all? Unintended consequences of large-scale ecological engineering perhaps. Sure, commercial beekeepers can increase prices and the neonicotinoid users can accept it as an indirect cost of their choice of pesticide, but what about the large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied into commercial interests, but on which we still depend? Seems to me like there's a huge indiscriminant spillover effect into an incredibly complex system, the implications of which can not be easily predicted nor priced. One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost onto carbon emissions. Also note how you said "have fewer ill effects on other mammals"... there are still effects, and asbestos seemed like a miracle material before the long-term effects were studied. The indiscriminate usage of an chemical toxic enough to cause measurable ecological web disruption sounds like a geo-engineering quagmire to me, even if the commercial front-line can compensate with higher prices. How do you accurately price what you don't know?
  - CWuestefeld 11y ago
    One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost onto carbon emissions. Actually, this isn't a shortcoming of the market as such. It's a failure in conjunction of our incomplete recognition of private property rights. By preventing certain types of property from having private ownership, we don't allow the market to correct itself. More specifically, if we had some private entity or entities that were recognized as the owners of air or water, then they would be able to recover damages from the polluters, thus removing ability to externalize the cost of pollution. But once you start removing things from the purview of the market (in this case by saying that nobody can own it, and thus nobody has an ownership interest in protecting or has a right to damages), then you're actively preventing the market from correcting. I think it's really amazing that the market does as well as it does, considering how ubiquitous are the regulations that handicap it. Edit: I should have read farther down the chain, where this [1] mentions the same idea. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024457
- tehchromic 11y ago
  One thing we can stipulate is that the chemistry of our planet is changing rapidly as result of human industry. We might not be able to prove that fact with conclusive evidence before any fallible human court of law, or public opinion. But whether we do or not doesn't change the fact that big changes in planetary chemistry mark major extinction periods in our planetary past, and that we are messing with forces far beyond our control. That is the height of hubris. So we can also stipulate that the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance. Unfortunately our corporate law and ideas of rightful production were founded before accurate concepts of our place in the ecology of the planet were fully formed. So we are dealing with a lot of retrograde ideas of a human centered produce chain, and these are based very firmly in law and ideas of right and good that are outdated in the anthropocene. You can talk about a "net win for agriculture" and "aggressive colony generation strategies", however net wins and aggressive strategies need to be evaluated in the larger context of their impact on life on earth - the whole thing, not just human ability to pig out for another 50 or 100 years before we go extinct! Cheers.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    I will not stipulate that "the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance", because I don't even know what that means. The Precautionary Principle works well in some places and not in others. In this case: you're pretending that the policy you're advocating doesn't have an embedded tradeoff, but it does. If you use less neonicotinoid pesticide, which you're hyperfixated on because of what seems to be a BS media trend story about bees, you will use more of other pesticides (or, worse, more land, which destroys habitat for all animals) which may be more harmful in the aggregate. Honey bees are not a natural part of our ecology. They are a livestock animal. Worrying about their population and the energy it takes to sustain them is a lot like worrying about the population of dairy cows.
    - tehchromic 11y ago
- schiffern 11y ago
  >if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture The logic here seems to be that: * Farmers buy neonicotinoids. * Therefore, neonicotinoids have a net positive effect on agriculture. (in other words, like a good libertarian you are assuming that the market has complete/perfect/accurate information) Unfortunately that's just not true. Today's farmers simply don't have the required soil science/botany/ecology/hydrology knowledge. Worst, they are actively misled by biocide and fertilizer salesmen, who have a natural profit motive to convince farmers that their products are essential. Far from being essential, in reality pesticides destroy the nutrient harvesting ability of healthy soil. Soil microbiologist Dr. Elaine Ingham explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag
  - tptacek 11y ago
    I would appreciate it if you would not call me a libertarian, as I am not one of those, and you couldn't possibly know anyways. This mistake --- the fundamental attribution effect --- causes more bullshit misunderstandings on HN than anything except for perhaps the is-ought fallacy.
    - schiffern 11y ago
      Whether or not you call yourself the "L" word, you argument relies on free market fundamentalism, which is just as bad. Free Market Fundamentalism: the belief that markets are giant calculating machines that output optimal social relations, i.e. Pareto optimal transactions
      - tptacek 11y ago
        That is also false. Please don't use me as a coat rack for arguments you want to make that are unrelated to mine.
        schiffern 11y ago
        If you'd like to talk about the glaring hole I pointed out in your argument instead of clutching your pearls, I'd be happy to change topic! :)
- snowwrestler 11y ago
  Because wild populations of bees are affected too. From a strictly utilitarian point of view, that reduces biodiversity, which increases the risk of disease. The narrower the gene pool, the greater percentage of animals could be lost to a particular virus or bacteria. From a broader perspective, it would be a bummer of a world of the only bees are managed colonies that are trucked around from farm to farm. Goodbye to fields of wildflowers with bees buzzing around, and goodbye to all sorts of wild plants that depend on wild bee pollination.
rational-future 11y ago
>> addressing the underlying cause of the leak There are problem causes that are very hard to address. E.g. alcohol consumption causing a lot of traffic accidents. Or massive corporations, with huge lobbying budgets, releasing toxins in the environment. Toxins that cause no obvious harm, but kill a lot of bees or cause cancer in some humans after 20 years of exposure.
- 13thLetter 11y ago
  Can you be more specific about what these toxins are, and how it's known that they kill bees or cause cancer over a period of twenty years?
  - anon1385 11y ago
    In the case of neonicotinoids and honeybees recent research suggests it disrupts their ability to navigate back to the hive: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0091364 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
    - icebraining 11y ago
      Do they actually die as a result, or just continue living somewhere else? Because if the problem is just that beekeepers lose them, that doesn't seem so bad as if it actually decimated them.
jsprogrammer 11y ago
Did you correct for possible increased honey consumption since 2006?
tedunangst 11y ago
Consider perhaps a speed boat. You find that by lowering the freeboard (height above waterline) you can go faster. But this means more water splashes in, necessating a bigger bilge pump. People like their speedboats to go fast, they're probably ok with this trade off.
the8472 11y ago
also worthy of note: > show that the number of managed colonies Says nothing about wild bees. If they're declining more rapidly than before that's still a problem.
- wang_li 11y ago
  There are no wild honey bees. They got wiped out in the 1990s by varroa mites.
  - slavik81 11y ago
    There are other species of wild bees besides honey bees. Are they not affected by this?
    - Houshalter 11y ago
      It's unlikely. Wild bees are not affected by the same diseases and parasites, have much more genetic diversity, and are adapted for this climate. Honeybees are not native, they have less genetic diversity from domestication and importation, and they are transported around the country by beekeepers every year (spreading their diseases and parasites around.) Nor do they have to deal with their produce being taken by humans.
  - ultrasandwich 11y ago
    Source? As someone who kept tabs on wild honeybee colonies around the Austin area, I'm a little baffled by this comment.
    - wang_li 11y ago
      It's not as settled as my comment made it sound, but the second paragraph at the below article briefly touches on the idea: http://www.honeybeesuite.com/of-feral-colonies-and-varroa-mites/ http://www.honeybeesuite.com/of-feral-colonies-and-varroa-mi...
  - kaitai 11y ago
jusben1369 11y ago
The author is actually expliciting stating "Yep, there is an increase in bee deaths but the total number of bees is substantially higher so the supposed negative effect of these increased deaths is overstated or wrong" I don't think that's dodgy.
- floatrock 11y ago
  You can spend more money on your Adwords campaigns and get a measurable increase in absolute page views or absolute conversions. However, the KPI's that your investors care about are things like your cost-of-acquisition. If it's actually the case that you're spending more just to maintain the same conversion because you're losing customers at a higher rate, that indicates something is wrong.
  - jusben1369 11y ago
    I know all analogies break down with scrutiny but I think the major issue here is you're assuming bees are customers when in actuality bees are the workers, honey is the product or service and the customers' consume honey. To put this in startup terms "We're seeing higher employee turnover and so our expenses are rising because we're spending more to recruit and retain works and those workers are more expensive and less productive till they get up to speed (and with high employee churn might leave us before they're fully productive) Higher costs suck because we've had to raise the prices for our service to offset but the market has absorbed a 2x increase in our prices since 2006 so it's not exactly all bad"
    - schiffern 11y ago
      ... and in that situation, a headline suggesting the crisis is over ("Call off the Bee-pocalypse") would be misleading. Especially since the all indications show the problem continues to get worse.
- kaitai 11y ago
  It's dodgy because [1] the author is claiming that the number of colonies of domesticated bees is higher (not the number of bees), [2] the author ignores non-domesticated bees and thus misses a significant economic contributor that matters for agricultural pollination, if not honey. It's particularly dodgy because you're an example of a reader who came away thinking, "But there's more bees so that's good!" That's a false conclusion, the blame for which I lay partly at the feet of this author.
mikeash 11y ago
I don't understand how this would work. You can't turn money into bees. You can turn bees into more bees, and money can be used to persuade people to put in more effort to make this happen, but at some point the bees themselves have to be reproducing. I thought the whole problem with colony collapse and the honeybee crisis was that bees were declining and nobody knew how to stop it. If you can stop it with money, maybe that's not ideal, but is it a major problem anymore?
- bronson 11y ago
  You can't stop it with money, but you can reduce it with more human labor/management. And money buys human labor. And, even though people are figuring out how to deal with the problem, that doesn't mean that the problem is over.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    If the problem is fewer bees, and money is able to compensate by creating more bees, then there is no problem. If you view the problem as being that bees are being killed by something, then yes, this doesn't solve the problem. But isn't the problem ultimately how many bees you have, not the rate at which they're reproducing and dying? The comment I replied to seems to be implying that the death of the honeybee is still nigh, and that this extra money is just temporarily hiding it. But how could that be?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - bronson 11y ago
      > [if] money is able to compensate by creating more bees, then there is no problem. The problem comes when "creating" more bees becomes too expensive/difficult, and you can no longer afford it. In HN terms: a little cash infusion can make everything look great... until it runs out. Edit: this comment does a much better job of using HN terms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024771
kaitai 11y ago
Moreover, the article entirely ignores wild bees. That's somewhat understandable as they're not as well studied, but they're a significant pollination force nevertheless -- according to this White House fact sheet [1], wild bees accounted for $9 billion of the economic benefit of pollination (compared to $15 billion for domesticated bees). The wild bees are not being replaced. This article really does have a lot of dodgy accounting (esp ignoring externalized costs). [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/20/fact-sheet-economic-challenge-posed-declining-pollinator-populations https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/20/fact-... [PNAS] Bumblebees: http://www.duluth.umn.edu/biology/documents/MaKarrall2_000.pdf http://www.duluth.umn.edu/biology/documents/MaKarrall2_000.p...
- iak8god 11y ago
  I find it incredibly sad that the only way to make people care about the destruction of wild bees is to talk about how much economic benefit they provide.
- slavik81 11y ago
  Shamelessly plugging a related project, I recently contributed to a game [1] designed to illustrate that wild bee populations have economic value. Jana Vamosi, a biologist from the University of Calgary, submitted the project idea to the Mozilla Science Lab [2] to get help building it. There's a lot of room for improvement, actually, if anyone wants to lend a hand. [1] http://www.diversibee.org http://www.diversibee.org [2] https://www.mozillascience.org/projects/diversibee https://www.mozillascience.org/projects/diversibee
staticint 11y ago
> I believe that CCD has basically been conclusively traced to a certain class of pesticides. However, the initial data on bee deaths following the use of dust-off mitigation strategies, like using Fluency Agent, looks promising. Granted, it is still early days to be forming any formal concluions, but the data that is available shows a significant change. Even if we can point to neonicotinoids as the cause, where do we go from here if changing our handling strategies resolves the problem?
pbreit 11y ago
In other words, we've adapted?
Houshalter 11y ago
CCD hasn't been traced to insecticides though. It's a contributing factor. But there are multiple causes. Parasites and diseases are big factors too. Honeybees are not native. They have low genetic diversity from domestication. They are transported around the country by beekeepers every year, spreading their diseases and parasites. And they have their produce taken by humans. Even if you removed all insecticides, they might improve a bit, but I doubt they would be doing well. And if they did get wiped out, so what? They aren't native, and there are wild bees that would replace them. I keep seeing comments and articles implying that all bees are going extinct and that this will be cataclysmic. It's just a ridiculous misunderstanding of what is happening.

tptacek 11y ago

You'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.
- semi-extrinsic 11y ago
  Use of the three most common neonicotinoids has been severely restricted in the EU since 2013. If they can withstand the lobbying pressure from Bayer, who makes literally billions of dollars selling these, we'll hopefully have good data in a few years time.
anon1385 11y ago
Because honeybees are just one of many pollinating insects whose numbers are falling dramatically. They just happen to get talked about a lot in the press because there are people with a direct economic interest in them.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Can you cite statistics showing that e.g. mason bee populations are collapsing?
  - anon1385 11y ago
    I'm not in the US but this seems to be the biggest study there http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6127/1611 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6127/1611 >Using historic data sets, we quantified the degree to which global change over 120 years disrupted plant-pollinator interactions in a temperate forest understory community in Illinois, USA. We found degradation of interaction network structure and function and extirpation of 50% of bee species. Network changes can be attributed to shifts in forb and bee phenologies resulting in temporal mismatches, nonrandom species extinctions, and loss of spatial co-occurrences between extant species in modified landscapes. Quantity and quality of pollination services have declined through time. The historic network showed flexibility in response to disturbance; however, our data suggest that networks will be less resilient to future changes. News article: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/28/wild-bees-pollinators-crop-yields http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/28/wild-bees... Pesticides are far from the only factor, but adding that to habitat loss and climate change is hardly helping.
  - mohawk 11y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Other_wildlife https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Other_wildlife REVIEW: An overview of the environmental risks posed by neonicotinoid insecticides http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12111/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12111/f... Forget about the bees, it doesn't sound like something i would like to have on my food...
galago 11y ago
Is the answer partly that its a classic Pigouvian property rights issue? The pesticide users are not compensating the bee users for the damage to their property. There may be some overlap in the forms of agriculture, but I'm guessing its not 100%.
g8oz 11y ago
So brutally rapid market driven natural selection of the honey bee population is a good thing, hmm. Darwinian both financially and biologically, and fits with prevailing American economic philosophy. I venture that we're performing an uncontrolled experiment with known benefits and risks we are just beginning to understand. Not worth it. One can only hope the E.U invades in Operation American Freedom and imposes the Precautionary Principle on us.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Honey bees are not American. They're livestock brought into the country by settlers.
  - hughw 11y ago
    As I am not American. My forebears came here as settlers.
  - earleybird 11y ago
    This is a narrow view. As go the honey bees, so go the indigenous pollinators.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      That does not in fact appear to be the case.
- happyscrappy 11y ago
  The EU should concentrate on keeping themselves viable, I am not sure they can afford to worry about Americans. Edit: I have a lot of sympathy for the EU, they are in a tough situation.
floatrock 11y ago
> why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all? Unintended consequences of large-scale ecological engineering perhaps. Sure, commercial beekeepers can increase prices and the neonicotinoid users can accept it as an indirect cost of their choice of pesticide, but what about the large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied into commercial interests, but on which we still depend? Seems to me like there's a huge indiscriminant spillover effect into an incredibly complex system, the implications of which can not be easily predicted nor priced. One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost onto carbon emissions. Also note how you said "have fewer ill effects on other mammals"... there are still effects, and asbestos seemed like a miracle material before the long-term effects were studied. The indiscriminate usage of an chemical toxic enough to cause measurable ecological web disruption sounds like a geo-engineering quagmire to me, even if the commercial front-line can compensate with higher prices. How do you accurately price what you don't know?
- CWuestefeld 11y ago
  One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost onto carbon emissions. Actually, this isn't a shortcoming of the market as such. It's a failure in conjunction of our incomplete recognition of private property rights. By preventing certain types of property from having private ownership, we don't allow the market to correct itself. More specifically, if we had some private entity or entities that were recognized as the owners of air or water, then they would be able to recover damages from the polluters, thus removing ability to externalize the cost of pollution. But once you start removing things from the purview of the market (in this case by saying that nobody can own it, and thus nobody has an ownership interest in protecting or has a right to damages), then you're actively preventing the market from correcting. I think it's really amazing that the market does as well as it does, considering how ubiquitous are the regulations that handicap it. Edit: I should have read farther down the chain, where this [1] mentions the same idea. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024457 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024457
tehchromic 11y ago
One thing we can stipulate is that the chemistry of our planet is changing rapidly as result of human industry. We might not be able to prove that fact with conclusive evidence before any fallible human court of law, or public opinion. But whether we do or not doesn't change the fact that big changes in planetary chemistry mark major extinction periods in our planetary past, and that we are messing with forces far beyond our control. That is the height of hubris. So we can also stipulate that the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance. Unfortunately our corporate law and ideas of rightful production were founded before accurate concepts of our place in the ecology of the planet were fully formed. So we are dealing with a lot of retrograde ideas of a human centered produce chain, and these are based very firmly in law and ideas of right and good that are outdated in the anthropocene. You can talk about a "net win for agriculture" and "aggressive colony generation strategies", however net wins and aggressive strategies need to be evaluated in the larger context of their impact on life on earth - the whole thing, not just human ability to pig out for another 50 or 100 years before we go extinct! Cheers.
- tptacek 11y ago
  I will not stipulate that "the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance", because I don't even know what that means. The Precautionary Principle works well in some places and not in others. In this case: you're pretending that the policy you're advocating doesn't have an embedded tradeoff, but it does. If you use less neonicotinoid pesticide, which you're hyperfixated on because of what seems to be a BS media trend story about bees, you will use more of other pesticides (or, worse, more land, which destroys habitat for all animals) which may be more harmful in the aggregate. Honey bees are not a natural part of our ecology. They are a livestock animal. Worrying about their population and the energy it takes to sustain them is a lot like worrying about the population of dairy cows.
  - tehchromic 11y ago
schiffern 11y ago
>if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture The logic here seems to be that: * Farmers buy neonicotinoids. * Therefore, neonicotinoids have a net positive effect on agriculture. (in other words, like a good libertarian you are assuming that the market has complete/perfect/accurate information) Unfortunately that's just not true. Today's farmers simply don't have the required soil science/botany/ecology/hydrology knowledge. Worst, they are actively misled by biocide and fertilizer salesmen, who have a natural profit motive to convince farmers that their products are essential. Far from being essential, in reality pesticides destroy the nutrient harvesting ability of healthy soil. Soil microbiologist Dr. Elaine Ingham explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag
- tptacek 11y ago
  I would appreciate it if you would not call me a libertarian, as I am not one of those, and you couldn't possibly know anyways. This mistake --- the fundamental attribution effect --- causes more bullshit misunderstandings on HN than anything except for perhaps the is-ought fallacy.
  - schiffern 11y ago
    Whether or not you call yourself the "L" word, you argument relies on free market fundamentalism, which is just as bad. Free Market Fundamentalism: the belief that markets are giant calculating machines that output optimal social relations, i.e. Pareto optimal transactions
    - tptacek 11y ago
      That is also false. Please don't use me as a coat rack for arguments you want to make that are unrelated to mine.
      - schiffern 11y ago
        If you'd like to talk about the glaring hole I pointed out in your argument instead of clutching your pearls, I'd be happy to change topic! :)
snowwrestler 11y ago
Because wild populations of bees are affected too. From a strictly utilitarian point of view, that reduces biodiversity, which increases the risk of disease. The narrower the gene pool, the greater percentage of animals could be lost to a particular virus or bacteria. From a broader perspective, it would be a bummer of a world of the only bees are managed colonies that are trucked around from farm to farm. Goodbye to fields of wildflowers with bees buzzing around, and goodbye to all sorts of wild plants that depend on wild bee pollination.

rational-future 11y ago

>> addressing the underlying cause of the leak There are problem causes that are very hard to address. E.g. alcohol consumption causing a lot of traffic accidents. Or massive corporations, with huge lobbying budgets, releasing toxins in the environment. Toxins that cause no obvious harm, but kill a lot of bees or cause cancer in some humans after 20 years of exposure.

13thLetter 11y ago
Can you be more specific about what these toxins are, and how it's known that they kill bees or cause cancer over a period of twenty years?
- anon1385 11y ago
  In the case of neonicotinoids and honeybees recent research suggests it disrupts their ability to navigate back to the hive: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0091364 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
  - icebraining 11y ago
    Do they actually die as a result, or just continue living somewhere else? Because if the problem is just that beekeepers lose them, that doesn't seem so bad as if it actually decimated them.

jsprogrammer 11y ago

Did you correct for possible increased honey consumption since 2006?

tedunangst 11y ago

Consider perhaps a speed boat. You find that by lowering the freeboard (height above waterline) you can go faster. But this means more water splashes in, necessating a bigger bilge pump. People like their speedboats to go fast, they're probably ok with this trade off.

the8472 11y ago

also worthy of note: > show that the number of managed colonies Says nothing about wild bees. If they're declining more rapidly than before that's still a problem.

wang_li 11y ago
There are no wild honey bees. They got wiped out in the 1990s by varroa mites.
- slavik81 11y ago
  There are other species of wild bees besides honey bees. Are they not affected by this?
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    It's unlikely. Wild bees are not affected by the same diseases and parasites, have much more genetic diversity, and are adapted for this climate. Honeybees are not native, they have less genetic diversity from domestication and importation, and they are transported around the country by beekeepers every year (spreading their diseases and parasites around.) Nor do they have to deal with their produce being taken by humans.
- ultrasandwich 11y ago
  Source? As someone who kept tabs on wild honeybee colonies around the Austin area, I'm a little baffled by this comment.
  - wang_li 11y ago
    It's not as settled as my comment made it sound, but the second paragraph at the below article briefly touches on the idea: http://www.honeybeesuite.com/of-feral-colonies-and-varroa-mites/ http://www.honeybeesuite.com/of-feral-colonies-and-varroa-mi...
- kaitai 11y ago

jusben1369 11y ago

The author is actually expliciting stating "Yep, there is an increase in bee deaths but the total number of bees is substantially higher so the supposed negative effect of these increased deaths is overstated or wrong" I don't think that's dodgy.

floatrock 11y ago
You can spend more money on your Adwords campaigns and get a measurable increase in absolute page views or absolute conversions. However, the KPI's that your investors care about are things like your cost-of-acquisition. If it's actually the case that you're spending more just to maintain the same conversion because you're losing customers at a higher rate, that indicates something is wrong.
- jusben1369 11y ago
  I know all analogies break down with scrutiny but I think the major issue here is you're assuming bees are customers when in actuality bees are the workers, honey is the product or service and the customers' consume honey. To put this in startup terms "We're seeing higher employee turnover and so our expenses are rising because we're spending more to recruit and retain works and those workers are more expensive and less productive till they get up to speed (and with high employee churn might leave us before they're fully productive) Higher costs suck because we've had to raise the prices for our service to offset but the market has absorbed a 2x increase in our prices since 2006 so it's not exactly all bad"
  - schiffern 11y ago
    ... and in that situation, a headline suggesting the crisis is over ("Call off the Bee-pocalypse") would be misleading. Especially since the all indications show the problem continues to get worse.
kaitai 11y ago
It's dodgy because [1] the author is claiming that the number of colonies of domesticated bees is higher (not the number of bees), [2] the author ignores non-domesticated bees and thus misses a significant economic contributor that matters for agricultural pollination, if not honey. It's particularly dodgy because you're an example of a reader who came away thinking, "But there's more bees so that's good!" That's a false conclusion, the blame for which I lay partly at the feet of this author.

mikeash 11y ago

I don't understand how this would work. You can't turn money into bees. You can turn bees into more bees, and money can be used to persuade people to put in more effort to make this happen, but at some point the bees themselves have to be reproducing. I thought the whole problem with colony collapse and the honeybee crisis was that bees were declining and nobody knew how to stop it. If you can stop it with money, maybe that's not ideal, but is it a major problem anymore?

bronson 11y ago
You can't stop it with money, but you can reduce it with more human labor/management. And money buys human labor. And, even though people are figuring out how to deal with the problem, that doesn't mean that the problem is over.
- mikeash 11y ago
  If the problem is fewer bees, and money is able to compensate by creating more bees, then there is no problem. If you view the problem as being that bees are being killed by something, then yes, this doesn't solve the problem. But isn't the problem ultimately how many bees you have, not the rate at which they're reproducing and dying? The comment I replied to seems to be implying that the death of the honeybee is still nigh, and that this extra money is just temporarily hiding it. But how could that be?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - bronson 11y ago
    > [if] money is able to compensate by creating more bees, then there is no problem. The problem comes when "creating" more bees becomes too expensive/difficult, and you can no longer afford it. In HN terms: a little cash infusion can make everything look great... until it runs out. Edit: this comment does a much better job of using HN terms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024771

kaitai 11y ago

Moreover, the article entirely ignores wild bees. That's somewhat understandable as they're not as well studied, but they're a significant pollination force nevertheless -- according to this White House fact sheet [1], wild bees accounted for $9 billion of the economic benefit of pollination (compared to $15 billion for domesticated bees). The wild bees are not being replaced. This article really does have a lot of dodgy accounting (esp ignoring externalized costs). [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/20/fact-sheet-economic-challenge-posed-declining-pollinator-populations https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/20/fact-... [PNAS] Bumblebees: http://www.duluth.umn.edu/biology/documents/MaKarrall2_000.pdf http://www.duluth.umn.edu/biology/documents/MaKarrall2_000.p...

iak8god 11y ago
I find it incredibly sad that the only way to make people care about the destruction of wild bees is to talk about how much economic benefit they provide.
slavik81 11y ago
Shamelessly plugging a related project, I recently contributed to a game [1] designed to illustrate that wild bee populations have economic value. Jana Vamosi, a biologist from the University of Calgary, submitted the project idea to the Mozilla Science Lab [2] to get help building it. There's a lot of room for improvement, actually, if anyone wants to lend a hand. [1] http://www.diversibee.org http://www.diversibee.org [2] https://www.mozillascience.org/projects/diversibee https://www.mozillascience.org/projects/diversibee

staticint 11y ago

> I believe that CCD has basically been conclusively traced to a certain class of pesticides. However, the initial data on bee deaths following the use of dust-off mitigation strategies, like using Fluency Agent, looks promising. Granted, it is still early days to be forming any formal concluions, but the data that is available shows a significant change. Even if we can point to neonicotinoids as the cause, where do we go from here if changing our handling strategies resolves the problem?

pbreit 11y ago

In other words, we've adapted?

Houshalter 11y ago

CCD hasn't been traced to insecticides though. It's a contributing factor. But there are multiple causes. Parasites and diseases are big factors too. Honeybees are not native. They have low genetic diversity from domestication. They are transported around the country by beekeepers every year, spreading their diseases and parasites. And they have their produce taken by humans. Even if you removed all insecticides, they might improve a bit, but I doubt they would be doing well. And if they did get wiped out, so what? They aren't native, and there are wild bees that would replace them. I keep seeing comments and articles implying that all bees are going extinct and that this will be cataclysmic. It's just a ridiculous misunderstanding of what is happening.