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> The last feral North American honey bees were wiped out in the 1980s, by the Varroa mite. This is likely overstated a bit, though I can't find any recent def

> The last feral North American honey bees were wiped out in the 1980s, by the Varroa mite. This is likely overstated a bit, though I can't find any recent definitive surveys of persistent feral honeybee hives. The best I can do is this: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0150362 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... but they don't actually test any feral hives, just attempt to determine factors that could lead to survival with varroa infestation. Anecdotally I know of a few feral hives that have survived multiple years in trees and barns, but I can't rule out the possibility that they're "seeded" by swarms from managed hives every spring (they're too far away for me to inspect regularly). Also, Youtube has a few folks doing cutouts of wild hives that have taken up residence in houses and sheds, and there's clear evidence of multiple years of work in some of these hives. A bit of a nitpick, I admit, but I'd go with "mostly wiped out" personally.

tptacek 10y ago
I'm fine with stipulating "mostly wiped out" rather than "eradicated" as long as we can both agree that they're not native to the country. They were brought here as livestock.
- EGreg 10y ago
  It's amazing how much you guys know about bees ... I was relatively sure that tptacek's main job was computer related security, so having such a deep knowledge of bees is impressive.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    It's the thing I love most about this site, is that it generates an incentive to go read journal articles about bees. Things like this usually start with some seed of general knowledge or trivia --- in my case, it's listening to EconTalk, which had an episode with a bee economist talking about the misconceptions about colony collapse. But in an HN thread, you usually need something more specific than the general vibe of an EconTalk episode, so you go do a bunch of reading. It's fun! It's like competitive librarianing. (For what it's worth: that's not what I do in infosec and crypto threads.)
- beardicus 10y ago
  > as long as we can both agree that they're not native to the country Of course. There's no deep ecological need for wild honeybees to exist in North America.

tptacek 10y ago

I'm fine with stipulating "mostly wiped out" rather than "eradicated" as long as we can both agree that they're not native to the country. They were brought here as livestock.

EGreg 10y ago
It's amazing how much you guys know about bees ... I was relatively sure that tptacek's main job was computer related security, so having such a deep knowledge of bees is impressive.
- tptacek 10y ago
  It's the thing I love most about this site, is that it generates an incentive to go read journal articles about bees. Things like this usually start with some seed of general knowledge or trivia --- in my case, it's listening to EconTalk, which had an episode with a bee economist talking about the misconceptions about colony collapse. But in an HN thread, you usually need something more specific than the general vibe of an EconTalk episode, so you go do a bunch of reading. It's fun! It's like competitive librarianing. (For what it's worth: that's not what I do in infosec and crypto threads.)
beardicus 10y ago
> as long as we can both agree that they're not native to the country Of course. There's no deep ecological need for wild honeybees to exist in North America.