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You make a very good point, but your post reads a bit too much like 'wild bees are fine'. I think you know what follows, but just for completeness and for other
by stinos 6y ago
You make a very good point, but your post reads a bit too much like 'wild bees are fine'. I think you know what follows, but just for completeness and for other readers: they aren't, at all, just like insects in general (the numbers are so unbelievably insane I'm nog even going to look up the latest one but just say '70% decrease in the last couple of decades' and it will be ballpark correct, unfortunately). And unlike the domestic bees they cannot be bred (or at least not easily). Pesticides likely also play a role in there, small perhaps, habitat loss is estimated to be the main factor. Which mono-crops also is the key player in of course; not just because those fields are no habitat but also because upscaling leads to destroying the surroundings, and so on.
- alsetmusic 6y agoTo the greater point of "insects," I was a child in the 80s. A road trip (driving in unpopulated areas) resulted in tons of bugs smacking the windshield, reducing visibility. That's much reduced.
- Retric 6y agoThat’s about 50/50 from better aerodynamics and fewer insects.
- bergstromm466 6y agoSource?
- saghm 6y agoI mean, all the bugs dying due to hitting windshields probably didn't help their population count...
- 40four 6y agoThis is fair. I did not mean to suggest there are no issues with wild bee populations declining. There certainly are. Also it's important to note that anything we call a 'wild' honey bee now is just a descendant of a once 'domesticated' variety, originally brought over by European settlers. So if you trace it back far enough, protecting 'wild' bees is sort of funny since it is an 'artificial' element we introduced to our environment in the first place. My gripe is these articles like to quote decrease in numbers observed by commercial bee keepers. They mislead people into thinking these are the same numbers scientists are observing in the overall wild bee population. Again, in America, something we introduced in the first place. They were not native. I think it is important to understand that mono crop farms, with crops that depend on pollinators, work closely hand in hand with commercial bee keepers. I have never seen this explained to people by any of these articles, probably because it does not server their agenda. Collateral damage from mono-crop farming practices (destruction of habitat, mass chemical application) is a big problem, but not being honest about the the history, and purposely hiding the large role commercial beekeepers play is not helpful. https://honey.com/blog/honey-in-history-colonial-america https://honey.com/blog/honey-in-history-colonial-america