20 ms·

We haven’t seen a quarter of known bee species since the 1990s

638 points by esarbe 6y ago

jibcage 6y ago
Even if we manage to address climate change in time, I worry we’ve already missed the boat for addressing the accompanying ecological collapse that seems to be rapidly accelerating.
- radford-neal 6y ago
  "The sharpest decrease occurred between 2006 and 2015, with roughly 25 percent fewer species spotted" This short time scale doesn't seem to fit with climate change being the cause (assuming that the decrease is actually real at all, not an observational artifact).
  - toss1 6y ago
    Yup, but I'll bet a significant sum it corresponds with tonnage of neonicotinoid and other pesticide production (application). This is truly a problem that free markets will never handle, by design The market is great at identifying the utility of aggressive pesticides. Need found, production started, pricing, & distribution - insect crop damage 'solved' (for some values of 'solved'). Discovering that this 'solution' actually breaks the food web will also be 'solved' by the free market, as the last remaining produce that requires those pollinators spike from $/bushel to $/gram levels. But, that will fail to create more production when pollinators are extinct, and even if they could be ressurrected from DNA libraries, the poisons are still spread. Oh, and all the customers also died Yes, regulation is massively inconvenient, and apparently inefficient, and one can always find egregious bad examples. But intelligent regulation is necessary for our survival.
    - toss1 6y ago
      And of course, any post that goes against the libertarian-ish hivemind immediately gains downvotes with no comments
      - jrsj 6y ago
        just stop complaining and solve the problem with LISP ;)
        toss1 6y ago
        Touché!
    - esarbe 6y ago
      Yes. Capitalism is not a viable survival strategy for a species.
    - radford-neal 6y ago
      Yes, some change in pesticide use would fit better with the time scale. But supposing that's the source of the problem, I don't understand your focus on capitalism. In any economic system, some people are going to be trying to increase the efficiency of food production (if not, they'll all eventually starve to death). In doing so, they are going to be responding to incentives of making money, or of getting a promotion after fulfilling the goals of the five-year plan, or simply of having the inner feeling of having done a good job. I don't see why only the "making money" incentive is problematic. And indeed, the former Soviet block was notorious for terrible environmental problems.
      - toss1 6y ago
        Good question, thx. It is the balance that I'm focusing on. Completely agree that over-regulation, e.g., soviet-style, is a recipe for many of the WORST environmental disasters. Corporate regulatory capture or elimination of regulation is just crashing the scale in the other direction. Since the current problem in most of the world is lack of constraints on production of, for example, things that serve some purpose but also break the food web, that's my focus. Basically, it seems that, whenever people get enough good information, and have good democratic (small-d) control of the system, they find a balance to encourage and regulate development. No one wants to live in a wasteland. But if too few control things, such as an authoritarian state, or corporatists doing regulatory capture, they have the illusion that they can destroy all they want, externalize the damage, and enjoy life in their palaces. For centurys, it was true. Now, we seem to be approaching the point where the whole food web may break.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- zests 6y ago
  As soon as the "ecological collapse" stops, extensive speciation will occur. Nature always wins. There's a lot to be hopeful about even when it seems like there might not be.
andrewstuart 6y ago
That's the unsurprising outcome of our relentless poisoning of insects, which continues unabated today. Humans think about certain things as being infinite, until they aren't: forests are so big we could never impact them oceans are so big we could never impact them the atmosphere is so big we could never impact it the weather system is so big we could never impact it there's so many insects we could never impact them etc etc
- yboris 6y ago
  Humans suck (at least via intuition) when it comes to exponential processes. E.g. - people think a 2% growth rate of population in a town is good, but that means in 35 years it's double of what it was!
  - learnstats2 6y ago
    Interesting to note that population of central boroughs of London (which is used as a canonical example of population growth and overcrowding in Europe) is roughly half what they were 100 years ago. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Borough_of_Islington#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Borough_of_Islington#De... And likely decreasing now again, as people find less cultural benefit of living in an expensive city during an ongoing pandemic. I don't think population size or density is really the problem - the problem is poor planning to account for probable changes in population size or density. Consistent 2% growth should be relatively easy for politicians to anticipate and manage.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - yboris 6y ago
      I worded this poorly. I meant to point out the counterintuitive nature of 2% growth, not that growth of a city is bad. Mayors who don't realize what 2% means are doing a bad job governing.
- esarbe 6y ago
xipho 6y ago
As suggested by others the number of taxonomists, people who could accurately identify species (many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods), who are actually working on collecting and identify species has most certainly declined. In many groups of insects there is at most a handful of experts worldwide who can take specimens to a species-level identification. This is not to say that species richness is not declining, its to say that in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world why they are important, and why they require fixed, institutionally-based funding to actually be able to provide the services that would allow us to confidently state that data like these are because of environmental change (again, they very likely are) rather than a lack of experts in the field actually doing basic research. In other words, it is extremely rare that universities (in the US) actually hire what was once known as "alpha-taxonomists", in part this is a reflection of taxonomists inability to sell themselves and adapt to new tools (but note that many have evolved) in part it is a reflection of the (I would argue "immense") short-sightedness of institutions. "We want answers to complex questions! We've neglected to give scientists time to think deeply, and research over decades to answer those questions. Oh, we see."
- hammock 6y ago
  >there is at most a handful of experts worldwide who can take specimens to a species-level identification. We also have the internet now. Would be cool if you could upload photos of bees someplace and have them identified.
  - AlexandrB 6y ago
    This already exists: https://www.inaturalist.org https://www.inaturalist.org
    - Symbiote 6y ago
      The machine vision on iNaturalist is great, but it's not necessarily adequate for distinguishing between insect species -- there can be details that are difficult to photograph, let alone identify from a casual user's photograph. And we still need training data (i.e. identified by the expert taxonomists) for future work.
esarbe 6y ago
I have come to the conclusion that most of my colleagues, friends neighbors and acquaintances are living in a stoically enforced willful blindness. No one in their right mind can nowadays honestly deny that we are moving, slowly but ever accelerating, into a human-made ecosystem collapse that no one is able to stop before it is too late. But still people are finding ways to weasel out of actually making the conscious effort of accepting the fact that we - as a species - are killing ourselves. Either by denying the facts - the climate is not changing, the animals are not dying, the rivers are not poisoned! - or by ascribing to some kind of techno-utopism where everything will be fixed in the future. I'm wondering if this is part of psychological coping mechanism; that the fact of our species ending is such a trauma that we - even though we cannot deny it in all honesty - have to suppress our own conciseness from realizing the direful consequences for every single person we know and love. We have to deny reality, because the implications of accepting the facts are just to painful. And so we continue this charade of daily going to work and shopping and comparing our income to those of our neighbors and continue our meaningless competitions for status and rank. I think deep in our hearts most of us know that it is really far to late. And that's why we cannot admit the truth.
- pokeymcsnatch 6y ago
  Surely you're the enlightened one and everyone you know is willfully blind. Or maybe they're pragmatic and begrudgingly accept that to maintain any semblance of modern life, they have to participate in however society functions *now*. I'm in no position, financial or otherwise, to go off-grid, ride my bike everywhere, delete my car, home cook every meal with locally grown ingredients. Or to decrease my energy consumption through buying less VPS time, buying and using test equipment, parts, protypes made overseas with no pollution regulations. I can do better than I'm doing now, but not by much unless there truly is some massive, global-level, snap-of-the-fingers change. Reason being, if I do, it's essentially self-harm, like a social suicide. I suffer, I lose jobs, contracts, my livelihood, relationships, etc while the rest of the world happily moves on without me. Which yeah, it fits the idea of your of complaint. The majority of your acquaintances who you've written off as stuck in the dark ages don't have the ability to make the extraordinary changes that you demand for removing that label. Your statement was more philosophical than demanding specific action, but ignoring the reality of humans and human society so you can shit on us from your tower is not helpful.
shmageggy 6y ago
Is there a link to a non-subscribe-walled version?
- 40four 6y ago
  Reader mode in Firefox worked for me
BlueTie 6y ago
I built my house about 5 years ago in a subdivision. First year on the back deck at noon there were a handful of bees buzzing around and at dust I was getting eaten alive by mosquitos. After 5 years of watching my neighbors spray for mosquitos in their lawn, and anti-grub stuff, synthetic fertilizer all spring and summer -> they're all basically gone. When you think about all the forests getting knocked down to build new houses not just in the US - but even more so in rapidly growing 3rd world countries...it makes sense.
- twiddling 6y ago
  Yeah, when we bought our house , we stopped the maintenance of the backyard with chemicals that the previous owner did. Planted more native shrubs and trees and now eight years later we have got a pretty vibrant patch, with lots of birds feeding on the bugs. Of course this has put me in conflict with my neighbors who make snide comments about a poorly maintained yard... sigh
  - 40four 6y ago
    I agree with you all’s sentiment. But, I wish it was a simple as letting things get ‘back to nature’ but it’s not unfortunately. I live in a rental, halfway through our second year lease. We have a really large, fantastic yard. It is landscaped nicely with mostly ’native’ plants. Rhododendron, azaleas, among others. Also full of large, old growth trees. Many probably 150-200 years old according to the arborist who came out and surveyed recently. Due to the large tree canopies in the neighborhood, we have an unbelievable bird population. Numerous small birds special, huge seasonal flocking birds passing through, hawks, even a couple resident owls. Huge amounts of squirrels and small mammals. Unfortunately, we still have a horrible mosquito problem in the summertime. It’s really almost unbearable. I strongly considered having the yard sprayed last year, but resisted the temptation.
- harryh 6y ago
  Total land devoted to forrest in the US has been basically stable since the early 1900s and has actually increased a bit in the last 20 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforestation#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforestation#United_States
ciconia 6y ago
Last year I installed a beehive in our garden. Didn't take their honey, didn't treat them for Varroa. In the midst of winter I was sure they were all dead. Then a few days ago temperatures shot up to about 18°c and suddenly they were back, basking in the sunlight and buzzing around the hive. Made me so happy... Seriously, I've come to understand that contrary to what most of us seem to believe, it's not about what we can do to minimize our negative impact, but rather what we can do to have a positive impact on our environment. Not just ecologically, but also socially and politically.
- searine 6y ago
  >didn't treat them for Varroa. That's fine if they're fine, but if the hive gets infected and you let them fester they can do a lot of damage to other hives. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/08/03/backyard-beekeeping-mites-untreated-kills-bees https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/08/03/backyard-beekeeping...
  - yawz 6y ago
    That is true. I've been dealing with Varroa in the US since I started beekeeping. I've lost many hives because of Varroa. I ran my own experiments treating some hives and not treating others, trying to see if nature would allow me to select the strongest (Varroa-resistant) colonies and selectively breed them. I didn't succeed.
- yawz 6y ago
  Depending on where you are they may not be out of the danger zone yet. Here in Colorado we regularly get mid-to-high 60F days and I know people who lost hives as late as April. You didn't take their excess honey, but I assume you still inspected to give them room otherwise they could easily have swarmed.
- crazydoggers 6y ago
  Some breeds are more hygienic and will do more at keeping mite infections to a minimum. For instance here in Texas we have BeeWeavers which do really well against mites: https://beeweaver.com/our-breed/ https://beeweaver.com/our-breed/ That said no bee breed is 100% resistant. To breed the resistance that this breed has took a very long time and active management like killing susceptible drones to artificially select for the trait. It’s not going to happen with one hive. And as others have said you might do more harm than good by letting a hive get badly infected, spreading heavy infection to other hives. You should definitely actively manage it. With the beeweavers I still get some mites, and you need to do a mite count. Typically a mite count of 3% is in danger and needs treatment.
averageuser 6y ago
I'm not sure what the consequences of this are, but it is a pretty big deal. Bees are responsible for pollinating a lot of plants, and if the bees are dying off, it could have devastating consequences for the food supply. I'm not sure what the point of this article is. It's not like we're going to be able to do anything about it.
- Krisando 6y ago
  It also might not be that bad as believed. I remember when I was younger, we were told about the killer bees were going to wipe out the modern world. Also, I was told that we would all be living on a beach or the sea because of global warming and the ozone hole lazering everything.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
feralimal 6y ago
... 'cos people are spending too much time looking at their phones nowadays?
alberth 6y ago
As a kid, whenever we’d take a family road trip - the front windshield would be splattered with smashed bugs. Over the winter holidays, I drove 9 hours and don’t believe a single bug was in my windshield after that long drive. I don’t know what’s happening with bugs but could it be related?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  While changes to insect populations are a thing, it could be in part that your car is more aerodynamic than the ones you rode in as a kid. That would reduce bug impacts, and increase fuel efficiency.
- Cd00d 6y ago
  I agree with another poster that it's likely aerodynamics. But, it reminded me of an incident when I was a kid. In a minivan, all windows open, highway speeds. Driver hit a swarm of bees. I've never seen a density of bees like it. Made the windshield opaque for many seconds of wipers and spray, and the number of bees that came through the side windows to be smashed against the back windows and luggage was shocking. I don't know anything about swarming behavior, and it's been years since I thought about that incident. Thanks for the memory!
- terse_malvolio 6y ago
  Just because you don't see them, it doesn't mean you didn't ran them over
- pvaldes 6y ago
  It depends on where you live, but winter and flying insects are terms mutually exclusive normally. Many species adapt their cycles to pass winter in form of eggs/larvae or just hibernate in a quiet place. Some migrate. Most adults just die.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
Bug population in general is down massively. I worry about a silent spring.
alexfromapex 6y ago
Please don't kill insects unless you really need to, I've seen people on Facebook talking about destroying caterpillar nests because they kill trees and it's not even true they might eat some leaves but it's natural and doesn't usually kill the tree. Now I hardly see the nests anywhere anymore and the butterflies either.
- eggsmediumrare 6y ago
  We had a massive gypsy moth outbreak this year. They destroy oak trees and no birds will eat them. It's absolutely a good idea to destroy their nests. Obviously this entails knowing what they look like...
rodiger 6y ago
As someone who lives in a fairly seasonal environment, how can I help?
wishinghand 6y ago
Anecdata, but I feel like I don't see that many bugs in general since the 1990s (born in mid-80s). In my adult life I don't bother buying bug spray or citronella candles anymore, butterflies don't seasonally pass overhead, crickets are very quiet in the fields, and picnics rarely get raided by ants.
- brianberns 6y ago
  When I was a kid in the 1970’s and early 80’s, my grandparents would drive 100’s of miles along I-95 to visit us from Florida and arrive with the grille and windshield of their car absolutely splattered with bug corpses. You can make that same drive today without killing a fly. Side note: We also used to see long caravans of migrating birds flying south in the fall. Thousands of them at least, traveling overhead in a steady stream for 15 minutes or more.
eucryphia 6y ago
I was told that at a nursery when I went buy a discontinued systemic fruit fly spray (spray twice a year), he had no answer when I told him the local council had banned keeping bee hives in the city. We do have bees, just nowhere near as many as I remember as a kid.
klingaman 6y ago
Check out this TensorFlow project that Google is working on to analyze bee pollination behavior in order to try to save them: https://about.google/intl/en-GB/stories/save-the-bees/ https://about.google/intl/en-GB/stories/save-the-bees/
- anon0010022 6y ago
  oh that is awesome
dryd 6y ago
If you live in Washington State, you can help by planting bee-friendly flowers in your garden (if you have one). The Noxious Weed Control Board offers a pack of seeds for free!: https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/bee-u-tify https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/bee-u-tify
kirillzubovsky 6y ago
Could it bee they are just really good at hiding?
anonytrary 6y ago
As a physics/chemistry person I have a lot of questions, I hope there are some biologists in the house. I am all for environmental preservation and conservation -- do we know the exact effects of certain bee species becoming extinct? Will it really throw off pollination and ecological equilibrium, or will it be a slight perturbation that nature will promptly rebound from? For example if all X pollinators go extinct, could it not potentially leave room for Y pollinators to grow and effectively "take over the job" or "fill the void". Somewhat dark, but I imagine there are hundreds, if not thousands, of species that could simply go extinct without permanent "damage" to the biochemical ecosystem. Humans are probably one of those species. For example, what if all red ants went extinct? Would the Earth just be completely screwed? I would guess probably not. My question is what separates a critical species from a non-critical one and how do biologists even determine this effectively? I know nature does not care about what species live and die; evolution has no "desire" to keep anything alive. But is there really a bottleneck species that, if wiped out, would cause an irreversible phase transition for life as we know it?
- pvaldes 6y ago
  > do we know the exact effects of certain bee species becoming extinct? Not, in most cases. > For example if all X pollinators go extinct, could it not potentially leave room for Y pollinators Not. We would enter in an extinction vortex. Less pollinators mean less seeds, less plants, and the empty space would be filled by Y, the species that Y pollinators search for. X would disappear. And we would lose Z, M and Q also. Is the same that happens with companies that lose their main customers. They became less attractive, not more. To be rescued by the fanbase of a competitor suddenly moving in mass to your product is not likely. > Would the Earth just be completely screwed? Not, you can't screw the planet, but would be painful (Mess with nature, brace yourself for nasty surprises. Nasty and unfixable). If we take in mind similar events from our past many people would probably die.
  - sebastialonso 6y ago
    I cannot make sense of your second paragraph. It's either badly written, badly argumented or both. I'll try again. If the metaphor you're choosing is a company losing their clients, then your argument is wrong, because what happens is that the competitor(s) fills the void and the system balances itself. Why would that not happen in the scenario parent comment proposed? What rule prohibits it?
bcatanzaro 6y ago
I have always found it astonishing that the number of bee species and the number of bird species are roughly comparable.
40four 6y ago
I’ve gone on one too many angry rants about inaccurate & deceptive ‘bees are dying’ articles at this point so I will try to be nice :) Also, I’ll give National Geographic credit here for presenting a more ‘balanced’ depiction of the situation than most news outlets offer. I still have some nitpicks, but this article is a bit more balanced & honest than most, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because they admit up front, that the majority of pollination in farms comes from ‘managed’ bee hives, offered up as a service by commercial bee keepers. Many articles never mention this, and present the subject as if all crops are pollinated by wild bees. Secondly, despite the title, the article clearly states that the science and observations on the subject are not well understood. Obviously wild pollinators supplement the managed honey bee hives, but I’ve never heard of any study that tries to measure the impact of wild pollinators have, compared to managed hives. I think it’s safe to say the large majority of pollination comes from commercial honey bee keepers. For a point of reference, in the US according to the ‘National Honey Board’, ”The USDA has estimated that 80 percent of insect crop pollination is accomplished by honey bees”. https://honey.com/newsroom/presskit/honey-industry-facts https://honey.com/newsroom/presskit/honey-industry-facts Also, it is important to remember many crops do not need pollinators. When this article states right off the bat that bees ”pollinate 85 percent of food crops and fruits around the world”, this is slightly misleading. They really mean bees pollinate 85% of crops and fruits that require pollination. The statement that 85% of all crops require pollination to grow would be incorrect. With all that said, let me be clear. I’m not trying to be an apologist, or say any of this news is ‘okay’, it’s not. We see these articles all the time now for good reason, because it is super important to protect bees and other pollinators. But commercial honey bee keepers need to be given credit for the invaluable and important work that they do by providing their hives to increase production in agriculture. They are the true champions. It’s not the best system, but it is the reality of large scale agriculture these days. As the article mentions, depending too much on a single species can be risky. If there is a disease or pest outbreak in the hives, or in the fields, or problems from chemical application, that could have dramatic impacts of yearly yields. The article also rightly says ”There’s no long-term, very accurate, precise sampling of bees all over the world,” , and ” Nevertheless, he cautions, the records that underpin the study don’t give us enough information to determine if certain species have gone extinct.” Even with my nitpicks, I applaud National Geographic here. This is one of the more balanced articles I’ve seen on the topic of bee populations. Many of them are either purposely or ignorantly disingenuous.
terse_malvolio 6y ago
Is there any downside to humans feeding bees? If not, why isn't it more common?
- pjerem 6y ago
  Because it’s time consuming so you have to be paid for this. So you have to sell honey that will suffer the competition of cheap industrial honey. However, you can have a hive in your land just for the sake of feeding bees (and eat your own honey). I don’t know how it works in your country, in France, you can legally do it as long as your terrain is large enough to place the hive 20m away any habitation (100m away if it’s a public building). You are also required to follow a 3 day training. It’s not that much but it requires some self-investment. So I would say that it’s not common but it is totally possible.
  - kawsper 6y ago
    Isn't having bees part of the problem? Your honey-bees will compete with local pollinators.
rbrbr 6y ago
“Enter your email address to continue reading”
IgorPartola 6y ago
From my reading Mason bees are easier to maintain and are better pollinators than honey bees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_bee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_bee
_ph_ 6y ago
Where I live (Bavaria), in the last two years public lawns didn't get mowed any more and now grow a beautiful variety of wild flowers and are a great place for bees and other insects. Also, some part of the farmed ground around the village has been dedicated to growing flowers. Sometimes it is very easy to at least compensate a bit the damage done.

638 points by esarbe 6y ago

Even if we manage to address climate change in time, I worry we’ve already missed the boat for addressing the accompanying ecological collapse that seems to be rapidly accelerating.

radford-neal 6y ago
"The sharpest decrease occurred between 2006 and 2015, with roughly 25 percent fewer species spotted" This short time scale doesn't seem to fit with climate change being the cause (assuming that the decrease is actually real at all, not an observational artifact).
- toss1 6y ago
  Yup, but I'll bet a significant sum it corresponds with tonnage of neonicotinoid and other pesticide production (application). This is truly a problem that free markets will never handle, by design The market is great at identifying the utility of aggressive pesticides. Need found, production started, pricing, & distribution - insect crop damage 'solved' (for some values of 'solved'). Discovering that this 'solution' actually breaks the food web will also be 'solved' by the free market, as the last remaining produce that requires those pollinators spike from $/bushel to $/gram levels. But, that will fail to create more production when pollinators are extinct, and even if they could be ressurrected from DNA libraries, the poisons are still spread. Oh, and all the customers also died Yes, regulation is massively inconvenient, and apparently inefficient, and one can always find egregious bad examples. But intelligent regulation is necessary for our survival.
  - toss1 6y ago
    And of course, any post that goes against the libertarian-ish hivemind immediately gains downvotes with no comments
    - jrsj 6y ago
      just stop complaining and solve the problem with LISP ;)
      - toss1 6y ago
        Touché!
  - esarbe 6y ago
    Yes. Capitalism is not a viable survival strategy for a species.
  - radford-neal 6y ago
    Yes, some change in pesticide use would fit better with the time scale. But supposing that's the source of the problem, I don't understand your focus on capitalism. In any economic system, some people are going to be trying to increase the efficiency of food production (if not, they'll all eventually starve to death). In doing so, they are going to be responding to incentives of making money, or of getting a promotion after fulfilling the goals of the five-year plan, or simply of having the inner feeling of having done a good job. I don't see why only the "making money" incentive is problematic. And indeed, the former Soviet block was notorious for terrible environmental problems.
    - toss1 6y ago
      Good question, thx. It is the balance that I'm focusing on. Completely agree that over-regulation, e.g., soviet-style, is a recipe for many of the WORST environmental disasters. Corporate regulatory capture or elimination of regulation is just crashing the scale in the other direction. Since the current problem in most of the world is lack of constraints on production of, for example, things that serve some purpose but also break the food web, that's my focus. Basically, it seems that, whenever people get enough good information, and have good democratic (small-d) control of the system, they find a balance to encourage and regulate development. No one wants to live in a wasteland. But if too few control things, such as an authoritarian state, or corporatists doing regulatory capture, they have the illusion that they can destroy all they want, externalize the damage, and enjoy life in their palaces. For centurys, it was true. Now, we seem to be approaching the point where the whole food web may break.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
zests 6y ago
As soon as the "ecological collapse" stops, extensive speciation will occur. Nature always wins. There's a lot to be hopeful about even when it seems like there might not be.

andrewstuart 6y ago

That's the unsurprising outcome of our relentless poisoning of insects, which continues unabated today. Humans think about certain things as being infinite, until they aren't: forests are so big we could never impact them oceans are so big we could never impact them the atmosphere is so big we could never impact it the weather system is so big we could never impact it there's so many insects we could never impact them etc etc

yboris 6y ago
Humans suck (at least via intuition) when it comes to exponential processes. E.g. - people think a 2% growth rate of population in a town is good, but that means in 35 years it's double of what it was!
- learnstats2 6y ago
  Interesting to note that population of central boroughs of London (which is used as a canonical example of population growth and overcrowding in Europe) is roughly half what they were 100 years ago. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Borough_of_Islington#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Borough_of_Islington#De... And likely decreasing now again, as people find less cultural benefit of living in an expensive city during an ongoing pandemic. I don't think population size or density is really the problem - the problem is poor planning to account for probable changes in population size or density. Consistent 2% growth should be relatively easy for politicians to anticipate and manage.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - yboris 6y ago
    I worded this poorly. I meant to point out the counterintuitive nature of 2% growth, not that growth of a city is bad. Mayors who don't realize what 2% means are doing a bad job governing.
esarbe 6y ago

xipho 6y ago

As suggested by others the number of taxonomists, people who could accurately identify species (many of which require internal dissection, or molecular methods), who are actually working on collecting and identify species has most certainly declined. In many groups of insects there is at most a handful of experts worldwide who can take specimens to a species-level identification. This is not to say that species richness is not declining, its to say that in the past 3-4 decades Taxonomists have done a poor (some would say terrible) job at describing to the broader world why they are important, and why they require fixed, institutionally-based funding to actually be able to provide the services that would allow us to confidently state that data like these are because of environmental change (again, they very likely are) rather than a lack of experts in the field actually doing basic research. In other words, it is extremely rare that universities (in the US) actually hire what was once known as "alpha-taxonomists", in part this is a reflection of taxonomists inability to sell themselves and adapt to new tools (but note that many have evolved) in part it is a reflection of the (I would argue "immense") short-sightedness of institutions. "We want answers to complex questions! We've neglected to give scientists time to think deeply, and research over decades to answer those questions. Oh, we see."

hammock 6y ago
>there is at most a handful of experts worldwide who can take specimens to a species-level identification. We also have the internet now. Would be cool if you could upload photos of bees someplace and have them identified.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  This already exists: https://www.inaturalist.org https://www.inaturalist.org
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    The machine vision on iNaturalist is great, but it's not necessarily adequate for distinguishing between insect species -- there can be details that are difficult to photograph, let alone identify from a casual user's photograph. And we still need training data (i.e. identified by the expert taxonomists) for future work.

esarbe 6y ago

I have come to the conclusion that most of my colleagues, friends neighbors and acquaintances are living in a stoically enforced willful blindness. No one in their right mind can nowadays honestly deny that we are moving, slowly but ever accelerating, into a human-made ecosystem collapse that no one is able to stop before it is too late. But still people are finding ways to weasel out of actually making the conscious effort of accepting the fact that we - as a species - are killing ourselves. Either by denying the facts - the climate is not changing, the animals are not dying, the rivers are not poisoned! - or by ascribing to some kind of techno-utopism where everything will be fixed in the future. I'm wondering if this is part of psychological coping mechanism; that the fact of our species ending is such a trauma that we - even though we cannot deny it in all honesty - have to suppress our own conciseness from realizing the direful consequences for every single person we know and love. We have to deny reality, because the implications of accepting the facts are just to painful. And so we continue this charade of daily going to work and shopping and comparing our income to those of our neighbors and continue our meaningless competitions for status and rank. I think deep in our hearts most of us know that it is really far to late. And that's why we cannot admit the truth.

pokeymcsnatch 6y ago
Surely you're the enlightened one and everyone you know is willfully blind. Or maybe they're pragmatic and begrudgingly accept that to maintain any semblance of modern life, they have to participate in however society functions *now*. I'm in no position, financial or otherwise, to go off-grid, ride my bike everywhere, delete my car, home cook every meal with locally grown ingredients. Or to decrease my energy consumption through buying less VPS time, buying and using test equipment, parts, protypes made overseas with no pollution regulations. I can do better than I'm doing now, but not by much unless there truly is some massive, global-level, snap-of-the-fingers change. Reason being, if I do, it's essentially self-harm, like a social suicide. I suffer, I lose jobs, contracts, my livelihood, relationships, etc while the rest of the world happily moves on without me. Which yeah, it fits the idea of your of complaint. The majority of your acquaintances who you've written off as stuck in the dark ages don't have the ability to make the extraordinary changes that you demand for removing that label. Your statement was more philosophical than demanding specific action, but ignoring the reality of humans and human society so you can shit on us from your tower is not helpful.

shmageggy 6y ago

Is there a link to a non-subscribe-walled version?

40four 6y ago
Reader mode in Firefox worked for me

BlueTie 6y ago

I built my house about 5 years ago in a subdivision. First year on the back deck at noon there were a handful of bees buzzing around and at dust I was getting eaten alive by mosquitos. After 5 years of watching my neighbors spray for mosquitos in their lawn, and anti-grub stuff, synthetic fertilizer all spring and summer -> they're all basically gone. When you think about all the forests getting knocked down to build new houses not just in the US - but even more so in rapidly growing 3rd world countries...it makes sense.

twiddling 6y ago
Yeah, when we bought our house , we stopped the maintenance of the backyard with chemicals that the previous owner did. Planted more native shrubs and trees and now eight years later we have got a pretty vibrant patch, with lots of birds feeding on the bugs. Of course this has put me in conflict with my neighbors who make snide comments about a poorly maintained yard... sigh
- 40four 6y ago
  I agree with you all’s sentiment. But, I wish it was a simple as letting things get ‘back to nature’ but it’s not unfortunately. I live in a rental, halfway through our second year lease. We have a really large, fantastic yard. It is landscaped nicely with mostly ’native’ plants. Rhododendron, azaleas, among others. Also full of large, old growth trees. Many probably 150-200 years old according to the arborist who came out and surveyed recently. Due to the large tree canopies in the neighborhood, we have an unbelievable bird population. Numerous small birds special, huge seasonal flocking birds passing through, hawks, even a couple resident owls. Huge amounts of squirrels and small mammals. Unfortunately, we still have a horrible mosquito problem in the summertime. It’s really almost unbearable. I strongly considered having the yard sprayed last year, but resisted the temptation.
harryh 6y ago
Total land devoted to forrest in the US has been basically stable since the early 1900s and has actually increased a bit in the last 20 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforestation#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforestation#United_States

ciconia 6y ago

Last year I installed a beehive in our garden. Didn't take their honey, didn't treat them for Varroa. In the midst of winter I was sure they were all dead. Then a few days ago temperatures shot up to about 18°c and suddenly they were back, basking in the sunlight and buzzing around the hive. Made me so happy... Seriously, I've come to understand that contrary to what most of us seem to believe, it's not about what we can do to minimize our negative impact, but rather what we can do to have a positive impact on our environment. Not just ecologically, but also socially and politically.

searine 6y ago
>didn't treat them for Varroa. That's fine if they're fine, but if the hive gets infected and you let them fester they can do a lot of damage to other hives. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/08/03/backyard-beekeeping-mites-untreated-kills-bees https://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/08/03/backyard-beekeeping...
- yawz 6y ago
  That is true. I've been dealing with Varroa in the US since I started beekeeping. I've lost many hives because of Varroa. I ran my own experiments treating some hives and not treating others, trying to see if nature would allow me to select the strongest (Varroa-resistant) colonies and selectively breed them. I didn't succeed.
yawz 6y ago
Depending on where you are they may not be out of the danger zone yet. Here in Colorado we regularly get mid-to-high 60F days and I know people who lost hives as late as April. You didn't take their excess honey, but I assume you still inspected to give them room otherwise they could easily have swarmed.
crazydoggers 6y ago
Some breeds are more hygienic and will do more at keeping mite infections to a minimum. For instance here in Texas we have BeeWeavers which do really well against mites: https://beeweaver.com/our-breed/ https://beeweaver.com/our-breed/ That said no bee breed is 100% resistant. To breed the resistance that this breed has took a very long time and active management like killing susceptible drones to artificially select for the trait. It’s not going to happen with one hive. And as others have said you might do more harm than good by letting a hive get badly infected, spreading heavy infection to other hives. You should definitely actively manage it. With the beeweavers I still get some mites, and you need to do a mite count. Typically a mite count of 3% is in danger and needs treatment.

averageuser 6y ago

I'm not sure what the consequences of this are, but it is a pretty big deal. Bees are responsible for pollinating a lot of plants, and if the bees are dying off, it could have devastating consequences for the food supply. I'm not sure what the point of this article is. It's not like we're going to be able to do anything about it.

Krisando 6y ago
It also might not be that bad as believed. I remember when I was younger, we were told about the killer bees were going to wipe out the modern world. Also, I was told that we would all be living on a beach or the sea because of global warming and the ozone hole lazering everything.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

feralimal 6y ago

... 'cos people are spending too much time looking at their phones nowadays?

alberth 6y ago

As a kid, whenever we’d take a family road trip - the front windshield would be splattered with smashed bugs. Over the winter holidays, I drove 9 hours and don’t believe a single bug was in my windshield after that long drive. I don’t know what’s happening with bugs but could it be related?

dragonwriter 6y ago
While changes to insect populations are a thing, it could be in part that your car is more aerodynamic than the ones you rode in as a kid. That would reduce bug impacts, and increase fuel efficiency.
Cd00d 6y ago
I agree with another poster that it's likely aerodynamics. But, it reminded me of an incident when I was a kid. In a minivan, all windows open, highway speeds. Driver hit a swarm of bees. I've never seen a density of bees like it. Made the windshield opaque for many seconds of wipers and spray, and the number of bees that came through the side windows to be smashed against the back windows and luggage was shocking. I don't know anything about swarming behavior, and it's been years since I thought about that incident. Thanks for the memory!
terse_malvolio 6y ago
Just because you don't see them, it doesn't mean you didn't ran them over
pvaldes 6y ago
It depends on where you live, but winter and flying insects are terms mutually exclusive normally. Many species adapt their cycles to pass winter in form of eggs/larvae or just hibernate in a quiet place. Some migrate. Most adults just die.

Taylor_OD 6y ago

Bug population in general is down massively. I worry about a silent spring.

alexfromapex 6y ago

Please don't kill insects unless you really need to, I've seen people on Facebook talking about destroying caterpillar nests because they kill trees and it's not even true they might eat some leaves but it's natural and doesn't usually kill the tree. Now I hardly see the nests anywhere anymore and the butterflies either.

eggsmediumrare 6y ago
We had a massive gypsy moth outbreak this year. They destroy oak trees and no birds will eat them. It's absolutely a good idea to destroy their nests. Obviously this entails knowing what they look like...

rodiger 6y ago

As someone who lives in a fairly seasonal environment, how can I help?

wishinghand 6y ago

Anecdata, but I feel like I don't see that many bugs in general since the 1990s (born in mid-80s). In my adult life I don't bother buying bug spray or citronella candles anymore, butterflies don't seasonally pass overhead, crickets are very quiet in the fields, and picnics rarely get raided by ants.

brianberns 6y ago
When I was a kid in the 1970’s and early 80’s, my grandparents would drive 100’s of miles along I-95 to visit us from Florida and arrive with the grille and windshield of their car absolutely splattered with bug corpses. You can make that same drive today without killing a fly. Side note: We also used to see long caravans of migrating birds flying south in the fall. Thousands of them at least, traveling overhead in a steady stream for 15 minutes or more.

eucryphia 6y ago

I was told that at a nursery when I went buy a discontinued systemic fruit fly spray (spray twice a year), he had no answer when I told him the local council had banned keeping bee hives in the city. We do have bees, just nowhere near as many as I remember as a kid.

klingaman 6y ago

Check out this TensorFlow project that Google is working on to analyze bee pollination behavior in order to try to save them: https://about.google/intl/en-GB/stories/save-the-bees/ https://about.google/intl/en-GB/stories/save-the-bees/

anon0010022 6y ago
oh that is awesome

dryd 6y ago

If you live in Washington State, you can help by planting bee-friendly flowers in your garden (if you have one). The Noxious Weed Control Board offers a pack of seeds for free!: https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/bee-u-tify https://www.nwcb.wa.gov/bee-u-tify

kirillzubovsky 6y ago

Could it bee they are just really good at hiding?

anonytrary 6y ago

As a physics/chemistry person I have a lot of questions, I hope there are some biologists in the house. I am all for environmental preservation and conservation -- do we know the exact effects of certain bee species becoming extinct? Will it really throw off pollination and ecological equilibrium, or will it be a slight perturbation that nature will promptly rebound from? For example if all X pollinators go extinct, could it not potentially leave room for Y pollinators to grow and effectively "take over the job" or "fill the void". Somewhat dark, but I imagine there are hundreds, if not thousands, of species that could simply go extinct without permanent "damage" to the biochemical ecosystem. Humans are probably one of those species. For example, what if all red ants went extinct? Would the Earth just be completely screwed? I would guess probably not. My question is what separates a critical species from a non-critical one and how do biologists even determine this effectively? I know nature does not care about what species live and die; evolution has no "desire" to keep anything alive. But is there really a bottleneck species that, if wiped out, would cause an irreversible phase transition for life as we know it?

pvaldes 6y ago
> do we know the exact effects of certain bee species becoming extinct? Not, in most cases. > For example if all X pollinators go extinct, could it not potentially leave room for Y pollinators Not. We would enter in an extinction vortex. Less pollinators mean less seeds, less plants, and the empty space would be filled by Y, the species that Y pollinators search for. X would disappear. And we would lose Z, M and Q also. Is the same that happens with companies that lose their main customers. They became less attractive, not more. To be rescued by the fanbase of a competitor suddenly moving in mass to your product is not likely. > Would the Earth just be completely screwed? Not, you can't screw the planet, but would be painful (Mess with nature, brace yourself for nasty surprises. Nasty and unfixable). If we take in mind similar events from our past many people would probably die.
- sebastialonso 6y ago
  I cannot make sense of your second paragraph. It's either badly written, badly argumented or both. I'll try again. If the metaphor you're choosing is a company losing their clients, then your argument is wrong, because what happens is that the competitor(s) fills the void and the system balances itself. Why would that not happen in the scenario parent comment proposed? What rule prohibits it?

bcatanzaro 6y ago

I have always found it astonishing that the number of bee species and the number of bird species are roughly comparable.

40four 6y ago

I’ve gone on one too many angry rants about inaccurate & deceptive ‘bees are dying’ articles at this point so I will try to be nice :) Also, I’ll give National Geographic credit here for presenting a more ‘balanced’ depiction of the situation than most news outlets offer. I still have some nitpicks, but this article is a bit more balanced & honest than most, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because they admit up front, that the majority of pollination in farms comes from ‘managed’ bee hives, offered up as a service by commercial bee keepers. Many articles never mention this, and present the subject as if all crops are pollinated by wild bees. Secondly, despite the title, the article clearly states that the science and observations on the subject are not well understood. Obviously wild pollinators supplement the managed honey bee hives, but I’ve never heard of any study that tries to measure the impact of wild pollinators have, compared to managed hives. I think it’s safe to say the large majority of pollination comes from commercial honey bee keepers. For a point of reference, in the US according to the ‘National Honey Board’, ”The USDA has estimated that 80 percent of insect crop pollination is accomplished by honey bees”. https://honey.com/newsroom/presskit/honey-industry-facts https://honey.com/newsroom/presskit/honey-industry-facts Also, it is important to remember many crops do not need pollinators. When this article states right off the bat that bees ”pollinate 85 percent of food crops and fruits around the world”, this is slightly misleading. They really mean bees pollinate 85% of crops and fruits that require pollination. The statement that 85% of all crops require pollination to grow would be incorrect. With all that said, let me be clear. I’m not trying to be an apologist, or say any of this news is ‘okay’, it’s not. We see these articles all the time now for good reason, because it is super important to protect bees and other pollinators. But commercial honey bee keepers need to be given credit for the invaluable and important work that they do by providing their hives to increase production in agriculture. They are the true champions. It’s not the best system, but it is the reality of large scale agriculture these days. As the article mentions, depending too much on a single species can be risky. If there is a disease or pest outbreak in the hives, or in the fields, or problems from chemical application, that could have dramatic impacts of yearly yields. The article also rightly says ”There’s no long-term, very accurate, precise sampling of bees all over the world,” , and ” Nevertheless, he cautions, the records that underpin the study don’t give us enough information to determine if certain species have gone extinct.” Even with my nitpicks, I applaud National Geographic here. This is one of the more balanced articles I’ve seen on the topic of bee populations. Many of them are either purposely or ignorantly disingenuous.

terse_malvolio 6y ago

Is there any downside to humans feeding bees? If not, why isn't it more common?

pjerem 6y ago
Because it’s time consuming so you have to be paid for this. So you have to sell honey that will suffer the competition of cheap industrial honey. However, you can have a hive in your land just for the sake of feeding bees (and eat your own honey). I don’t know how it works in your country, in France, you can legally do it as long as your terrain is large enough to place the hive 20m away any habitation (100m away if it’s a public building). You are also required to follow a 3 day training. It’s not that much but it requires some self-investment. So I would say that it’s not common but it is totally possible.
- kawsper 6y ago
  Isn't having bees part of the problem? Your honey-bees will compete with local pollinators.

rbrbr 6y ago

“Enter your email address to continue reading”

IgorPartola 6y ago

From my reading Mason bees are easier to maintain and are better pollinators than honey bees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_bee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_bee

_ph_ 6y ago

Where I live (Bavaria), in the last two years public lawns didn't get mowed any more and now grow a beautiful variety of wild flowers and are a great place for bees and other insects. Also, some part of the farmed ground around the village has been dedicated to growing flowers. Sometimes it is very easy to at least compensate a bit the damage done.