3 ms·

Stealing is a weird choice of words. Do you steal the oxygen that you breathe, or the water that you drink ? For it to reach your tap, it has been stolen by som

• blueflow 3y ago
  Wait until they realize bees do all that work without a profit incentive!
  • mmmmmmtoes 3y ago
    They do?
• distances 3y ago
  The parent has a point, though I never thought about it that way. In a way a similar case would be if you had a squad of squirrels that gather seeds and nuts from your neighbour's gardens, and you would then take and sell the bounty that they bring back.
  • mike_richards 3y ago
    If the bees are in a man made hive they need you to remove honey so that they have room to lay. If you don't they will leave and not all of that honey is going with them.
    • cryptonector 3y ago
      Eh, it's not quite that simple. Honeybees produce more honey than they need for several reasons, mainly that a) they are natural hoarders, b) we've bred them to hoard even more. It's true that colonies can become pollen-bound and/or nectar-/honey-bound, and thus have too little space for brood. When this happens it's very likely that the colony will swarm off, leaving behind as few as 20% or so of the bees behind, as well as and swarm cells from which one victorious queen will emerge, and then the rump colony will have plenty of honey while it's weak and recovering its numbers. During that time they'll consume whatever it was they had too much of and thus make room for brood.
      • mike_richards 3y ago
        Yes, and you will have happy neighbors... I do understand that the natural reproduction cycle isn't quite that simple. However for "normal" operation some removal is beneficial and not "stealing", so long as they have adequate supplies.
        • cryptonector 3y ago
          Not only that, but what beekeepers do is give the colony more room as it fills the hive with honey. The bees don't realize they have enough and just gather more and more, thus ending up with a large surplus that the beekeeper is happy to harvest.
    • distances 3y ago
      The neighbour example is about wild critters getting the harvest from your own yard vs. your neighbour running a farming operation and keeping the proceeds.
• Modified3019 3y ago
  The nectar and pollen that flowers produce is in fact a limited resource, both in quantity and in time available. Honeybees have the capability of depleting such resources because they are far more active than they actually need to be, which is one of the reasons we use them for crops with very high densities of flowers, like blueberries. They are efficient and thorough enough to get the job done. There are times of the year (in particular, late summer/fall) where good flowers are especially hard to come by, and so solitary bees can have trouble trying to compete against a hive in the area when they are trying to gather the resources they need to reproduce. Meanwhile a hive also has honey stored so dips in availability during the year matter much less.
• funcantor 3y ago
  Sir, please stop stealing my internet
  • Tagbert 3y ago
    "stealing the nectar" is more like saying that you are stealing the webpages of websites.