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Does America suddenly have a record number of bees?
- throwup238 3y agoI think the bigger question is: why has squab fallen so much in popularity in 15 years?
- thefourthchime 3y agohttps://archive.is/lHVwP https://archive.is/lHVwP
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoThe real reason is buried pretty far down in the article: > In 2012, the Herbert Hypothetical gave rise to a new law: Your plot of five to 20 acres now qualifies for agriculture tax breaks if you keep bees on it for five years. > Over the next few years, all 254 Texas counties adopted bee rules requiring, for example, six hives on five acres plus another hive for every 2.5 acres beyond that to qualify for the tax break. Herbert keeps a spreadsheet of the regulations and drives across the state to educate bee-curious landowners. Economics, who knew?
- ThrowawayR2 3y agoThe interesting bit is more that there's still an ongoing severe problem with bee colonies dying that hasn't been solved despite the apparent increase in overall numbers: "Sadly, however, this does not mean we’ve defeated colony collapse. One major citizen-science project found that beekeepers lost almost half of their colonies in the year ending in April 2023, the second-highest loss rate on record. For now, we’re making up for it with aggressive management. The Texans told us that they were splitting their hives more often, replacing queens as often as every year and churning out bee colonies faster than the mites, fungi and diseases can take them down."
- ortusdux 3y agoSounds like the usual issues you see with an aggressive focus on monoculture.
- zamalek 3y agoI wonder if this is helping weed out the "africanized genes" (bees that will far more easily sting), or have southern beekeepers given up in that regard?
- giantg2 3y agoThe way it would be weeded out is through selective queening. That's how the European honey bee has become so docile - pinching the agressive queens. So it could influence the genetics of the feral bee population, but I would guess it will be minimal.
- poulsbohemian 3y agoI’m not in the region where they have Africanized bees, but following the research and stories from active keepers, it seem like it’s a combo of both keepers learning how to manage them plus shifts in genetics causing them to mellow some. From what I hear, there are small scale and hobby keepers in the southwest that are actively keeping and working them
- nrjames 3y agoVarroa mites are a vector for diseases and fungus and most likely the distal cause of most of the dying colonies. If they are not aggressively managed, they eventually lead to the death or absconding of almost every colony.
- giantg2 3y agoA lot of it's genetics over management in my experience. I've seen treatment-free colonies go multiple years with low mite numbers and treatment free yards overwinter 75-100% of colonies. I've also seen heavily managed hives take losses anyways, or abscond after treatment. Including some that take 75-100% losses. Many times the same apiary can go from one extreme to the other in a year or two. The problem with the genetics is that it's extremely hard to maintain continuity of a colony beyond a few years because eventually they need to requeen. Those future queens are made from a variety of contributions of other gene lines due to the way the mating happens.
- jackfoxy 3y agoThat which you incentivize you get more of. That which you tax you get less of. Or, as Charlie Munger famously remarked, Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
- gottorf 3y agoYes! People, irrational and misinformed as they may be, respond to incentives.
- djangogitit 3y ago[dead]
- tomjakubowski 3y agoThis is why it's important to have a robust base tax rate. Plenty of headroom for incentives when they're needed
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoYou could also have no "true taxes" and just print money and have everyone else pay for it in inflation (tax) to give handouts to incentivize what you want. Right now we do both!
- pfdietz 3y agoAlso, even further down, the large increase in almond cultivation in California.
- ortusdux 3y agoFlorida has similar tax breaks for cattle grazing, and Washington has them for managed forests.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoManaged forests are greenwashing. The term itself is a ridiculous illusion. It's like this bee article - it gives a process and metric by which things are improving while ignoring more general collapse that those same economic processes are generating
- ortusdux 3y agoHow so?
- midnitewarrior 3y agoidk what the previous commenter means by it, but to me, a forest is more than a collection of trees that are planted in a grid, ready for clearcutting in a decade or so. A forest is an entire ecosystem that takes decades to build without the disruption of human intervention. Some of these "managed forests" are little more than tree farms, lacking the wildlife and diversity that comes with natural forests. Monoculture tree farming does not create a diverse ecosystem and the benefits that come from that.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoYes though it's forgiving to say that it does not create benefits instead of that it destroys those needs without making up for them
- bombcar 3y agoIt depends on what you're trying to do - some of those tax breaks are because the land is taxed "as if it grew corn" normally, but if people choose to grow trees you want to tax it at a lower rate, because trees are a lower profit crop. If you're trying to preserve actual forest, you want to do something more like the land trusts that have come into existence (which already exclude the land from taxes usually anyway).
- wellYeahbruh 3y ago[dead]
- djangogitit 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lizhang 3y agoanother great day of saving the beeeeeeez
- jszymborski 3y agoI might have missed it, but this article seems to be making the common mistake of conflating native bee species with cultivated bees. I'd be interested in knowing how native bee species are doing, especially since my understanding is that cultivated bees often compete with native bee species.
- Dig1t 3y ago>the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn’t count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over.
- jzimbel 3y agoFeral honey bees (European honey bees living in a non-beekeeper-managed colony) are different from North American native bees: https://bugguide.net/node/view/475348 https://bugguide.net/node/view/475348
- nathanrf 3y agoFeral != Native. There are no honeybee species native to North America; all honeybees, including the feral ones, are descended from colonies imported from Europe (e.g. the "Western honeybee" apis mellifera). There are a lot of non-honeybee bee species native to North America though, and they now face competition from feral domesticated honeybees. It's unclear exactly how much impact they have- some research does treat honeybees as a harmful invasive species (similar to many other human-introduced species). Native bee species have a harder time getting good PR because they don't directly work for us, even though they are important pollinators for some native plants.
- giantg2 3y agoI think there at least used to be honey producing bee species in the southern US. I believe some are extinct now and others are only present in South America now.
- 3y ago
- WillAdams 3y agoWhen I was a kid, it was pretty normal to get stung by a bee when out playing/picking dandelions/making clover chains, and just a walk around one's neighborhood would have more bees covering various flowers than one could easily count. A local school system has an annual project where school children gather insects --- bees dropped precipitously in number two decades ago, and children have since been cautioned not to capture any sort of stinging/biting insect (mostly out of liability concerns), but it seems to only apply to wasps and yellowjackets. There's an article on this sort of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
- com2kid 3y ago> When I was a kid, it was pretty normal to get stung by a bee when out playing/picking dandelions/making clover chains, and just a walk around one's neighborhood would have more bees covering various flowers than one could easily count. I bought an online pollinator friendly garden kit. $150 later (and a few dead plants that didn't make it through shipping) I now have an absurd number of bumble bees around. Bumble bees are incredibly gentle, you can walk through entire fields of them and they will just ignore you. I was actually pretty worried about planting a pollinator garden while having a toddler around, but it has gone surprisingly well (meaning he hasn't gotten stung).
- jszymborski 3y agoSimilarly, our garden, which is in an urban area, is always full of bumble bees. They especially love the oregano.
- WillAdams 3y agoWhen we moved to our current home two decades ago, there were a lot of honey bees (apparently visitors from the local apple orchard) and only a few bumble bees --- since then the apple orchard has been replaced by McMansions and it's quite rare to see a honey bee, but there are still a few bumble bees.
- whimsicalism 3y agoI would be curious to see if these bee hives in Texas are mostly actually extant or whether people are just claiming bee hives for the tax benefit.
- adolph 3y agoIn 1987 the nation lost 7 million children for similar reasons. In 1986, when taxpayers had only to provide the names for children they were claiming as exemptions, 77 million dependents were listed. But then the law changed, and in returns filed for 1987 only 70 million exemptions were identified. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-11-me-33-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-11-me-33-sto...
- flutas 3y agoMy first thought on that: How many of those missing 7m were split custody cases where both were claiming them. Then with the new law it's "Oh hey, [parent allowed to claim tax for the child] can I have their social for taxes? Whatdya mean you won't give it to me?"
- bombcar 3y agoSome podcast did an "update" on Freakonomics and according to them the majority of the difference could be explained by double custody/double claims and people not getting SSNs in time.
- whimsicalism 3y ago10% of all children had double custody claims? That seems surprisingly high to me
- bombcar 3y agoThere's an and in there. SSNs weren't automatically issued at birth until relatively recently.
- palata 3y agoI can't access the article (paywall), but I hope it makes the difference between wild bees and cultivated bees.
- throwawayoaky 3y agobuttloads of honeybees everywhere around here. Hate em. Eating bumble and carpenter foods, boo. Leave my white sage alone. https://bugguide.net/node/view/7698 https://bugguide.net/node/view/7698
- malfist 3y agoYou like carpenter bees? They're a pain in the ass
- fatnoah 3y agoI have a very large garden area near my patio with plants that flower from Spring through Fall. I bump into the full assortment of bees going for the flowers and wasps for my food, but the main harassers in my yard are male carpenter bees that dive bomb me and the occasional female coming out of nowhere to sting me.
- giantg2 3y agoDepends on the location. Many times they do not compete for food as the tongues of the bumble and carpenter bees are able to reach nectar sources the honeybees cannot. Also many of the native bees will work the flowers earlier in the day, giving them a headstart on the honeybees.
- JamesSwift 3y agoI'm a fan of the honeybees, except they keep invading my house. Currently addressing a nest in our attic... Thats the 5th incident in 3 years in this house, 3 of which were hives being built in the home...
- supposemaybe 3y ago[flagged]
- Solvency 3y agoour backyard in California is full of native plants, lavender, fennel, and tons of other pollinator friendly plants. There are quite literally hundreds of bees basically working in our backyard every single day, 365 days a year. And it takes almost no effort other than some basic gardening. It's outrageously simple to support bees. It's comically absurd how difficult the world wants to make it seem.
- 97s 3y agoExactly this. Thank you. I have a bee friendly yard in suburban neighborhood with HOA. I keep the front streetside nice and neat for the HOA, but the side yard and back yard is full of clover, a plot of wildflowers, blueberries, blackberries, apples, and a lot of flowers for birds and butterflies. The total amount of effort and cost for all this? Maybe a few hundred dollars over a few years and very minimal work. Turns out that the stuff bees like are basically weeds and will establish and come back with basically no effort at all. The hardest part is stopping the stupid bermuda grass from overtaking it. I cannot wait for my wildflower plot to shoot up. This year I turned over about 10m x 10m of bermuda grass and sewed a southeastern wildflower mix. I left the center of it grass and a path into it. I plan to go lay down and meditate in the wildflower patch while the bees zoom over head.
- enraged_camel 3y agoI mean, yes and no. If you live in a humid climate where pests like roaches can breed easily, then you either have to live with them, or use pesticides. In which case, say goodbye to bees (and other beneficial insects).
- Solvency 3y agothis is such a wild and perversely wrong take. living in a humid climate means you have to drench your backyard in pesticides? what?
- enraged_camel 3y agoNot your entire backyard. Just the perimeter of your house. Trust me, otherwise you’ll be drowning in roaches.
- subwrmodblocker 3y agoBecause agribusiness were making up the “bee crisis” to begin with.
- Freebytes 3y agoThis is one of those fairly obvious situations where you can simply go outside and observe a collapse of insect populations. You may be too young to remember not being able to drive without windshield washer fluid due to the large number of insects that would be on your windshield in a single drive from place to place. Consider leaving your basement.
- aksss 3y agoThere's always a crisis you need to be ultra-worried about, even if you can't do anything to fix it yourself. One day it's too few honeybees, the next it's too many. It goes from being exhausting to being silly, the more cycles you've seen.
- daneel_w 3y agoA record number of honey bees, maybe? But how are all the other equally (or more) important species of wild bees doing?
- whall6 3y agoThis better not be an april fools joke
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoWorks where archive.is is blocked: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=3048629111976&w=yisrFjabHBOkziNivdpEzKFXLRWMke_R https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=3048629111976&w=yisrFjabHB...
- arathis 3y agoBEADS!?!?