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Honeybees are not native to North America. It is great and currently necessary we use them the way we do. It makes one wonder in the age of AI and evolving far

Honeybees are not native to North America. It is great and currently necessary we use them the way we do. It makes one wonder in the age of AI and evolving farm practices, can we start finding ways to cultivate already-climate-adapted native bees to do the work? Can we leverage adaptations for specific crops? I get it that honeybees work great at pollinating monoculture fields, etc., but that does not change the fact we are perpetuating a square peg in round hole problem and pushing it very very far right now, at greater and greater cost, all while climate change is fighting us.

halflife 3mo ago
If they are not native, how did plant propagate seeds? Flies? Wasps? Butterflies?
- EdwardDiego 3mo ago
  Native bees. Apis mellifera are introduced bees across most of the world. But yes, there are other pollinators like butterflies, moths, flies, birds, etc.
  - halflife 3mo ago
    Makes sense, thanks!
- Jedd 3mo ago
  Amusingly, propagate has a horticultural, and non-horticultural meaning, and it's not obvious which one you're using there, because the bee's role is long over by the time the seed is ready to go out into the world. Pollen can be carried (as noted by sibling and you) by lots of different insects, and there's myriad solitary and other (by conventional standards) weird bee species around, plus lots of plants are happy to pollinate themselves (tomato is a good example) or rely on wind (corn/maize is the famous example there). When the common honeybee landed in the continental USA, about four centuries ago, the same people also brought in lots of (other) european plant species that had co-existed with Apis mellifera for millennia.
  - halflife 3mo ago
    Thanks for the detailed comment! I always heard that bees pollinate the vast majority of plants, so in the parent comment, I assumed incorrectly that the meaning was for bees in general being non native.
    - Jedd 3mo ago
      Yeah, there's a claim I've seen about 'every third mouthful of food' that humans eat needs honeybees, and that may well be true. I'm in Australia, and we only got Varroa in 2022, and it was suppressed for about a year before a regrettable 'oh well' attitude overwhelmed us. The last couple of years has seen a breathtaking impact. Anecdata - one of my five hives is still struggling on. Australia's experience since 2022 had (I thought) laid to rest a lot of the 'It's not varroa that's the problem' claims from armchair analysts. But yes, per my earlier point, lots of our tree crops require honeybees to be shipped in - just because of broadacre / monoculture style farming. Well, along with honey production being its own industry - so they need to follow the nectar, and change up the flavours a bit, but also some trees just don't produce useful amounts of nectar but absolutely require a lot of pollinators for a few weeks only (almonds / peaches I think fit this category).
- tim-tday 3mo ago
  There are hundreds of native bees. It’s the European honey bee that is not native. The native bees tend to be solitary or non honey producing small colony bees that hibernate instead of stocking honey for the winter. We tend to only care about honey producing bees for obvious reasons.
gadders 3mo ago
>>Honeybees are not native to North America. Neither are horses. I guess the issue is you don't get honey with the native bees.
- colechristensen 3mo ago
  A quite similar horse species went extinct in North America ~10,000 years ago likely due to humans. The horse ancestor species come from the Americas and migrated to Eurasia over the bearing land bridge. Horses were only missing from North America for 10,000 of the last 50 million years.
  - firen777 3mo ago
    I was about to say the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horse#Equus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horse#Equus Of all the examples to pick from, seeing GP picked horse made me wonder if GP was doing it for gits and shiggles.
    - MostlyStable 3mo ago
      I've always had a soft spot for the plan of repopulating the Great Plains with modern versions of all the extinct megafauna. We used to have camels and cheetahs and lions and more. We could import half of the African large mammals and they would have had near species analogs in the relatively recent past, geologically speaking.
- nerbert 3mo ago
  Neither with horses
  - gadders 3mo ago
    Good point. We need to genetically modify horses that can pollinate plants and create honey.
    - 3mo ago
looping__lui 3mo ago
I suppose honey bees are not native in North America pretty much the same way as the human species? I don’t quite understand why there seems to be a pretty persistent thread around “honey bees are invasive and harm the ecosystem by stealing all the food from the native bees and doing all their pollination; that’s why they decline” - when at the same time the use of pesticides is so rampant that insects are literally gone entirely. Honey bees are not great and reliable pollinators btw. So the solution is: more genetically modified crops? More pesticides? Unless “we need to stop our use of pesticides and we should also acknowledge that honey bees are an invasive species and consider making changes to the way we do monocultures” are in the same sentence this entire “honey bees are invasive” argument just feels super weird. Pesticides kill native pollinators. It’s not the honey bees. Edit: and just to be clear - honey bees do not survive in the wild by themselves anymore due to varroa mites. They essentially depend on humans to protect them. That’s what the entire purpose of this article is about. So, if humans stopped keeping honey bees - they’d have a pretty hard time surviving in the wild on their own.
- mastermage 3mo ago
  An idea that sprang to mind and please point me out at which points its unrealistic and why because I am talking completely out of my ass here. If we want to reduce mono culture but we still need to somehow figure out how to provide humanity. Could large scale vertical farms, in Green Houses reduce the footprint of monocultures? By being more productive year round? Or is that just technolgist delusions of mine?
  - j4k0bfr 3mo ago
    The thing that always baffles me with vertical farming is sunlight. Assuming most crops are pretty good at turning full spectrum sunlight into useful stuff, why shrink your solar energy per crop? And assuming you get around this via grow lights, surely the energy and material cost goes up too much for high-volume crops to make economical sense.
    - b112 3mo ago
NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo ago
You could pick up a catalog from any of these places and find half a dozen different species of bees to cultivate for pollination. Blue mason bees come to mind. Anything that's even slightly domesticatable is being pursued. Some of these bees are loners too, perfect for the hipster crowd.
bregma 3mo ago
The catch is that native North American pollinators are adapted to native North American flowers and have a great deal of difficulty pollinating introduced species that are native to Eurasia. Given the vast majority of commercial crops are not native plant species, the only way to mass pollinate them is to use non-native pollinators. Also, few native North American bee species are eusocial. That's another quality one would need to be able to use them the same way as commercial honeybees are used today. The there is the issue of honey production.
- dqv 3mo ago
  That's not true. We have a lot of generalist bees (and other pollinators too! bees aren't the only ones that pollinate!) that can pollinate the Eurasian crops. This is also true for any other crop on any other continent. And I am dubious as to your claim about major crops. Soybeans, for example, are self-pollinating, so it would seem any generalist bee can pollinate soybean crops for better yields. This is an issue of biodiversity. If we rely on a mono-species for pollination and that mono-species goes extinct or its population plummets, then our crop yields are down 20% until we can build up other bee populations. This is about giving back to Nature so that She may continue to cradle us. And She does tend to punish us for "optimizing" toward one specific species. We do enough already taking crops from one part of the world and putting them elsewhere. In exchange for that, we really ought to be trying to support the native wildlife as much as possible. The Europeans can have their honey, and I will have my maple syrup. On occasion, of course, so as not to upset Nature.
grayhatter 3mo ago
Did you just ask if we could use AI to create new/better honey bees?
- xgulfie 3mo ago
  Grok, pollinate the flowers
eleveriven 3mo ago
The hard part is probably that "native bees" are not a drop-in replacement for managed hives you can put on a truck and move between farms
EA-3167 3mo ago
This is also a submarine story and has been for well over a decade. https://www.bpia.org/2014/11/spider-venom-snowdrops-shield-bees-from-pesticide/ https://www.bpia.org/2014/11/spider-venom-snowdrops-shield-b... And yes it's a "square peg round hole" problem, but the issue is that the solutions don't exist yet without driving up the price of everything we eat.

halflife 3mo ago

If they are not native, how did plant propagate seeds? Flies? Wasps? Butterflies?

EdwardDiego 3mo ago
Native bees. Apis mellifera are introduced bees across most of the world. But yes, there are other pollinators like butterflies, moths, flies, birds, etc.
- halflife 3mo ago
  Makes sense, thanks!
Jedd 3mo ago
Amusingly, propagate has a horticultural, and non-horticultural meaning, and it's not obvious which one you're using there, because the bee's role is long over by the time the seed is ready to go out into the world. Pollen can be carried (as noted by sibling and you) by lots of different insects, and there's myriad solitary and other (by conventional standards) weird bee species around, plus lots of plants are happy to pollinate themselves (tomato is a good example) or rely on wind (corn/maize is the famous example there). When the common honeybee landed in the continental USA, about four centuries ago, the same people also brought in lots of (other) european plant species that had co-existed with Apis mellifera for millennia.
- halflife 3mo ago
  Thanks for the detailed comment! I always heard that bees pollinate the vast majority of plants, so in the parent comment, I assumed incorrectly that the meaning was for bees in general being non native.
  - Jedd 3mo ago
    Yeah, there's a claim I've seen about 'every third mouthful of food' that humans eat needs honeybees, and that may well be true. I'm in Australia, and we only got Varroa in 2022, and it was suppressed for about a year before a regrettable 'oh well' attitude overwhelmed us. The last couple of years has seen a breathtaking impact. Anecdata - one of my five hives is still struggling on. Australia's experience since 2022 had (I thought) laid to rest a lot of the 'It's not varroa that's the problem' claims from armchair analysts. But yes, per my earlier point, lots of our tree crops require honeybees to be shipped in - just because of broadacre / monoculture style farming. Well, along with honey production being its own industry - so they need to follow the nectar, and change up the flavours a bit, but also some trees just don't produce useful amounts of nectar but absolutely require a lot of pollinators for a few weeks only (almonds / peaches I think fit this category).
tim-tday 3mo ago
There are hundreds of native bees. It’s the European honey bee that is not native. The native bees tend to be solitary or non honey producing small colony bees that hibernate instead of stocking honey for the winter. We tend to only care about honey producing bees for obvious reasons.

gadders 3mo ago

>>Honeybees are not native to North America. Neither are horses. I guess the issue is you don't get honey with the native bees.

colechristensen 3mo ago
A quite similar horse species went extinct in North America ~10,000 years ago likely due to humans. The horse ancestor species come from the Americas and migrated to Eurasia over the bearing land bridge. Horses were only missing from North America for 10,000 of the last 50 million years.
- firen777 3mo ago
  I was about to say the same: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horse#Equus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_horse#Equus Of all the examples to pick from, seeing GP picked horse made me wonder if GP was doing it for gits and shiggles.
  - MostlyStable 3mo ago
    I've always had a soft spot for the plan of repopulating the Great Plains with modern versions of all the extinct megafauna. We used to have camels and cheetahs and lions and more. We could import half of the African large mammals and they would have had near species analogs in the relatively recent past, geologically speaking.
nerbert 3mo ago
Neither with horses
- gadders 3mo ago
  Good point. We need to genetically modify horses that can pollinate plants and create honey.
  - 3mo ago

looping__lui 3mo ago

I suppose honey bees are not native in North America pretty much the same way as the human species? I don’t quite understand why there seems to be a pretty persistent thread around “honey bees are invasive and harm the ecosystem by stealing all the food from the native bees and doing all their pollination; that’s why they decline” - when at the same time the use of pesticides is so rampant that insects are literally gone entirely. Honey bees are not great and reliable pollinators btw. So the solution is: more genetically modified crops? More pesticides? Unless “we need to stop our use of pesticides and we should also acknowledge that honey bees are an invasive species and consider making changes to the way we do monocultures” are in the same sentence this entire “honey bees are invasive” argument just feels super weird. Pesticides kill native pollinators. It’s not the honey bees. Edit: and just to be clear - honey bees do not survive in the wild by themselves anymore due to varroa mites. They essentially depend on humans to protect them. That’s what the entire purpose of this article is about. So, if humans stopped keeping honey bees - they’d have a pretty hard time surviving in the wild on their own.

mastermage 3mo ago
An idea that sprang to mind and please point me out at which points its unrealistic and why because I am talking completely out of my ass here. If we want to reduce mono culture but we still need to somehow figure out how to provide humanity. Could large scale vertical farms, in Green Houses reduce the footprint of monocultures? By being more productive year round? Or is that just technolgist delusions of mine?
- j4k0bfr 3mo ago
  The thing that always baffles me with vertical farming is sunlight. Assuming most crops are pretty good at turning full spectrum sunlight into useful stuff, why shrink your solar energy per crop? And assuming you get around this via grow lights, surely the energy and material cost goes up too much for high-volume crops to make economical sense.
  - b112 3mo ago

NoMoreNicksLeft 3mo ago

You could pick up a catalog from any of these places and find half a dozen different species of bees to cultivate for pollination. Blue mason bees come to mind. Anything that's even slightly domesticatable is being pursued. Some of these bees are loners too, perfect for the hipster crowd.

bregma 3mo ago

The catch is that native North American pollinators are adapted to native North American flowers and have a great deal of difficulty pollinating introduced species that are native to Eurasia. Given the vast majority of commercial crops are not native plant species, the only way to mass pollinate them is to use non-native pollinators. Also, few native North American bee species are eusocial. That's another quality one would need to be able to use them the same way as commercial honeybees are used today. The there is the issue of honey production.

dqv 3mo ago
That's not true. We have a lot of generalist bees (and other pollinators too! bees aren't the only ones that pollinate!) that can pollinate the Eurasian crops. This is also true for any other crop on any other continent. And I am dubious as to your claim about major crops. Soybeans, for example, are self-pollinating, so it would seem any generalist bee can pollinate soybean crops for better yields. This is an issue of biodiversity. If we rely on a mono-species for pollination and that mono-species goes extinct or its population plummets, then our crop yields are down 20% until we can build up other bee populations. This is about giving back to Nature so that She may continue to cradle us. And She does tend to punish us for "optimizing" toward one specific species. We do enough already taking crops from one part of the world and putting them elsewhere. In exchange for that, we really ought to be trying to support the native wildlife as much as possible. The Europeans can have their honey, and I will have my maple syrup. On occasion, of course, so as not to upset Nature.

grayhatter 3mo ago

Did you just ask if we could use AI to create new/better honey bees?

xgulfie 3mo ago
Grok, pollinate the flowers

eleveriven 3mo ago

The hard part is probably that "native bees" are not a drop-in replacement for managed hives you can put on a truck and move between farms

EA-3167 3mo ago

This is also a submarine story and has been for well over a decade. https://www.bpia.org/2014/11/spider-venom-snowdrops-shield-bees-from-pesticide/ https://www.bpia.org/2014/11/spider-venom-snowdrops-shield-b... And yes it's a "square peg round hole" problem, but the issue is that the solutions don't exist yet without driving up the price of everything we eat.