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Bees aren’t the only arthropods having this problem, but for most of the other non-pollinators people seem to think "good less bugs to bother me. " I guess we should just give up on the survival of the food chain.
The news for insects is not entirely bad, emerald ash borers are finding the ability to survive in areas that were formerly too cold for them. This allows them to kill more trees turning them into kindling for lightning strikes and other fire starting events.
Who could have known that fucking with our habitat might have negative consequences for us?
The news for insects is not entirely bad, emerald ash borers are finding the ability to survive in areas that were formerly too cold for them. This allows them to kill more trees turning them into kindling for lightning strikes and other fire starting events.
Had me in the first half, not gonna lie.
Thanks for researching this! Still not good news for bees 🐝 😪
This is bad news for every animal on land
Probably the same reason we had 40+ tornadoes, huge hailstorms, floods, and drought-enabled wildfires in six adjacent states within 48 hours. Anthropogenic climate change is real, whether you believe in it or not.
The upside is now farmers won’t have to worry about what to do with the crop surplus from trade wars, dismantled USAID, and defunded school lunch program.
Please stop saying sacreligious comments like this. It’s offensive to religious people.
Dont forget that time the hurricane hit Tennessee and it fucking flooded the mountains
Everything is totally normal
Well, one would expect mountainous areas to flood because elevation focuses water flow. I’m in Florida, flattest state in the union. We never flood except in hurricanes, and those floods don’t last like they do in other places, in and out.
Still… I expect hurricanes in Florida, not in Tennessee.
Hurricanes are known to travel in land and up North though. The fact a hurricane hit Tennessee isn’t odd. It was the strength and the length it lingered over the state that made it devastating.
Anthropogenic climate change is real, whether you believe in it or not.
You know who believes in climate change? Fossil fuel companies, insurance companies, the military industrial complex, and every single politician talking about buying or taking Greenland by force. All the very same people who have spent the past half century publicly denying the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Not only do they believe in it, but they are designing their profit models around it at our expense.
Have you tried persecuting all the scientists yet??
They just got fired, together with anyone who might begin to fix this.
And the US government banned words related to climate change from any future studies. If your grant proposal includes those keywords, it’ll get denied automatically without a human even looking at it.
Refer to Ambience Adjustments in your research proposal?
Nowhere in the article does it say we lost 80% of the bee population. You are spreading misinformation
You’re correct. The quote is "If we lose 80% of our bees every year, the industry cannot survive, which means we cannot pollinate at the scale that we need to produce food in the United States."
It does, in a quote.
Not on the current scenario.
I definitely don’t want to downplay a crisis, but I feel like I’ve been seeing headlines saying “all the bees are dying and we don’t know why” every year for nearly 20 years now.
I’m no bee expert. Just seems to me, based on the headlines, bees would’ve been extinct 10 years ago.
Some cursory searching led me to Colony Collapse Disorder which seems to have no agreed-upon cause. It appears devastating losses to honey bee colonies started being reported around 1900. But it also mentions:
In 2024, the United States Census of Agriculture reported an all-time high in commercial honey bee hives (mostly in Texas), making them the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country.[38]
Link to the source cited there: https://archive.is/nfeb2
Apparently last year saw the largest honey bee populations in US history. Though they write that huge boom in honey bee population is a threat to other native pollinators, so I guess that presents its own unique problems.
Usually, when people talk about bees dying, they mean wild bees. Unlike honey bees they aren’t cultivated by us. They also tend to be better pollinators than honey bees, adapted to local plants that honey bees can’t handle well.
The issue is OP is spreading misinformation. You‘re right, we haven‘t lost 80% of the bee population, because this was a hypothetical statement in the article saying it would have consequences if it happened.
Honey bees aren’t even native to the US
Pesticides, same as always.
Want to help? Plant pollinator gardens. Easy peasy. Even some pots of local wildflowers on your patio. It all helps.
It does, but the problem everyone’s talking about isn’t about wild bees, it’s about farming bees. Monospeecies of non-native bees pollinating monoculture of probably corn. They are dying, but only because they’re basically kept in bees analogue of factory farming conditions.
Wild pollinators are fine (well, as fine as any wild species can be in our world, so not really, but at least not worse than others)
It’s because of shareholder profit
Honey bees are dying but you can help native bees in your area. Find out what they like and plant that shit. Also just letting weeds grow helps a lot of species.
I get leafcutter bees at my place as well as a few other solitary species
Weeds? I thought they were pests
Weeds aren’t really a thing. A weed is just a plant we don’t like.
weeds are to gardens like my house is to HOAs.
G
As long as you mow them it’s all good. Just having a yard with anything than just a monoculture grass is better.
Making bee hotels for solitary bees is child’s play. Take a chunk of wood, drill holes, hang in a tree.
Technical aspects:
- Don’t use pressure treated lumber, anything else is fine.
- Look up “solitary bee hotel” for your area to see what size holes to make for the locals. In any case, it’s going to be a variety of different sizes to cover all your bases. Doesn’t have to bee (heh) perfect.
- Make the holes, especially the edges, nice and smooth. They’re not dumb enough to nest their if the hole is raggedy and might jack up their wings.
That’s mostly it. You can research easily enough in an hour or less There’s a woman on YouTube that sells bee hotels and has solid advice for making your own. Wish I remembered her name. Anyone?
Damned satisfying when you find the holes plugged with wax! You have new tenants! Stupid easy and basically free.
CAVEAT: These things are single use. Chunk 'em out every season, or better, burn them. Keeps the mites out. Make another for free.
I can’t do that! What about my nice green grass lawn? /s
My city will put a letter in my mailbox telling me to get rid of weeds and fine me $150 if I don’t. Rip
Ouch. I have been trying to plant native plants in our garden. Luckily I don’t have anything like that in my city.
How do they enforce that? HOA?
No, the city rolls around and if there are things sticking up out of the ground high enough outside of a flower bed they take pictures and send you a letter
Cities have a lot of soft power in that regard. Mine, just as an example, bans parking on grass. Even if you’re not in a fancy neighborhood, and have been parking on your lawn underneath the spreading oak tree for the last 50 years, they can ticket you for it (and tow) if they feel like being ornery.
I think the usual wording for grass/plants goes along the lines of property values and nuisances to bring it within legal frameworks for what they can regulate.
The actual city sends a fine. If you don’t clean it, they send a crew. If you don’t pay for the crew, they lien the property.
Source: got letter from the city a week ago.
In fairness, I’ve been dealing with a lot and there were some areas that looked like we were abandoned. I’ve been meaning to clean out the unwanted stuff so the flowers can grow. My lawn is mostly moss and clover and that’s not what they cared about.
Bees have been under assault for a while.
It’s hive mites. The Varroa mite is going to wipe out all bees from the planet. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.
Source: talked to a beekeeper.
there’s a fungus that protects against the mites and it’s being researched. it’s genius, the bee picks up the fungus in a contraption where it has to crawl through to get to nectar and then brings it back to the hive. i read it in Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life.
Is now a bad time to get into mead making?
I wonder if I can return my yeast…
It’s a bad time to enjoy being alive
Most domesticated bee species aren’t native to the US. It’s quite possible they are just getting bee-ported.
Specifically, honey bees (Apis mellifera). Native bees that aren’t colony dwellers may not be impacted the same by the mites.
Who cares then, aren’t they only useful for monocropping large farms? Most US bee enthusiasts would instantly cull every honey bee if they could.
“Only”.
80% of crops grown in the US are pollinated by honey bees.. If you think grocery prices are bad now…
Why would the bee enthusiasts cull honey bees?
Because the aren’t native, would be my guess
That’s really interesting and I’d love to read more
Honeybees compete for resources with native bees and are much more efficient foragers, and it’s hard to state the scope of impact they have had on native bee populations, but most believe it to be significant.
They were introduced to North America in the 1600s and then again, over repeated colonizations as colonizers were frustrated that native bees didn’t produce honey. Native Americans called them “white man’s flies”.
Africanized honey bees were introduced from South America around the 1990s. Which are even more aggressive in their foraging and nature then their European cousins, although produce more honey.
Native bees are relatively docile and some variants lack the ability to sting at all.
Here is an article, or op ed about the problem: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-honey-bees/
Do you like food? We use bees to grow that
You don’t need honey bees to grow food.
Personally, I care because I love honey, farm grown food, and they are a poster child for all bees. Without them, there is certainly a lot less care for native bees. While yes they are primarily important for large monocropped farms, that’s your food. Like, so much of your food. Natuu is very bee populations aren’t sufficient or interested in pollinating our food crops, so yes we should really care.
We’re pretty sure it’s the Monsanto pesticide and anyone who suggests it is hit with a litigation threat. Curiously, as we’re speed-breeding domesticated bees the wild bees are dying out faster, so as the bee population dwindles it also becomes more domesticated and less wild. I know that’s a bad thing, but I am fuzzy on the why details.
I’m a brown thumb, and plants wilt as my shadow falls on them, but if you’re a green-thumb, plant pollinators, which will help the bees.
Also plant milkweed for the monarchs.
Some beekeepers actually mentioned that they’ve been scraping the beeswax clean off their hives more frequently because its known that the beeswax collects pesticides and herbicides over time which affects the colony due to exposure.
The problem is its not just monsanto acid, there’s a ton of other issues also correlated like weather/climate, seasonal flowering, untreated parasites, bacteria, etc.
We’ve literally nuked the environment so hard that even if we fix one problem, the population will not make a full bounce back (although I would think monsanto is the biggest threat)
Biggest scam of this century was corporate produce monoliths convincing people Organic was about health and not the fact that it doesn’t use a scorched earth policy and scam one off hybrid plant seeds to grow food which has been setting us up for a widespread fammine for decades.
Some random superweed is gonna crossbreed with some rapid out of control growth plant and wipe out half of the food chain.
Also, the domesticated bees are generally honeybees. And unfortunately, honeybee and wild bees don’t fulfill the same rile, so even if we replaced wild bees with honeybees 1:1, we still wouldn’t be able to polinate everything.
It’s Bayer’s now. Monsanto sold it to Bayer when they started getting heat for neonicotinoids killing all the bees.
I’ll hop in here and add that your locality probably does pesticide fogging/spraying. For what it is worth, you can ask them not you spray your property. Make some local wildflower patches in your yard. Less stuff you have to mow, more food and habitat for native birds and insects. It’s a win-win.
Plant native. Plants that are native to your ecosystem. Those are the true pollinator powerhouse plants that bees need to survive
I forget the term for non native, non invasive plants (naturalized?) but those are good too. Native is best, of course. I see a ton of carpenter bees (native bees to my area) on my red clover (non native, non invasive).
Unfortunately, naturalized plants are not good. It’s a scale, with invasive plants being extremely bad. Naturalized plants aren’t as bad. But still bad
In the end, our native insects rely on native plants (with extremely few exceptions to not be distracted by). A native plant can support hundreds or even thousands of species.
A non native / naturalized plants cannot support even a fraction of that. They can also support… Non native insects. Which in turn fuck up the ecosystem, either by displacement or direct damage.
I’m not gonna tell you to rip out naturalized plants like clover. I’m not gonna say you should destroy your garden. You should just know that native plants are superior in literally every possible way, and your NEXT plant choices should be as native as you can get :)
If you can suggest native ground cover that is low maintenance and easy to start I’d consider it. I’m not going to put plugs in my yard when I can just over seed with clover. Clover is strictly better than turf grass.
It is better than turf, but I’m not talking about grass lawns, I’m talking about plants like for a garden. It’s better to have more garden plant masses, less grass lawn.
Most people don’t need as much lawn as they have and reducing down to more what you actually use is great, but it’s totally situational.
If you wanted a NorthEast suggestion for general ground cover I’d say wild strawberry. But if it’s like … Lawn then just stick with what you’re doing.
