Writes Andrew Van Dam in "Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees?" (WaPo)(free access link).
March 30, 2024
Bees are back.
"After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields, we were stunned to run the numbers on the new Census of Agriculture (otherwise known as that wonderful time every five years where the government counts all the llamas): America’s honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high...."
Writes Andrew Van Dam in "Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees?" (WaPo)(free access link).
"'It is absolutely not a good thing for native pollinators,' said Eliza Grames, an entomologist at Binghamton University, who noted that domesticated honeybees are a threat to North America’s 4,000 native bees, about 40 percent of which are vulnerable to extinction.... 'You wouldn’t be like, "Hey, birds are doing great. We’ve got a huge biomass of chickens!" It’s kind of the same thing with honeybees,” she said. 'They’re domesticated. They’re essentially livestock.'..."
Writes Andrew Van Dam in "Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees?" (WaPo)(free access link).
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53 comments:
'You wouldn’t be like, "Hey, birds are doing great. We’ve got a huge biomass of chickens!"
I would.
Too few bees; too many bees. Environmental crisis - humans to blame. We need federal bee regulation.
There is no making these people happy.
I started with this last year. I started with 12 hives, lost 3, but collected 2 swarms and scooped them into a couple of the empty hives and so far (knock wood) they seem to be happy in their new home.
Bee keeping is pretty interesting. No honey yet - the first year is all about colony growth - but hopefully this year, with a good pollen flow, I'll be able to harvest some. The wild (Mexican) plums have already bloomed, and now the jaupon is blooming, one of their best sources here locally.
If you want to see what they feed on, a good source is, believe it or not, the Goddard Space Center :
https://honeybeenet.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Can't have good news. Everyone must be afraid. That is the only way for governments to accumulate power.
Some folks outright refuse to be happy about ANYTHING.
You can't win with these mental cases.
After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields...
Another in the long list of disasters that never happened. But that's okay...
'It is absolutely not a good thing for native pollinators,' said Eliza Grames, an entomologist at Binghamton University...
here's something else to worry about.
They sky is always falling with these guys, isn’t it?
Not enough bees, bad.
Too many bees, also bad.
What doesn't change is the sweet honey flowing from Washington, DC to study this.
Yeah, but if the "domesticated honeybees" can handle pollinating requirements, what's the diff?
"We need a Bee Czar!"
How weird.
Was Colony Collapse even real?
Oh brother
Guess who just got back today?
Them wild-eyed bees that had been away
Haven't changed, had buzz to say
But man, still think them hives are crazy
They were askin' if flowers were around
How they was, where they could be found
I told 'em you were on the news downtown
Drivin' climate scientists crazy
"NO! NOT THE BEES!"
Writes Andrew Van Dam in "Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees?"
"That's fucking great, man. Did you write that?"
A possibly incorrect conclusion drawn from the data presented it that the Emu ranchers have moved on to Bee ranching.
We can't do anything right by these people. I'm looking forward to reading about the cicada emergence this spring and how it's the result of (a) Climate Change, (b) J6, (c) meat eaters, and (d) Ronna Romney almost being allowed to speak on (ms)NBC.
To fix 'c' we're going to be asked to eat cicadas. And I'm sure we'll see something about a restaurant offering them for a bit. Or a bite.
"Yeah, but if the "domesticated honeybees" can handle pollinating requirements, what's the diff?"
Haven't you heard? Diversity is our strength. Or so I'm told.
I think that it makes sense to have domesticated bees pollinate domesticated crops.
To bee or not to bee..
Either way the global climate change is an existential event.
Or so I'm told.
Some people will go to any lengths to avoid bee-ing pleased. I hive spoken.
Odd. I lit a candle in my window for Good Friday last night, and outside the glass, the biggest bees I've ever seen were gently thumping on the window, trying to get inside. My neighbor does raise bees. Maybe these are the new ones. There are definitely new wasps around, and their sting is terrible.
'Drivin' climate scientists crazy'
The bees are back
The bees are back
: )
I feel for these unhappy people. Ok. I'm done. Back to enjoying life.
Whatever happened to the "Killer Bees" that were coming from Mexico to wipe us out? IRC, they were vicious Africans who were going to destroy our honeybees and then us. Other than a SNL Skit they've disappered.
Is there really that much competition? Domesticated bees are mostly for agriculture right? Some just honey but the biggest use is places like the large almond groves and such which agriculture likewise isn't native.
Meanwhile most of the country doesn't have large amount of domesticated bees and native ones can thrive.
Is it like saying chickens are competing with native birds for seed? There may be a lot of chickens but they're definitely not competing with native birds.
'Some people will go to any lengths to avoid bee-ing pleased.'
Not Earnest...
Chickens are funny, useful, and tasty. What a h8er.
"Honey bee collapse is a disaster!"
"Honey bee resurgence is a disaster!"
I think activists are a disaster and the fewer of them whining and moaning would improve the morale of this country.
From crisis to crisis. When the global warming curve eventually flattens and tilts negative, which it inevitably will if whatever positive slope it has now is not, as I suspect, a politically-motivated bias artifact, the left will bloviate about the Coming Ice Age as they did in the late 1960s/early 1970s.
Too many domesticated European honeybees! What to do, what to do? How about exterminating more swarms rather than "rescuing" them with perfect, high-productivity commercial hives? Beekeepers love to rescue swarms from their usually cramped and vulnerable hiving opportunities our suburban lifestyles usually provide. A rescued swarm is a more-or-less free highly productive colony with hundreds of mature foraging workers. Place the queen into a vacant hive with eight to ten pre-waxed frames inside and the rest of the swarm will eagerly march in and start drawing out brood cells within a few hours, which the queen will populate with eggs almost as soon as they're ready.
Depending on the season and local conditions a rehomed swarm probably won't yield surplus honey the first year, but the hive is still much further along than a colony founded by a queen without an attendant swarm.
relentless colony collapse coverage
Relentless [insert trendy woke topic here] coverage
I've gotten honey for over 30 years from a local bee keeper who maintains 800 hives with very little help, not easy work, and he's now 80 years old, must be the constant stings. I worried for years about colony collapse having observed a huge hive in a tree on my property that had been there for 20 years or so suddenly disappear. Every time I would see the bee guy I'd quiz him about colony collapse and what he thought about it. It didn't concern him in the least.
Immigrants doing jobs Americans won’t do?
I used to think that every NYTimes reporter had 2 rolodexes: one white and one black-edged, for experts who could be counted on for positive and negative take on any given story. At some point, the environmental beat reporters threw away the first one: every story has a bleak outlook.
Yancey, I think it was but most of the explanations (pesticide, global warming) were hookum derived from people's priors. I recall one article that seemed fairly well balanced which suggested the problem was getting a lot of attention because the collapses happened mostly to commercial pollinator hives. The suggestion was that the hives were being stressed by constant relocation but that wasn't the explanation the beekeepers or their clients wanted to hear.
'It is absolutely not a good thing for native pollinators,'
Are domesticated humans a threat to the world's native humans -- assuming we haven't procreated or educated them out of existence already.
Just wondering.
Nice, Kevin.
remember "Mountaintop removal mining" for coal??
It was: THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD!
They'd cut The Whole Top of the mountain off, and throw in into the nearby stream; Killing ALL LIFE
Trout Unlimited did an article about Harmony creek in WVa back around the turn of the century..
Lamenting that this "Blue Ribbon Trout Fishery" was Permanently DESTROYED..
Interestingly..
Trout Unlimited did an article LAST MONTH; about "The AMAZING RESILIENCE" of, you guessed it:
Harmony Creek!
It turns out, that the fishing might Not be "better than Ever", but it IS Better than anyone can remember.
The article then when on and on (and on (and on)) about how This PROVES HOW IMPORTANT it is;
to be against ALL FORMS OF INDUSTRIALIZATION, because MAN IS EVIL
I started keeping bees 15 years ago. As the media was covering the bee crisis, the price of bees wasn't going up much from year to year. That convinced me that an environmental disaster wasn't likely to happen. Bees do need more care and maintenance then they did 40 years ago, but it's manageable.
“After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields”
“Was Colony Collapse even real?”
I don’t think so. My (now) SIL got his Masters in Bees (entomology) most of a decade ago. I asked him about Colony Collapse while he was till there. His response was “Huh.” Then went on to say that they hadn’t seen any evidence of it.
'It is absolutely not a good thing for native pollinators,' said Eliza Grames, an entomologist at Binghamton University...
What's not said is that the great bulk of native pollinators do not pollinate our crops, they pollinate Queen Ann's Lace, Goldenrod and a plethora of what most consider weeds and and wild flowers and if you watch what frequents those, it's not heavy with domesticated bees. Most of our native pollinators are beetles, flies and bees in roughly that order by both species and numbers.
From her bio: "The main focus of her research is centered on understanding the causes and consequences of insect decline,..."
Funny how she missed the cause of the bee decline but knows how their rise will ill affect others.
Some reporter called and asked for a negative outlook and she was happy to get her name in the news.
Joe Smith said...
“Not enough bees, bad.
Too many bees, also bad.”
Goldilocks has gotta be in there somewhere.
What happened to the murder hornets?
gilbar said...
Which is why I haven't been a member for 30 years. There's always a crisis. Something must be done immediately! we have to get our representatives involved!
Maybe if we quit "helping" nature so much. Quit pestering the wildlife.
Lucien said...
What happened to the murder hornets?
I don't know. There was a hive at our sportsmans club. At, of all places, the rifle range. They're big but not very fast and the .22 plinkers like to shoot them when they land.
First polar bears, now bees …
It’s so depressing that all these species aren’t going extinct.
John Belushi taught me all I know about Killer Bees, and all I needed to know about bee crises ever since.
This lady whining about domestic bee populations fails to recognize that domestic bees aren't permanent fixtures in any location. Their hives are moved by truck to perform crop pollinations area by area as crop growth requires. Native bee species might just have a longer time span - earlier in the spring and all summer and fall, to perform their own nectar gathering, pollination of local flora, and breeding. Unless she is taking that simple fact into account, her complaints aren't sensible.
I also recall a widely un-heralded report that was made by professional beekeeper groups just after the first alarums were raised about bee population crashes, which explained that some huge percentage of hives -20%?, 25%? - were lost annually every year, and replaced with new hives bearing new queens and broods by the pros. That a few years of 30% to 50% hive deaths occurred was worrisome, but hardly an ecological crisis, and hey, those pros were correct.
More Mead!!!!
I began working with bees at age 3, alongside my paternal grandfather. We had veils because "Bees go for the eyes." as he said, but otherwise nothing. He taught me to work gently, and I didn't care about the occasional sting. By 4 yo I was helping to build hives. For my fifth birthday, 70 years ago, he gave me a hive and supervised my building of the wooden parts, yet wisely insisted on installing all but a few pieces of foundation himself. I raised bees all through high school, and my 'honey money' paid for most of my first term at Middlebury, not a cheap school, even back then.
At Midd, to stay grounded, I worked for free alongside one of the then best-known beekeepers in the eastern America. During my doctoral work in Alberta ... same thing with a guy running 200 hives -- double-queened for folks who know bees -- averaging over 500 lb per hive! Then for a couple of years, bees in Yukon, where I had to build a solid 12-ft fence to keep the bears out. But fireweed honey is crazy delicious. And so on, all the way to my Kansas farm, which only last year I sold to two brothers in their mid-40s whose family has been caring for nearby land in that valley for over 150 years.
Here's the key point -- I raised bees on my Kansas farm, and over the years lost not a few swarms, not only of the standard 'Italian' strain, but the more disease-resistant 'Carniolans' [smaller and darker]. Most swarms established self-sustaining feral colonies in my river-bottom woods. Yet as an Agronomist I studied a fair bit of Entomology, and I could spot at least 20 species of wild bees working my crops right alongside my tame ones, and presumably the ferals as well.
Domestic bees easily go feral, yet they don't seem to compete with wild species, at least not on an organic farm.
I began working with bees at age 3, alongside my paternal grandfather. We had veils because "Bees go for the eyes." as he said, but otherwise nothing. He taught me to work gently, and I didn't care about the occasional sting. By 4 yo I was helping to build hives. For my fifth birthday, 70 years ago, he gave me a hive and supervised my building of the wooden parts, yet wisely insisted on installing all but a few pieces of foundation himself. I raised bees all through high school, and my 'honey money' paid for most of my first term at Middlebury, not a cheap school, even back then.
At Midd, to stay grounded, I worked for free alongside one of the then best-known beekeepers in the eastern America. During my doctoral work in Alberta ... same thing with a guy running 200 hives -- double-queened for folks who know bees -- averaging over 500 lb per hive! Then for a couple of years, bees in Yukon, where I had to build a solid 12-ft fence to keep the bears out. But fireweed honey is crazy delicious. And so on, all the way to my Kansas farm, which only last year I sold to two brothers in their mid-40s whose family has been caring for nearby land in that valley for over 150 years.
Here's the key point -- I raised bees on my Kansas farm, and over the years lost not a few swarms, not only of the standard 'Italian' strain, but the more disease-resistant 'Carniolans' [smaller and darker]. Most swarms established self-sustaining feral colonies in my river-bottom woods. Yet as an Agronomist I studied a fair bit of Entomology, and I could spot at least 20 species of wild bees working my crops right alongside my tame ones, and presumably the ferals as well.
Domestic bees easily go feral, yet they don't seem to compete with wild species, at least not on an organic farm.
Remember when Instapundit would link another upstart blog and it would create an Instalaunch and the upstart's service would crash. That was awesome....Fun times. :-))
Varroa Mites. It was the mites.
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