It is a concern that we are experiencing a massive honey bee die off and it will have an economic impact since they are the cornerstone of agricultural pollination. That said, as far as having four years left, doesn't that assume we have no native pollinators in NA? Bumble bee anyone?
Bumble bees are known to be more effective at pollinating tomatoes, blueberries, and cranberries than honey bees. A study done in the ag super duper belt in the Central Valley in Cali found over fifty species of native, unmanaged bees providing pollination services to fourteen different crops.
This whole episode points to why conserving biodiversity isn't just a good thing for the nature photographers of the world, it provides a very real insurance policy against both natural and human caused disasters such as the current bee die-off. Having a greater biodiversity serves to add elasticity to natural systems' ability to respond to such calamities.
My blog (mostly photos): Fort Ephemera - My Flickr Photostream
“You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn’t waste either.” ―Galen Rowell
Enough wrote:Bumble bees are known to be more effective at pollinating tomatoes, blueberries, and cranberries than honey bees. A study done in the ag super duper belt in the Central Valley in Cali found over fifty species of native, unmanaged bees providing pollination services to fourteen different crops.
Plus, bumble bees are just less ornery than many other types of bees.
Enough wrote:Bumble bees are known to be more effective at pollinating tomatoes, blueberries, and cranberries than honey bees. A study done in the ag super duper belt in the Central Valley in Cali found over fifty species of native, unmanaged bees providing pollination services to fourteen different crops.
This whole episode points to why conserving biodiversity isn't just a good thing for the nature photographers of the world, it provides a very real insurance policy against both natural and human caused disasters such as the current bee die-off. Having a greater biodiversity serves to add elasticity to natural systems' ability to respond to such calamities.
Most of the pollination for more than 90 commercial crops grown throughout the United States is provided byApis mellifera , the honeybee. The value from the pollination to agricultural output in the country is estimated at $14.6 billion annually. Growers rent about 1.5 million colonies each year to pollinate crops.
" Hey OP, listen to my advice alright." -Tha General "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." -Stigler's Law of Eponymy, discovered by Robert K. Merton MYT
Enough wrote:Bumble bees are known to be more effective at pollinating tomatoes, blueberries, and cranberries than honey bees. A study done in the ag super duper belt in the Central Valley in Cali found over fifty species of native, unmanaged bees providing pollination services to fourteen different crops.
Plus, bumble bees are just less ornery than many other types of bees.
LordMortis wrote:So this a conspiracy to get rid of almonds?
If it is, I appreciate the sentiment but disapprove of the method.
" Hey OP, listen to my advice alright." -Tha General "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." -Stigler's Law of Eponymy, discovered by Robert K. Merton MYT
geezer wrote:Well, we don't KNOW that anything we are doing is causing this. After all, there have been bee die-offs in the past. Plus, if all the bees die other pollinators will step up -- that's how the earth balances things after all.
Ultimately, dealing with this problem would exact a high cost on bigAgro, and we simply can't endanger the economy.
Heads back in the sand, people. Now.
Excellently played!
Damn! You guys must shit diamonds from being so uptight! Do you really take yourselves so seriously?
Tell us, oh ecological watchmen of OO, what should hastily labeled, fat and happy, head-in-the-sand, myopic, big business advocates do about this supposed problem? Conserve Honey? Open up flop-hives for wayward bees? Invade Beeistan?
You can insult me all you want, but this rates very low on my list of cataclysmic world events to worry over. If all the bees die and the world dies off in 4 days, I'll be the first to step up and say that you were right and I was wrong. Until then, I only have so much worry to divvy out and this issue is very low on the list.
Is this a serious response, or did I not catch the reference this time?
Enough wrote:Bumble bees are known to be more effective at pollinating tomatoes, blueberries, and cranberries than honey bees. A study done in the ag super duper belt in the Central Valley in Cali found over fifty species of native, unmanaged bees providing pollination services to fourteen different crops.
This whole episode points to why conserving biodiversity isn't just a good thing for the nature photographers of the world, it provides a very real insurance policy against both natural and human caused disasters such as the current bee die-off. Having a greater biodiversity serves to add elasticity to natural systems' ability to respond to such calamities.
Most of the pollination for more than 90 commercial crops grown throughout the United States is provided byApis mellifera , the honeybee. The value from the pollination to agricultural output in the country is estimated at $14.6 billion annually. Growers rent about 1.5 million colonies each year to pollinate crops.
So does this rule out replacing the lost honey bees with native pollinators? I see cultivated blueberries heavily rely on honey bees from your list, and as I mentioned we know bumble bees do those better anyways. I wonder if there are things especially unique about propagating honey bees that would not scale well to other insects?
My blog (mostly photos): Fort Ephemera - My Flickr Photostream
“You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn’t waste either.” ―Galen Rowell
Smoove_B wrote:That's an awesome article -- score one for science.
And the power of networking.
But it took a family connection — through David Wick, Charles’s brother — to really connect the dots. When colony collapse became news a few years ago, Mr. Wick, a tech entrepreneur who moved to Montana in the 1990s for the outdoor lifestyle, saw a television interview with Dr. Bromenshenk about bees.
Mr. Wick knew of his brother’s work in Maryland, and remembered meeting Dr. Bromenshenk at a business conference. A retained business card and a telephone call put the Army and the Bee Alert team buzzing around the same blossom. [gag]
" Hey OP, listen to my advice alright." -Tha General "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." -Stigler's Law of Eponymy, discovered by Robert K. Merton MYT
If you are suspected of being involved in the honey bee genocide then the best practice is to purchase the firm that is releasing the results that seem to point at you.
Oddly enough, this could be a positive thing. Monsanto could be buying beelogics to clean up a mess that Monsanto should want cleaned up. But I sure don't trust them. Especially when beelogics was a small independent company is apparently in deep with the USDA among other federal agencies.
But yeah, it's a weird story. I haven't been able to get much more than what's in the articles. That and I have no idea what kind of evidence his research yielded.
" Hey OP, listen to my advice alright." -Tha General "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." -Stigler's Law of Eponymy, discovered by Robert K. Merton MYT
Today was the first I ever heard of him, I was asking in all honesty. I only seem to find his name in anti GMO sites and was looking to understand his plight from a less biased perspective.
LordMortis wrote:Today was the first I ever heard of him, I was asking in all honesty. I only seem to find his name in anti GMO sites and was looking to understand his plight from a less biased perspective.
Yeah, that's my problem too.
There's this from VOA yesterday but it doesn't mention the state taking his bees at all. He's just used as an expert source.
Going way back, he's also inexplicably referenced here.
March 02, 2002
The Tribune concludes its endorsements today in contested primary races for the Illinois House.
89th District (northwest Illinois): Republican Jim Sacia of Pecatonica is a former FBI agent who retired and opened a farm implement store outside Freeport. He has experience serving on school and county boards and has a reputation for strong beliefs and an open mind. He is endorsed over John Buford of Orangeville, Dean Wright of Freeport, Jerry Daws of Forreston and Terrence Ingram of Apple River.
I assume he's the only one in Apple River.
" Hey OP, listen to my advice alright." -Tha General "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." -Stigler's Law of Eponymy, discovered by Robert K. Merton MYT
Totally missed this back in July -- must have been because of the OOtage, but a report released suggests that it's a chemical cocktail that's killing the bees -- more specifically fungicides that were considered previously harmless to bees...
The discovery means that fungicides, thought harmless to bees, is actually a significant part of Colony Collapse Disorder. And that likely means farmers need a whole new set of regulations about how to use fungicides. While neonicotinoids have been linked to mass bee deaths -- the same type of chemical at the heart of the massive bumble bee die off in Oregon -- this study opens up an entirely new finding that it is more than one group of pesticides, but a combination of many chemicals, which makes the problem far more complex.
On Sunday morning, the South Carolina honey bees began to die in massive numbers.
Death came suddenly to Dorchester County, S.C. Stressed insects tried to flee their nests, only to surrender in little clumps at hive entrances. The dead worker bees littering the farms suggested that colony collapse disorder was not the culprit — in that odd phenomenon, workers vanish as though raptured, leaving a living queen and young bees behind.
Instead, the dead heaps signaled the killer was less mysterious, but no less devastating. The pattern matched acute pesticide poisoning. By one estimate, at a single apiary — Flowertown Bee Farm and Supply, in Summerville — 46 hives died on the spot, totaling about 2.5 million bees.
You think you've got her under control, so you turn the handle as hard as you can to stop her - only to discover that she's actually replaced your solution with a vice that has your balls neatly lined up in it - and you just crushed them.
There she is, a silhouette in the doorway, laughing as she walks off, giving us the finger.
Black Lives Matter
2021-01-20: The first good night's sleep I had in 4 years.
Conspirabee theories are 2 years out of date, honey.
"If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts." - Albert Einstein "I don't stand by anything." - Trump “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” - John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St Andrews, 2/1/1867 “It is the impractical things in this tumultuous hell-scape of a world that matter most. A book, a name, chicken soup. They help us remember that, even in our darkest hour, life is still to be savored.” - Poe, Altered Carbon
em2nought wrote:Maybe pollination is going to be a new human job to replace all the jobs that have immigrated overseas(no blame assigned).
You do realize that if it wasn't for pollinated plants, we'd have far fewer illegal immigrants coming here to steal our cotton pickin' jobs, right?
Ack! I was gonna post what I thought was a pretty funny answer, but it's not in R&P so........ I'll just say there are only certain illegals that I'm not fond of at all. The vast majority I've got no problem with as long as they aren't drawing paid benefits from the USA.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has designated the rusty patched bumblebee an endangered species — the first such designation for a bumblebee and for a bee species in the continental U.S.
The protected status, which goes into effect on Feb. 10, includes requirements for federal protections and the development of a recovery plan. It also means that states with habitats for this species are eligible for federal funds.
"Today's Endangered Species listing is the best—and probably last—hope for the recovery of the rusty patched bumble bee," NRDC Senior Attorney Rebecca Riley said in a statement from the Xerces Society, which advocates for invertebrates. "Bumble bees are dying off, vanishing from our farms, gardens, and parks, where they were once found in great numbers."
Large parts of the Eastern and Midwestern United States were once crawling with these bees, Bombus affinis, but the bees have suffered a dramatic decline in the last two decades due to habitat loss and degradation, along with pathogens and pesticides.
Yeah, about that listing. Um, we're gonna have a problem with that.
The Trump administration on Thursday delayed what would be the first endangered designation for a bee species in the continental U.S., one day before it was to take effect.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service adopted a rule Jan. 11 extending federal protection to the rusty patched bumblebee, one of many types of bees that play a vital role in pollinating crops and wild plants. It once was common across the East Coast and much of the Midwest but its numbers have plummeted since the late 1990s.
Federal law requires a 30-day waiting period before most new regulations become effective. The addition of the bumblebee to the endangered species list was scheduled for Friday.
But in a Federal Register notice, the service announced a postponement until March 21 in keeping with a Trump administration order issued Jan. 20. It imposed a 60-day freeze on regulations that had been published in the register but hadn't taken effect. The delay, according to the White House, was for the purpose of "reviewing questions of fact, law and policy they raise."
I would not hold high hopes for the listing going into effect in March, but we'll see.
My blog (mostly photos): Fort Ephemera - My Flickr Photostream
“You only get one sunrise and one sunset a day, and you only get so many days on the planet. A good photographer does the math and doesn’t waste either.” ―Galen Rowell
You've heard the story: Honeybees are disappearing. Beginning in 2006, beekeepers began reporting mysteriously large losses to their honeybee hives over the winter. The bees weren't just dying—they were abandoning their hives altogether. The strange phenomenon, dubbed colony collapse disorder, soon became widespread. Ever since, beekeepers have reported higher-than-normal honeybee deaths, raising concerns about a coming silent spring.
The media swiftly declared disaster. Time called it a "bee-pocalypse"; Quartz went with "beemageddon." By 2013, National Public Radio was declaring "a crisis point for crops" and a Time cover was foretelling "a world without bees." A share of the blame has gone to everything from genetically modified crops, pesticides, and global warming to cellphones and high-voltage electric transmission lines. The Obama administration created a task force to develop a "national strategy" to promote honeybees and other pollinators, calling for $82 million in federal funding to address pollinator health and enhance 7 million acres of land.
...
But here's what you might not have heard. Despite the increased mortality rates, there has been no downward trend in the total number of honeybee colonies in the United States over the past 10 years. Indeed, there are more honeybee colonies in the country today than when colony collapse disorder began.
Beekeepers have proven incredibly adept at responding to this challenge. Thanks to a robust market for pollination services, they have addressed the increasing mortality rates by rapidly rebuilding their hives, and they have done so with virtually no economic effects passed on to consumers. It's a remarkable story of adaptation and resilience, and the media has almost entirely ignored it.
"The world is suffering more today from the good people who want to mind other men's business than it is from the bad people who are willing to let everybody look after their own individual affairs." - Clarence Darrow
NYPost.com wrote:Walmart has quietly filed a patent for robot bees that could be used to pollinate crops just like real bees — suggesting that the discount retail giant could be branching out into farming.
The “autonomous robotic bees” would act like drones, carrying pollen from one plant to another, using sensors and cameras to find crops, according to Business Insider, which said that CB Insights first unearthed the patent paperwork.
"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." — P. J. O'Rourke
NYPost.com wrote:Walmart has quietly filed a patent for robot bees that could be used to pollinate crops just like real bees — suggesting that the discount retail giant could be branching out into farming.
The “autonomous robotic bees” would act like drones, carrying pollen from one plant to another, using sensors and cameras to find crops, according to Business Insider, which said that CB Insights first unearthed the patent paperwork.
Now the episode of Black Mirror with robot bees is a little more terrifying.
Is this a serious response, or did I not catch the reference this time?
