Bees - Beemageddon, or Everything's Fine?

Gruebeard

Gruebeard

I stand with Bernie


Wait. Are the bees Democrats or Republicans?


I blindly stand with whichever side won't sting me.


In the land of the Beemageddon, the half-a-bee is king. I stand with Eric.



Where's the Third Side to the story? Won't anyone think of the children!



Yeah, I know nothing about bees.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

China tried living without bees after killing them with pesticides.
Apple production increased almost 30 percent.
Turns out bees may be free, but they are inefficient.

--Patrick
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

Apples can easily be pollinated by many other species, though. Some other types of plants cannot.

There's definitely and 100% certainly a problem with bees at the moment. I don't think neonics are specifically the problem, though. Several types of illnesses and maggots and whatever are having a very serious impact, especially in some regions, though - IIRC in parts of the Serengeti nearly 90% of bees had died off which was causing the rangers quite a bit of trouble. In Belgium there've been serious issues as well (though I'm glad to see this is slowly recovering). Recently a Belgian developed a type of bee that wasn't (as) susceptible to the mites...Hopefully that'll help, but there's still some types of plants doomed if bee types get "simplified" - some plants can only be pollinated by one very specific bee type...

The problem is that's always very easy spray mist and very hard to tell facts. Is one side green fear mongering and the other scientific triumph, or is one side protecting the world while the other side's big business and blind science denying troubles? Is it global warming or tobacco smoke all over again? *shrug*, choose your poison.
 
Ravenpoe

Ravenpoe

PatrThom said:
China tried living without bees after killing them with pesticides.
Apple production increased almost 30 percent.
Turns out bees may be free, but they are inefficient.

--Patrick
Click to expand...
Apple production will always be up, until more Foxconn employees try to jump.
 
Eriol

Eriol

Bubble181 said:
There's definitely and 100% certainly a problem with bees at the moment.
Click to expand...
See that's the point of the article citing Stats Canada, and similar from other countries' departments of agriculture. They are pretty much as non-biased as you can EVER get. And populations are completely fine (better than ever, no exaggeration) in all the places where they were supposed to be horrific.
Bubble181 said:
The problem is that's always very easy spray mist and very hard to tell facts. Is one side green fear mongering and the other scientific triumph, or is one side protecting the world while the other side's big business and blind science denying troubles? Is it global warming or tobacco smoke all over again? *shrug*, choose your poison.
Click to expand...
It's the basic green mantra "if it's not organic, it must be poison" crap IMO. I started the thread with not TOO much obvious bias (bias yes, but still), but I'll say it straight out now - the facts don't support that neonic pesticides cause colony collapse disorder, as places have banned it, and places have not, and the result is the same, in that ALL have recovered in the same time period. If both kept collapsing, then we could say there's some lingering effect possible, but given that both groups have recovered (and then some) the evidence points to some unknown one-time event that caused it in the first place, but there's no reason to panic now, about bees or this particular pesticide.

Or you can believe that all government agriculture departments everywhere are all lying at the same time. Which raises the question of why did you believe them when they said bee populations were going DOWN? And now you don't believe that they're going up? That's insane. Believe the bad news, disbelieve the good news from the same source?


P.S. Not accusing you Bubble (or anybody here necessarily) of that last attitude.
 
Null

Null

Okay. During the 1990s and early 2000s there was a lot of concern over Colony Collapse Disorder, which is when the majority of the worker bees for some reason abandon a hive, leaving just a queen, some drones, and a few workers behind, leading to a failed colony. There were severe declines in western honeybee colonies in North America, as well as across Europe. A number of factors were blamed but none, by themselves, were particularly new and none caused damage on that scale. There were outbreaks of varroa mites, fungi, widespread use of supposedly bee-safe neonictonids that were not, severe winters, unusually hot summers, etc. This was compounded by commercially bred bees, which had a more limited genetic diversity - so things that effected them hit HARD. It's estimated that bee populations, wild and domesticated, declined by around 20% during the 2000s. That's pretty significant. However, it does seem to be climbing back up, and "natural" beekeeping practices (avoiding things such as crop spraying, hive movement, frequent hive inspection, artificial insemination of queens, routine medication, and sugar water feeding) showed far smaller losses among their hives, so more small-scale beekeepers are adopting those methods.

One of my mother's closest friends is a beekeeper in South Carolina, and so this question was not academic for her. She follows the "organic" or "natural" beekeeping practices and her hives are generally doing well.
 
Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

I thought this topic would be about killer bees. Anyone remember in the early 90s, we were all gonna die because of the killer bees? Then they just bred with the non-killer bees and nothing happened.

Maybe what we need is new killer bees.
 
Null

Null

Zero Esc said:
I thought this topic would be about killer bees. Anyone remember in the early 90s, we were all gonna die because of the killer bees? Then they just bred with the non-killer bees and nothing happened.

Maybe what we need is new killer bees.
Click to expand...
Africanized Honey Bees are still there, and still breeding, but they're not spreading as quickly as they had been and they have effectively reached the extent of their habitat in the US.
 
fade

fade

Staff member
We had killer bees in our garage. As far as people are concerned, they don't exactly live up to their name. I mean sure if you go bang on their nest. They make a poo-ton of honey though. We had bee removers come (yep, that's a thing) and by the time we had noticed, there was a HUGE honeycomb inside the wall. Honeycomb big, yeah yeah yeah. It's not small, no no no.
 
Eriol

Eriol

Update in Nature: Pesticide reduces bumblebee colony initiation and increases probability of population extinction
Exposure to thiamethoxam caused a 26% reduction in the proportion of queens that laid eggs, and advanced the timing of colony initiation, although we did not detect impacts of any experimental treatment on the ability of queens to produce adult offspring during the 14-week experimental period.
Click to expand...
So that's a non-trivial reduction. Seems pretty cut-n-dry on that chemical.

The only "weaselly" thing I could find on initial reading (that's NOT merely an abstract) were the words "field-relevant levels of thiamethoxam" (exactly stated below as "2.4 ppb for two weeks") which to me said "well, HOW relevant to real amounts in fields?" I found an answer in this article, which is on the OTHER side of the debate: No effect of low-level chronic neonicotinoid exposure on bumblebee learning and fecundity
Reported values of the maximum concentrations of clothianidin residues found in nectar of treated crops vary from 1–12.2 ppb with the average values ranging from 0.3–4 ppb (Sanchez-Bayo & Goka, 2014; Bonmatin et al., 2015; Botías et al., 2015).
Click to expand...
So it appears the most recent Nature study is pretty fair, though I would say while it puts the nail pretty firmly in the coffin of this particular pesticide they were testing (thiamethoxam), it does not negate the other study I found, as they are two different chemicals (the one that found no effect was for clothianidin), and in addition they don't appear to have been testing for the same result either! Same FAMILY sure, but ethanol and methanol are really close, but one will get you drunk, and the other will get you drunk and BLIND and/or dead.

So anybody saying "But other studies said it was fine!" are not talking about the same chemical, and there appears nothing "on the surface" wrong with this study (but I'm not a biologist or chemist either). E.g. they're not super-charging the amounts to totally unrealistic levels and then saying there's a problem. This study appears to prove that using this pesticide is unsafe to bees in the area in REAL concentrations found in fields (it's well within, and at the bottom-end of the DETECTED range in real life usages). I would support banning (or reducing severely) it's usage since this appears bad.

But anybody saying that this is the death of all of this GROUP of chemicals doesn't necessarily have a good point either. They're not the same chemicals in the two studies. One could be safe, and the other not at all. More research required!
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

I don't know. I'm firmly against the idea of pesticides and the sort. I fully understand that they're a necessary evil, but as something of a naturalist, I question how those chemicals affect us or the environment they're dropped in. I want to be clear that I'm not calling for an all-out ban on them, but at least continual study on their affects and further research into ways around not needing them.

I'm all for expanding bees since they help in plant and food production. Heck, I have this (probably naive) dream of cities full of green roofs with various plants and food growing on them, with nests on some for said production, as well as honey.
 
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