I can’t find any research on the impact of increased prevalence of vaping on bee populations. I feel there should be scientific studies done on this. It’s pretty much sweet smelling sticky bee poison that people are now walking about puffing all over every surface.
well if that is the case, humans can take pollinator job roles when AI will take their excel jobs.
At least i saved one from my dogs water bowl yesterday 🤷♀️
This doesn’t say 80% of the bees have died.
I agree it does mention hundreds of millions but is confusing because…Shook said. “If we lose 80% of our bees every year,…” Not very clear in the article on exactly what percentage of the bee population died.
Pretty huge distinction
It’s called winter.
Something about the birds and the bees …
Imagine when we find out bees were the only thing holding it all together.
Aaaaand, it’s over.
What are we supposed to do? Not rolling coal and eating meat every day? There is just nothing we can do.
It’s like nobody paid attention to bee movie.
Imma go out on a limb here and blame late stage Capitalism and some sort of pesticide or whatever that could solve the problem if it costed 5 cents more but the solution is to save that money and let the bees die.
Imma take my chances on that.
Idk about others, but mine died due to temperatures not reaching above 27 for 14 days straight.
there’s a crazy scene in the documentary More Than Honey where they compare beekeepers with US Almond Farm pollenators. It’s all about money and it’s sickening.
I was gonna quote the documentary too. My favourite scene was when they pollinated by hand and said: who’s better at pollinating? Humans or bees? It’s definitely not humans.
Mortified, but I am not a bee-ologist.
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.
Do you like food? We use bees to grow that
You don’t need honey bees to grow food.
“Only”.
80% of crops grown in the US are pollinated by honey bees.. If you think grocery prices are bad now…
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.
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/
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.
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
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.
It’s because of shareholder profit
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)
Honey bees aren’t even native to the US
Thanks for researching this! Still not good news for bees 🐝 😪
This is bad news for every animal on land