It’s a cause for concern, no matter how you look at it, and it doesn’t seem that there’s a single cause behind it, not even pesticides.
What should/can we do, either to save the bees or mitigate the consequences? As the subject line asks, how screwed are we? (I know that it’s popularly said that the world produces enough food to feed the world and still have a lot left over, but even without the food supply issue, most people realize that lots of bees dying is a Bad Thing <tm>.)
My understanding is “not that screwed” in terms of survival of our species. There are still tons of things we can grow and cultivate that don’t depend on bees like wheat and corn and tubers, etc. If all the bees were gone we’d lose a lot (all?) of the flowering fruits though.
Basically, there are a number of delicious things we will have to learn to live without, so enjoy your apples and oranges while you can.
I’m willing to bet consumption would not suffer much. Costs may go up some as artificial/alternative pollination methods are developed. The world will be a sadder place, no doubt.
I have not seen your posts in a while until this bee text.
I think the Chinese have a system of pollinating fruit trees by hand.
But this is labor intensive and the price of labor has recently gone up.
IIRC there is a strain of bees in Mexico that are more like wasps. They are
exceptionally hardy and perhaps they can be imported for American applications.
Science and technology will find a way to bypass the honeybee crisis.
I don’t understand that there is so little outcry.
This is way, way, way much more huge than any extinction of the whale.
Yet for every concerned person there are 10 who shrug; “huh, guess no more apples ey, we’ll just eat some other stuff then.”
Also the culprit does seem to be pesticides, neonicotinoids.
But as long as they can say “But there are other contributors as well.” we can all keep it nicely vague enough to escape a ban on these products.
And if products do start to get bannned or are forced to carry warnings, then “Hey, we’ll just change the name of a new compound.” or easier a new brandname “NEW!! now with neonicotinoids that aren’t on the ban list (yet), HELP SAVE THE BEES!!”
Re the title, nothin but pure fucked. This ain’t a
standalone one of a kind situation, its just a symptom among
a galaxy of symptoms, one stroke in a bigger picture, and
another piece of it is ignorance of that picture, or even large-scale
awareness that its something to maybe be paid attention.
nother words, its a death rattle of the world humans have
always lived in, one among many.
It’s that one among many, that quality of just being one piece
of a bigger picture. Even w/o that, bees are just fuckin huuge
in our food supply system and its been affecting prices for
a couple years already for certain foods. Not so noticeable
here, we still have folks with some spending money.
I’m not sure this is particularly Chinese. I thought it was pretty much the same as making Barbie and Ken have sex, but with blossom? I might be wrong.
But yes, it seems pretty catastrophic to me. It’s not just that Chinese hand-pollinated apples will be expensive, it’s that ecosystems will collapse. Presumably. Because I’m not sure the Chinese are willing to hand-pollinate everything, including species humans don’t eat.
We have half the number of managed honeybee colonies we had in the 40s, and it doesn’t seem like honeybee-based food production is down, although we are lugging around the colonies more so they can work harder.
I believe that honeybee counts have been cyclical since at least the late 1800s, so who knows how or what is going on now?
Since a lot of smart folks are working actively on the problem, I think your basic question about what “we” should do has been answered: Try to have smart guys figure out what’s going on, and see if it needs fixin’ or if it’s just cyclical.
I make the observation that there appears to be a lot of hand-wringing, headline-writing and chemical-bandwagon-jumping. But hey; that’s life in the Click-On-This-Crisis! lane.
I thought this article was worth reading on the topic.
Perhaps this persistent problem will spur more research into the cause of CCD. If we can pin down the cause, we can work on a solution. We are a long ways from either right now.
Either that or send all grade school kids into the field with magnifying glasses and little, tiny brushes.
If you read your article carefully then, despite all the other causes mentioned and elaborated on, the conclusion is: pesticides.
Yes, a lot of smart folks have been working actively on the problem, and the answer is neonicotinoid pesticides.
Another thing, it’s not just the bees, crittercount in pools, soil and rivers is down too. It’s just the bees we notice first.
But has someone given these smart folks authority to act on their findings?
So who is actually going to ring up Bayer and say: “Hello old boy, rotten news for you but it seems you are going to have to close down about 40 of your factories”
“Hmmm?” " Yes, worldwide, that’s right" “Awfully sorry, old chap, but there it is.”
Because that’s what politicians do all the time, right? Acting on our behalf, aren’t they?
In my mind, this is being read by a Antonin Artaud impersonator in a turtleneck, yelling at top volume with a Gitane dangling from his lips.
Which will look like Yul Brenner and will challenge you to a draw.
Colony collapse disorder (in which colonies fail to reproduce) is only part of the issue. Mass dieoffs or dysfunction of otherwise apparently reproductively healthy hives also contribute to the issue. A failure is not just a loss of fruit-producing plants, but also other nitrogen-fixing flowering plants of order Rosaceae which are critical to the health of natural ecosystems. There are, of course, other pollinators (the European honey bee, Apis melliferas, isn’t native to the Americas) by many of the same syndromes causing problems with honeybees are also affecting native species, and the widespread use of honey bees for crop pollination has resulted in a modest decline of native species, nor are these species as specialized in pollination modern cultivars.
As for the faith that “Science and technology will find a way to bypass the honeybee crisis,” this is as much an unwarranted confidence as that biofuels will replace fossil hydrocarbon petroleum sources. That the European honey bee is so execptionally good at pollinating cultivars has been a great boon to modern agriculture to an extent unappreciated by those not involved in farming, and there is no ready technology to replace or even significantly supplant this capability which has co-evolved with flowering plants for nearly 100 million years. We cannot wave a technomagical wand and replace pollinating bees and wasps with some manufactured innovation in the forseeable future, and to suggest that we can is blythe ignorance.
I joined a bee keepers forum and they seemed to claim that wild bees were fine. I have seen more wild bee hives in the city where I live including my own house than I have seen in the previous 50 years. I don’t believe they are going extinct. More than likley several causes are hurting th ebees and resistant strains will gradually become more prevalent.