Transporting bees across country for pollination is a fairly recent activity, starting somewhere around the time insecticides began being used in farming.
My mother used to keep bees. As I understand it, neonicotinoids aren’t themselves fatal but they weaken the bees’ resistances to other factors like the varroa mite.
False:
Most of our calories do not require bees. Some 90%. The (plant) food we eat self-pollinates, wind-pollinates, or it is propogated asexually. That doesn’t mean we should just spread arthropod neurotoxins willy nilly, but arguments against should be grounded in fact.
*So if honeybees did disappear for good, humans would probably not go extinct (at least not solely for that reason). But our diets would still suffer tremendously. The variety of foods available would diminish, and the cost of certain products would surge. The California Almond Board, for example, has been campaigning to save bees for years. Without bees and their ilk, the group says, almonds “simply wouldn’t exist.” We’d still have coffee without bees, but it would become expensive and rare. The coffee flower is only open for pollination for three or four days. If no insect happens by in that short window, the plant won’t be pollinated.
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*There are plenty of other examples: apples, avocados, onions, and several types of berries rely heavily on bees for pollination. The disappearance of honeybees, or even a substantial drop in their population, would make those foods scarce. Humanity would survive—but our dinners would get a lot less interesting.
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NRDC — Would a World Without Bees Be a World Without Us?
*1) We will lose some of our favorite foods! Honey bees are responsible for an average $30 billion a year in crops. (via bbc.com) These plants are pollinated by bees, which means when the bees die, so do they. We would lose: apples, mangoes, peaches, sunflower oil, kiwi, pomegranates, strawberries, onions, AVOCADOS (that means no guac), cherries, coffee, walnuts, cotton(that means clothes would be super expensive), lychee, macadamia nuts, limes, lemons, carrots, cucumber, watermelon, coconut, chili peppers, cocoa, tomatoes, and grapes just to name a few. (via honeylove.org)THINK OF THE GUAC WE ARE LOSING. In addition to these plants dying, animals higher up in the food chain, like cows and pigs, would cost more to feed, and that means higher prices for us. Seriously, if bees die out, the American economy will be is a crisis state, and food costs will skyrocket. Losing bees isn’t pretty for anyone, but especially not for us.
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*2) Everyday items would cost more, or be unavailable altogether. Because cotton would disappear without bees, the price of clothing would grow, and we would have less options for fabrics. In addition, biofuel would disappear without canola, and the world would rely on fossil fuel. Without bees, renewable resources would be replaced with outdated and wasteful resources. Medicines and the pharmaceutical companies would also be hit by the extinction of bees. The key ingredient in morphine is extracted from opium poppies, which would be almost unavailable without bees, making morphine disappear.
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Odessey Online — 3 Things That Will Happen If Bees Go Extinct
I trust them rather more than your Panglossian optimism
There is absolutely no contradiction between Ruken’s comment and your cite. Loss of diversity is bad enough - monotonous diets suck tremendously. But our major grains, most leafy greens and tuber crops from which we derive most of our calories( worldwide )do not require insect pollination.
Perhaps “invasive” was a poor choice of words. I mean “wide-spread, non-indigenous”.
I’m not suggesting that agriculture rely on indigenous bees. I’m wondering if the use of insecticides on crop plants is not really an ecological problem, but primarily an economic one. That depends on the impact on indigenous bees, which is unknown to me. Because indigenous bees might frequent indigenous plants more often than agricultural ones, it’s possible the use of insecticides is not severely affecting them.
You misunderstand how things work out there. Just because insecticides are only sprayed on crops does not mean they just stay on the crops and don’t get on other plants. Neonics are water soluable; they’ll go pretty much anywhere in the ecosystem.
Bees in general aren’t all that picky about which kinds of flowers they visit. Different plants flower at different times and bees will visit whichever one is in flower. They don’t know or care if the plants are crops or not. This applies to pretty much all bees, native or honey.
autism?
“Even more alarming, a study by NIH-funded researchers from UNC Chapel Hill and UC Davis reported that frequent exposure (self-reported by parents) to imidacloprid applied as flea and tick treatments for pets (Advantage by Bayer) during pregnancy was associated with Autism spectrum disorder (OR 2.0, 95% CI 1.0-3.9) in prenatally-exposed children (Keil et al 2014).”
Yes, my understanding is not complete, hence my question about impact on honeybees vs impact on indigenous bees. :smack:
“Could go anywhere” is not the same as “does go everywhere”. The dosage makes a difference. Since we bring honeybees closer to human agriculture and discourage indigenous bees, the former are more likely to be exposed to higher doses than the latter. And while bees in general aren’t that picky, particular bee species may in fact visit some plant species more than others.
So while I don’t know if colony collapse is a problem for indigenous bees, it’s plausible that they are affected by insecticides differently than honeybees.
Yes it is, because it’s not just honeybees but pollinator insects in general that are at threat. Wind-pollinated crops like maize aren’t going extinct even without pesticides, but various wild pollinators and a great number of insect-pollinated plants that they are in symbiosis with could actually go extinct.
You’re conflating two different things. Wild solitary bees do a lot of pollination even now, beyond what commercial mobile beehives do. A move away from roving beehives might slow the spread of the mites that have been harming our pollinators.
That’s a misleading number. Yes, you can eat a diet that is 90% (cloned) potatoes, (wind-pollinated) cereals, and (grass-fed) meat, but a healthy diet still has that 10% of other foods like fresh fruits that require some animal pollination. Just removing those particular compounds and pigments from your diet because they’re already less than 10% isn’t that smart.
Killing off the bees will not leave us without fruits and vegetables. Fewer, for sure, with plenty of economic distress. But it won’t be a meat n taters nightmare. I just ate a self-pollinated tomato.
But that’s neither here nor there, given that we have more bee colonies now than when CCD first hit the news. More than we had twenty years ago.