Almost everyone agrees that bee populations are dwindling and their importance to mankind is unquestionably important.
So what are the reasons for not initiating a large scale cloning of existent bees.
We pretty well have the technology to do it. Or dont we?
Because the problem isn’t making bees (we know how to do that - much easier and cheaper than cloning), it’s preventing them from not dying.
There’s many issues going on, and cloning wouldn’t solve any of them, best I can tell.
Bees -and pollinators in general- are declining because of a lack of suitable habitats and food sources, excess of pesticides and such factors, your newly released clone bees would simply die of starvation or whatever killed the previous bees. Bees, in general, need a mix of pollen and nectar sources, which are not supplied by the vast monocultures from modern agriculture. The pollen and nectar which is available is over far too short a season, so crops which need pollination aren’t getting it, because pollinators can’t survive during the rest of the year, so when they’re needed they’re not there.
One method which has been used to try to combat this is to move honey bees (which can store huge amounts of honey to tide them over poor seasons) around, so they’re in place when they’re needed to pollinate a crop, and should be able to collect enough stores at each site to last- with the stores being topped up later with cheaper syrup by beekeepers if needed. While this is a traditional practice, moving hives to orchards for the blossom, it has limits, and traditionally they wouldn’t be moved to more than 2 or 3 sites per year. Now, they can be moved to a new crop every few weeks, through the main season. Current thinking on Colony Collapse Disorder is that it’s actually largely caused by the stress to the bees of being moved so often, losing many of the foraging workers every time as well as the simple stress of being shut up for days, combined with low-level pesticide poisoning and diseases which would normally only sligthly weaken a hive. It also allows diseases to spread like wildfire, as colonies get constantly moved to new areas, with new neighbours.
Also, a large part of the issue is not a simple ‘lack of bees’ it’s reduced diversity of bee population. Honey bees aren’t native to the US, and actually had a suppressing effect on native bee populations (as they’re better at surviving bad seasons). Relying more on honey bees seems to be actually reducing the native pollinator population, as well as having negative effects on the honey bees as they get moved round more and more. This often gets simplified down to ‘bees are getting rarer!’ but really the problems facing native bees and honey bees are different, requiring different solutions. Cloning wouldn’t help natives at all, it’d make the lack of diversity worse, making it easier for diseases to spread through a wild population, and it’s utterly unnecessary for managed honeybees, which are commercially bred anyway.
The good news is that if the factors reducing the bee population were removed, the numbers (at least of most species) could rapidly bounce back. A stat I’ve read is that 85% of UK honeybees were killed by a selection of diseases (thought at the time to be one condition and known as ‘Isle of Wight disease’) in only one or two years back in the 1920s. Within 5 years of a resistant bee being found, the number of colonies was higher than it had been before the crash.
If you’re referring to honey bees, apiarists have more colonies today in the US than when colony collapse disorder was first identified. The easiest way to make more honey bees is to split an existing hive. Bees are very good at making new bees. I’m not aware of any way to make bees faster. I’m not aware of anyone bothering to try.
Cloning is generally desirable to avoid gene mixing, not because it’s fast.
We could move a bunch of hives near a semi-enclosed boy of water. Then there would be a lot of bay bees.
I’ll let myself out.
It’s hard to glare when I’m giggling.
I don’t think we want to prevent them from not dying.
It isn’t like there is a machine that you can stick a cell in and press the “clone” button–it is done one cell/embryo at a time under a microscope by a trained technician. And still you expect many failed clones for each successful one. We could probably clone bees. The only question is if the price would be thousands of dollars each or hundreds of thousands of dollars each.
We really don’t (AFAIK) have the tech to clone anything complex except as a lab curiosity. It’s not a standard industrial practice.
Besides, as the extensive trade in animal sperm shows, the basic Mother Nature method of just causing pregnancies with selected sperm works fairly well if your goal is “more of them, please”. Bees are not dying from genetic defects, and nobody has identified genes that make bees hardier against whatever ails them.
Plus, for mammals, clone production is easy once a “fertilized egg” is made - simply implant it in a host mother, let nature do the rest.
Bee 101 - queens are the same as regular (female) worker bees. Workers are just stunted females. Queens are fed a special diet of “royal jelly” and develop in much larger cells special-built for queens. So one would have to create a cloned egg, then feed it simulating the bee process. But then the queen needs to be fertilized by a male bee (drone) and needs workers to help raise the offspring.
Or, as Ruken says, split the hive. Hives split when they have a big surplus, something beekeepers try to prevent by removing the stored honey. Then the workers would make a new queen, and it would fly off with half the hive. Alternative, you could remove the queen and half the hive to a new box, and the remaining workers would realize the queen was missing and start turning some of the most recently laid eggs into queens. (Or you introduce your new queen and the workers will soon regard her as the official queen).
But then the queen still has to be fertilized by a drone bee, so the offspring would not be pure clones, they would be half; and all future queens, ditto. Fertilizing a queen bee artificially is not trivial either.
As others point out, the problem isn’t genetic - whatever you do, after all that lab work the bees are still in the same environment and that’s what’s sickening them. Why clone, unles you find something so valuable in one bee’s genetic makeup that needs replicating. (Two thoughts - problem is either insecticides, or very tiny mites that infect the bees’ breathing passages.)
Cloning is not a magical “make more living things” spell.
I do.
Good grief, immortal bees. That’s the start of the beepocalypse. I’d prefer to avoid that.