Hm here in Germany we do not burn hives. If AFB occurs the hives have to be heat threaded with a torch (plastic ones have to be cleaned with soda lye). The frames have to be burned or cleaned in soda lye. the bee swarm itself get new frames without any foundation so that they have to build combs of their own.
This process must be repeated until no spores are found anymore.
Back in the days the beekeepers had to burn their hives but this is from the old days.
This method is a little bit more complicated than you describe it. I’m also not sure how easy it is to scale.
You still need to destroy parts of the beehive, let all the bees hunger for a few days and disinfectant the parts of the beehive you want to reuse. I don’t know if all of this is possible with that many beehives mentioned in the post.
As far as I know this method is done by commercial beekeepers. Well at the end you are have to choose to burn it all and face big investment or to invest work. It's right that the artificial swarm has to "hunger" a bit.
At the end you get no honey from the bees and have to invest in new frames and sugar. It's no visit in the candy store if you have AFB but burning everything seem to be a last resort solution which isn't nowadays necessary anymore.
The other problem you are facing are the beekeepers around you ... they have to do the same and than there are some black sheep which are not known to the veterinary administration. They can also contribute to a never ending AFB problem.
At the end hygiene (torching unused hives and frames) is the first thing everybody can do to prevent such situation.
I wouldn't trust it. AFB is, well, foul. It's about the most satanic affliction imaginable. Destroying everything with extreme prejudice within a 2 km radius using fire seems right to me. The bees themselves can carry the spores, including the queen.
> Destroying everything with extreme prejudice within a 2 km radius using fire seems right to me.
Not the OP, but in my country, instead of destroying everything, we lockdown everything within a 2km radius and only kill the colonies that actually have the disease. Sometimes it means the entire apiary, sometimes only a few hives. There doesn't seem to be a need to bomb the whole area :-).
I guess there is a question of scale indeed. But when it is about animals, I feel like "efficiency" should not be the only concern.
The second thing is that if it is all about "efficiency", maybe the producer should not complain about the limitations of their "more productive" way. It feels a bit hypocritical to say "we do it this way because it is more profitable, but when we have a loss of productivity that is fundamentally related to the way we operate, then we believe the State should pay for it".
One can "become" allergic anytime, after many stings. You generally would not know before you make an allergic reaction, which is why beekeepers have to be "ready" to make one (as in, know how to react properly). I know beekeepers who keep practicing after they become allergic, some stop.
> once I finish university
I realised only after I graduated that my university had a beekeeping association... Are you sure yours doesn't? :-)
Apart from rules particular to NZ, because I do not know them, a key factor is that honey and wax containing AFB spores can transmit AFB to other bees in other colonies. The reason this is important is that beekeepers ( speaking as one ) move equipment between hives to balance their growth and give more space to make honey as needed. This is especially true after the honey harvest, when we empty frames of honey and give the wax honey comb back to the bees for them to get ready for the winter.
That makes the timing of this crucial, as it will be less likely for the beekeeper to reduce the damage if the boxes have been removed for harvest, and disassociated from their hive of origin when AFB is discovered. If you can't say where it came from and where it didn't, then it came from everywhere.
It isn't a fun hand to be dealt, and certainly it is worthy of more visibility and research, but it isn't worth wishing he didn't have to destroy it. Even the treatments available need to be used before adding equipment that will be used for honey, because the honey will shield the spores from the treatment and preserve the transmissibility of foul brood.
The article as I read it seemed less about being fun or not or regret / wishing etc. It seemed more about the economic toll on their business and the lack of backstop for the beekeeper. I was frankly surprised there was no government discussion of this - it seemed more rationalizing why the regulation exists rather than acknowledging the lack of insurance or assistance. I didn’t hear them wishing they didn’t have to destroy the hives, but fear of what it’s going to do to their business to lose millions in equipment then millions in revenue in the next season. The discussions of “why can’t we do X instead” were rooted in that economic concern. It seems like a pretty legit concern. A reasonable government response could be establishing a government backed insurance for beekeepers against hive loss.
Not blaming the beekeeper (I don't know), but in that particular case I would really like to know how it happened. I am a beginner beekeeper, and I know many beekeeper who have had AFB in one hive without having to kill the entire apiary. And 10 000 hives means many apiaries (I assume?).
Could it be that the beekeeper took too long to react and let all their colonies get infected? That surely takes some time.
I think they hint at the answer in the article. They mix and match stuff between the different hives during operations so it’s assumed to be infected everywhere within a single operation plus they detect it at a time that you can’t attribute it to a single hive. Maybe the cost of testing each individual hive is too great and the cross contamination issues too likely to have hives infected but not yet observable via tests?
More than 10 000 beehives? How does AFB reach 10 000 beehives before the beekeeper takes action? That's the part I don't get.
It surely takes time for AFB to spread like this. In my country, when AFB is detected, we lockdown (meaning beekeepers cannot move beehives in and out of that radius) and test all the apiaries in a 2km radius. And we destroy the contaminated beehives. But that stays under control. 10 000 beehives sounds like a huge number to me!
My heart breaks for the bees and their keepers (which is weird because most tragic news doesn't phase me), but I don't think think this is a good case for insurance.
You can profitably insure against a flood because it is not more likely to rain when everybody has flood insurance--the risk is independent. But any measure designed to take the sting out of the risk is going to increase the density of colonies and thereby create more risk than there was in the first place. It has a positive feedback loop.
Diffusion of risk does not make it go away, and that diffusion is not what makes insurance profitable. You can insure things like 'hole in one' prize money on an individual basis - it's up to the insurer to set the price and they can and frequently do one-offs. Astute insurers would see the proliferation of hives as an insurance risk and up their rates accordingly which would result in more Beekeepers dropping out of the market. At which time they will likely complain to the government about insurers putting them out of business. I should point out that they could likely have bought insurance for their exact circumstance but they also likely would not have liked the price. In effect they're generally asking for cheap insurance - which is like asking for free money.
As best I can tell the failures of the markets in flood insurance are the results of government interventions.
People are more likely to build in flood zones if they can purchase flood insurance. There's a small town here where every house is within a flood zone off the river and they were underwater for about a week a couple years ago. Built right back up and now there's 2 or 3 new housing developments going in.
The entire coast of Florida is comprised of vacation homes and condos right in the path of hurricane storm surge on tiny sandy keys a few feet above sea level.
Fortunately, the feedback loop is finally disintegrating. Unfortunately for those left holding the bag, it's disintegrating by insurers fleeing the state and leaving properties uninsurable - just deserts for those who knew the risks and thought they could profit off the situation, but terrible for locals forced out of their homes.
I too have little sympathy for those who rebuild and increase development in a river floodplain.
Flood insurance is generally very expensive. That's should be a massive downside. I won't even look at a house if I know it needs flood insurance. I've seen a few that I would have been interested in had they not required the insurance - meaning I found the flood risk to be acceptable and there were mitigating factors if it did occur.
> There's a small town here where every house is within a flood zone off the river and they were underwater for about a week a couple years ago. Built right back up and now there's 2 or 3 new housing developments going in.
Yeah we got the same shit in Ahrtal, Germany. The government decided to do nothing and so, predictably, three years after the last flood, a few weeks ago the next flood came - way smaller than the 2021 flood, but still decently destructive.
IMHO, after devastating flood events governments should declare the affected area uninhabitable, insurances and governments pay out fair market value, and the land is then flattened and condemned for future settlement. There is just no way that with the escalating severity due to climate change this land will ever be safe from flooding again.
The flood plane thing is pretty extreme (and usually involves some sort of corruption, since zoning is involved), but pretty much everywhere on earth is seeing a correlated increased risk of building damage.
The insurance companies are using this as an excuse to increase profitability. Focusing on corner cases is a distraction. Only a tiny percentage of houses are built in flood planes.
A much larger percentage are in the sorts of towns that completely burn to the ground these days, or are in places that became flood planes since the housing was built (e.g., a big chunk of silicon valley).
Other areas face other new/more common correlated disasters, like tornados, widespread crop failure, high wet-bulb days, grid/industrial collapse due to winter storms, etc.
> You can profitably insure against a flood because it is not more likely to rain when everybody has flood insurance--the risk is independent.
Flood insurance is a weird corner case of the market. Insurers would rather not provide flood insurance because of the widespread impact of flooding caused by weather; the claims are enormous. They'd prefer to exclude weather-associated flooding and limit it only to flooding caused by, say, broken plumbing. To the extent you can purchase flood insurance in flood-prone areas, it's because the government has intervened in the market and requires insurers to provide it as a condition of doing business in the state or to get a federally-backed mortgage loan.
For the same reason, earthquake damage is explicitly excluded from homeowner's insurance in quake-prone states like California, Washington, and Hawaii. You have to purchase separate, and very expensive, earthquake insurance. When people see the premiums, they usually decide to forego it.
I think this is an excellent case for insurance, because it seems like something that might rely on beekeepers noticing the disease and acting quickly, even though it might be an option and in their (short-term) interest to look the other way.
When doing the right thing is ruinous with nothing to soften the blow, not doing the right thing becomes a lot more attractive.
Wouldn't your premium just be based on the density of your hives? Insurance insures your individual risk. If you increase your risk, you pay more for it.
The way these pathogens work is that once the environment is sufficiently dense with their spores there is no stopping them. There are certain continents where you just can't grow bananas for this reason. That's why they're burning the bees with the equipment, to prevent it from spreading.
So what's to stop your neighbor from paying the high premiums, getting infected, and then a wayward bee carries the infection to your uninsured hives? As much as it would be nice to protect the bottom line for each farmer, it's far more important to protect the environment's compatibility with bees, and thats not a game that insurance is set up to play.
Does that work? Companies get fined for bad behavior all the time and they rarely change that behavior.
It would seem that once we enter a one dimensional incentive space dictated by money we just forget about the reason behind those incentives and instead try to hack around our new limitations.
Crop Insurance will have requirements for protocols that must be followed to make a crop insurable. For instance, some fruit or seed crops have pollination requirements of 2 hives per acre which must be carried out or they will not provide coverage for certain types of crop failure.
An alternative analog would be not noticing that a cow was acting up, and allowing a whole herd to contract tuberculosis because a farmer didn't contact the vet or isolate parts of his herd from each other or the neighbors. Some things just happen, and they suck. But some things happen when you aren't on top of good management practices, and that sucks but some of it is on the farmer.
One could make the same argument against car insurance, and most kinds of insurance.
I'm pretty sure that if car insurance were somehow banned, especially medical-liability, fewer people would own and operate motor vehicles.
Insurance exists to put an upper bound on risk; the bad thing will hurt or be inconvenient, but with insurance it won't kill you. Perverse incentives appear in the case where the insurance payout is greater than the inconvenience/pain of the insured event. Until that threshold is breached, however, I don't think there's a case against insurance (and insurers that inadvertently pay people to have accidents rapidly go out of business).
Insurance has high upper bounds of coverage, liabilities over this are very unlikely to occur. AFAIK you can't get car liability insurance for infinity dollars. So in theory everyone is accepting some risk even with insurance, they just feel that it's small enough to be worth it.
There are plenty of places on earth that have very little car insurance penetrations so we don't have to guess what that would look like. To me it looks pretty much the same. The major difference is that it's difficult to sue for liability and the people you're suing don't have much money so it's often pointless. Society just accepts that accidents happen, people die, and the survivors move on.
In these, often highly unequal societies, the people who have money have a lot of it so they in effect self insure.
Above the deductible (and premium payments), the insured's exposure is largely lost time and headaches, the remaining financial burden is borne by the insurer. If anything, the presence of insurance might increase the amount of compensation an aggrieved party might be able to reap.
Agreed that there are plenty of places in the world where car-insurance is non-existent. In those places, accident victims may not receive proper compensation for their injuries/destroyed property or the recompense may not be monetary in nature.
I re-used the 'upper bound' for the insurance - there is no upper bound in liability for the insured. Tort law does not specify a limit in liability - though it can be a bit complicated as there can be other laws around this. A 'fully insured' person is taken to mean sufficiently insured to meet a law, or sufficiently insured to meet a reasonable level of liability. While highly unlikely it's possible that someone with $1,000,000 in insurance can incur $10,000,000 in liability.
To your final point, life is unfair yet it continues. I understand that you wish the world would always provide proper compensation for victims, my position is that even if that was theoretically possible, which I don't think it is, it may not even be optimal.
This is true, but there's also the opportunity for a negative feedback loop where the insurer mandates and enforces compliance measures in order to reduce risk.
Curious of the lack of access? to alternatives here. If a hive has AFB the practice I'm aware of is to burn it after dark after all the bees have returned, so they don't scatter to other hives. Its euthanasia for an insect colony. Your equipment goes with it.
But that was obvious signs (the smell) of AFB. Is this a complaint because its only a spore test and then they burn an entire cluster?
> Long said fewer than eight percent of the country's 8000 beekeepers were currently affected - and there were 2900 reports of AFB made in the past year to May, down 15 percent on the 3449 reports the year before.
I wonder if that's just due to people not self-reporting due to the cost of doing so.
> "Beekeepers have to notify and then destroy hives within seven days after finding the disease - and most beekeepers, including Steve, usually comply with that regulation.
Circa 1980, as a hobbyist beekeeper with six hives nearby Seattle, they came down with foul-brood. (It never was certain if it was American Foul-brood or European) Duly reported and the county agent came in, sealed them, and carted them away. For an additional fee (which I paid) they would fumigate them and return just the hive bodies, but none of the frames, (some of which would contain the infected brood). Those were burned. I believe the fumigant at the time was phosphine[1]
"Niha Long said it aimed to support beekeepers impacted by the disease"
With what? A shoulder to cry on? Nothing in her statement after that included anything about financial support, which is the only type of support that matters in this type of situation.
This sounds like when - to protect the American Chestnut from blight - we destroyed nearly all the American Chestnuts and their genetic diversity (including diversity that may have provided resistance).
I generally agree with this sentiment - I'm a treatment-free (disclaimer to prevent hate responses: I use IPM practices, I'm not a complete idiot) beekeeper. Burning the AFB hives and even other proximal ones makes sense. In theory the resistant hives wouldn't develop AFB and wouldn't be burned in the first place. The number of hives required to be burnt in any year is extremely low, so that'd not a factor in the diversity.
Large operations are inherently a threat to diversity. Stuff like package mills supplying most of the country. The large producers could reduce their risks of needing to burn all their equipment by managing multiple smaller apiaries separate from each other. This would limit disease speed and potentially increase diversity (or at least preserve it better).
I'm watching the hundreds black ash trees struggle against the emerald ash borer. They don't live more than 10? years at max though I wonder if that's true for the new ones. But under the pressure of the borer they seed immensely. For every one tree that dies 20 spawn around it. I'm letting the field of them do their thing, hoping at minimum they maintain themselves in their stunted form as a population until we can introduce a resistant tree.
> "The only way to destroy the spores is through burning, so we cannot use antibiotics unlike other countries in the world due to market access
“Market access” in NZ presumably means the local government’s law to use burning, not unwillingness of a pharmaceutical company to sell the antibiotic?
It sounds a bit like using antibiotics would mean they can't sell the honey anymore, which sounds somewhat plausible. It could be that this would violate the terms of trade agreements. Maybe the countries using the antibiotics don't export into markets that have rules against them.
Yes, some antibiotics have been used in markets like China and been found in honey. The antibiotic used is banned in the US due to some sort of negative human impacts. I hear there are other antibiotics approved, but I think it's a patchwork of regulation right now.
Also, I question the effectiveness of antibiotics to treat AFB. If the spores remain viable, reinfection in subsequent years or spread still seems possible.
I think it means that e.g. in the EU antibiotics use would make them lose their certification as organic producer, which probably makes a large difference financially.
That was my first thought too except it’s not organic certification. Anything going to the EU would have to be on the food additive whitelist and be generally recognized as safe in the US, since the antibiotics almost certainly end up in the honey.
The penalties for violating that can be pretty severe too. I.e. if one regulator tests and finds the antibiotics, they might temporarily ban imports of NZ honey altogether until the outbreak has passed or the antibiotic is approved.
That’s how I take it. Antibiotics for AFB were approved in the US in 2016 (based on Google-fu), so it may be NZ hasn’t caught up or has other reasons to keep pharmaceuticals out of beekeeping.
I, at one point like most people in tech thought being a farmer sounded good. In reality its very very hard and stories like these make me realize how lucky I am to get a good salary for essentially sitting in my office writing words in an IDE before calling it a day at 5pm.
I grew up in farming country, and spent most of my childhood on farms, or otherwise around them.
No illusions about it not being incredibly slim margins and fucking backbreaking work with long hours - many farms here are propped up with government subsidies and grants - but it’s still tempting sometimes.
I know a few guys in software who are also working farmers and such, and it seems that the regulations are often poorly considered - adding an additional burden.
Farming can be hard, but every business can get insurance that covers the risks associated with that particular business. And the risks in farming and raising livestock include total loss of crop or livestock from weather and or disease.
In this case, it's not the farming that's the issue, it's the lack of setting up your business to handle the known risks of that business.
While it may be unnecessary, which I'm not entirely sure about, if it's how things have been done for 200+ years, you ought to be able to look around that corner and see that you need a plan B for that day.
Crop and livestock insurance is a well trodden path in farming, and you either need to have the cash on hand to replace your entire operation or you need to insure for the possibility that your crops don't turn out or your livestock is seriously diseased.
"Burning the hives was more painful when other countries used tools like vaccines, antibiotics and sterilisation - measures prohibited in New Zealand and in some export markets.
"Most farmers vaccinate their cows for diseases every single year, but it's illegal to vaccinate the hive," Brown said."
My understanding is the vaccine was only just approved last year in the US, it's the first of its kind, and it might not even be commercially available on a widespread basis yet.
It's it really illegal to vaccinate the hive in New Zealand? It seems odd that a vaccine would be illegal if it was just invented last year. Even in areas where the vaccine is legal, it's not going to save an already infected hive.
I'm not familiar with the sterilization techniques the beek alludes to. I assume some jurisdictions allow irradiation for remediation. It seems most jurisdictions require killing the bees, then burning the frames, and charring the inside if the hive body. It seems other remediation methods are less common.
It's probably a case where it's illegal to vaccinate the hive, because it's not explicitly legal to vaccinate the hive.
For example, in the US, it's legal to use brand name "API-Bioxal", which is Oxalic Acid, to treat for varroa mites. However, one can head to their local hardware store and buy generic "Wood Bleach", which is also Oxalic Acid. It is not legal to use the wood bleach to treat your hive, even though it's the same chemical compound.
> However, one can head to their local hardware store and buy generic "Wood Bleach", which is also Oxalic Acid. It is not legal to use the wood bleach to treat your hive, even though it's the same chemical compound.
It's not, or to be more precise: there is no certification testing done to make sure the "wood bleach" is just oxalic acid and that's it. The stuff you can buy at a veterinarian, however, is certified to be 6% oxalic acid, 47% water and 47% sugar, and nothing else.
TL;DR is (1) none of these methods effectively control transmission of AFB, and (2) AFB is taken extremely seriously. Like, where I live there is a state law allowing ag inspectors to burn hives at their discretion overriding any fire codes in effect
The vaccine thing seems to be extremely new and probably isn't validated enough re: transmission
> "The only way to destroy the spores is through burning, so we cannot use antibiotics unlike other countries in the world due to market access," Long said.
Most of NZ's agricultural produce is exported. There are probably some export markets that don't approve of the use of these antibiotics (if I was guessing probably the EU).
Either nobody will sell it to them (unlikely) or more likely for New Zealand who takes their biosecurity extremely seriously, there's an approval process for agricultural antibiotics to be sold and nobody has completed that process.
Does it? Such vaccines are applied after/before season, bees will eat every bit of honey that may've been affected themselves. Then you put in clean frames for new, fresh honey. I don't know if it can be sold as organic, but it is always separated and the honey never touches any vaccines.
I notice that some people here say "vaccine" and some say "antibiotic" those are very different, as different as like bicycle versus jet liner. Is it a vaccine or an antibiotic?
There are often EU rules against antibiotics in foods because those antibiotics end up inside the humans eating the food which is unnecessary risk (if the humans need antibiotics we'll prescribe them thanks), and sometimes because this is a sign that you're probably not treating whatever it is that's full of antibiotics very well, that's why it needed antibiotics - so stop doing that.
The article itself is inconsistent. I know the difference, but I am not native and I don't know what that bacteria is. I did assume it is an antibacterial vaccine due to: "Most farmers vaccinate their cows for diseases every single year, but it's illegal to vaccinate the hive".
Paenibacillus larvae is a rod-shaped bacterium, so the treatment is an antibiotic. Most people don't understand the difference between vaccines and antibiotics it's all just doctor stuff.
I guess New Zealand has an isolationist policy and they don't want to introduce new chemicals into the environment. Burning probably isn't that huge issue for for small, side hustle beekeepers that have just a few boxes in few different spots. 3000 is an insane amount.
It is baffling to me that insurance isn't available for this. This is exactly the kind of situation that insurance exists for. There should be someone willing to underwrite it.
On one hand, probably yes, on the other hand, if that's the way it's been done for 200+ years as this guy says, then it's not sound to be running a business without a plan for that until things are changed.
Is it needlessly? I didn't see anything in the article that said it was needless. The remediation practices seem to be roughly in line with other countries.
Vaccination isn't an alternative to an already infected hive. The vaccine was the first in the world and was only approved for the first time last year. That's not a feasible alternative at this time.
The heat treatment they talk about is performed in the US too. You generally still need to burn your frames. You are allowed to char the inside of your hive body. It's not a meaningful difference as the frames are the more valuable part. It wouldn't surprise me if New Zealand allows charring the inside of the hive bodies and the farm decided against it due to labor concerns with the volume of equipment.
AFB vaccination is less than two years old and is not available worldwide. The majority of beekeepers expect to burn or absolutely sterilize any equipment that contacts it.
The EU requires equipment to be destroyed if it contacts AFB.
So the vaccine seems to have been approved in the US in 2023, so it's still very new. I assume antibiotics don't do anything against spores, so that is probably not a solution on its own. And I'd be curious what kind of sterilization procedure works for bacterial spores that would be feasible here?
> Burning the hives was more painful when other countries used tools like vaccines, antibiotics and sterilisation - measures prohibited in New Zealand and in some export markets.
This part of the article seems to imply that there are sterilization methods that aren't burning down the entire thing. Which I find a bit doubtful as spores are usually very hard to kill.
The whole story seems a tad off given https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40389997 and that no one could be bothered to find someone to work for ~$5 million to put them through an autoclave.
$2 million is still cheaper than requiring all the bee keepers to vaccinate. Burning seems like a better solution.
Perhaps a national insurance fund to help with unlucky individuals.
Also the country marketing themselves as having organic honey is worh a lot more.
I've paid like $50 for a small jar of nz honey in Dubai airpot, because of reputation...
Champaign from Chapagnia
Lotta the honey bees we're using these days have genetics from Ukraine/Russia as they were found to be excessively mite resistant. The breeding program for mine (Saskatraz) is in Saskatchewan, partially selecting for cold resistant behavior. Meanwhile your honey quality has a lot to do with the local ecology and the weather.
Its interesting NZ is able to have a reputation like that, but I think honey is the exact opposite of specific regionalism like "Champaign from Chapagnia". Quite sure you can drive through all 50 states and find a local beekeepers with good, interesting and organic honey.
I live in Canada, and lost my first hive over this winter. I'm hoping to try again. Honey was delicious...just not enough to share with everyone.
Reputations are worth a lot. Canada attracts millions of students to come here to build its future, on reputation alone. Tough some say it's on the decline. Maple syrup, Ice wine, polar bears and polar dips play on people's imagination across the world.
I can understand no antibiotics or vaccines. New Zealand is notoriously heavy handed.
But I can't understand no insurance. Part of me feels like they forwent even trying to get insurance, despite the obvious risk of potentially having to burn your hives. Or got quoted and decided against it.
So now I feel a bit less "The state is screwing me over" and a bit more "I didn't get insurance, got burned, and now want to socialize the loss with a heart-strings story."
I can't imagine disease wouldn't fall under "Loss of stock". But even if it didn't, you can usually pay for whatever you need. And if the disease is so rampant that insurers won't cover it, that's a good sign you shouldn't be in the business. Like building a house where insurers refuse to offer flood coverage.
The coverage terms, and any exceptions, matter -- at a quick glance, I don't see coverage there for "disease enters a hive and the government forces you to burn all your hives".
In this context, usually it means that you would lose access to a market that you sell to. So, some market for NZ honey won't accept the honey if the bees have been treated. That may be geographical, or it may be something like an organic certification.
For those asking, from TFA: "Burning the hives was more painful when other countries used tools like vaccines, antibiotics and sterilisation - measures prohibited in New Zealand and in some export markets."
The first ever AFB vaccine was just created recently. It got US approval only last year (first market to approve it I believe). So yeah, a vaccine exists, but it's not widespread as it's extremely new.
They threw them all in one sentence and that made me think vaccination of bees is forbidden in NZ!
"Burning the hives was more painful when other countries used tools like vaccines, antibiotics and sterilisation - measures prohibited in New Zealand and in some export markets."
vaccine availability can be affected by things like, no one sells the vaccine here, or an application for a vaccines approval being stuck in a pile of papers.
Sigh ... yet again capitalism when there is profit, socialism when there are losses. I dislike the blatant hypocrisy and how rarely it gets called out.
I don't think it's a law of nature that GPT-generated text must be this discordant and obvious. This is simply the current state of the art, soon to be eclipsed by improved models that are more difficult or impossible to discern, because we have the combination of mathematics, underlying technology, and economic incentive to improve the models.
> because we have the combination of mathematics, underlying technology, and economic incentive to improve the models
Still we'll have to see how much the new models improve. Tesla also has all those incentives to get to actual full self-driving... yet they seem to have reached a plateau years ago.
I think that in both cases it's a question of when the economics run out: There's a Pareto principle plateau where further investment stops making sense when the project is 80% of the way to functional with 80% of the work remaining. (That's the general Pareto 80/20 rule, I suspect the actual numbers for FSD are far worse.)
If Tesla can sell a "Full Self Driving" package with 20% of the work of the real thing, some cameras, and some empty promises for $8k at 0.99%, I think their actual incentives to go from Level 3 to Level 5 are pretty weak.
In contrast, GPTs currently have a small window of utility in marketing, search, and other text generation processes where accuracy isn't that important and weird tics are tolerable. The general public isn't yet accustomed to their hallucinations and foibles, so people are willing to pay to use them in contexts where the current state of the art is inadequate, but there will be recoil from those uses. And there's a huge gold rush underway as Google/Microsoft/Meta/others all try to dominate the future regardless of present economics.
If market access is the reason they can't control with other methods, why isn't that just up to the farmer? I.e. it might affect the price he gets or ability to sell, but that's his call, he might think it works out the better option?
