
Campaigns to save honeybees don't solve the serious problems with pollination - wixxy
https://onezero.medium.com/bee-friendly-companies-are-getting-the-science-of-the-crisis-completely-wrong-c48055460337
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grailed
Our monoculture practices have removed all the natural forage for native bees.
They have nothing to eat amidst a sea of corn and soybean and thus they die.
Additionally, we routinely over-spray with neonicotinoids, which cause the
deaths of native and non-native bees alike. So now the only way to pollinate
fun foods (apples, cherries, almonds, blueberries, etc) is with the european
honeybee (apis mellifera), but we are running out of hives due to pesticide
use, overworking, and parasites (we're down to 1.8M hives in the US from 5.4M
30 years ago).

If we could stop spraying with neonicotinoids and start planting natural
forage (basically just regular weeds), we could undo this in just 10 years.

~~~
tptacek
Can you connect this concern to the actual industry of pollination? Have
pollination services become harder to procure, or dramatically more expensive,
in the last 10 years?

~~~
grailed
Yes! The cost of pollination (the service that most commercial beekeepers in
the US make the vast majority of their income from) has risen something like
200% over the last 30 years.

[https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/37059/49131_sp...](https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/37059/49131_special-
article-september_-pollinator-service-market-4-.pdf?v=0)

~~~
tptacek
I'm looking at your document and it shows no such increase over the last 10
years.

I'm less interested in the 30 year timespan, because other huge changes have
occurred in that timespan, from shifts in agriculture to the collapse of honey
bee populations due to the Varroa mite.

~~~
grailed
Here is some more recent data: [https://www.beeculture.com/2018-almond-
pollination-market-ou...](https://www.beeculture.com/2018-almond-pollination-
market-outlook-demand-supply-contracts/)

In 2017, the average price of pollination was $184.43/hive. That is up from
$125/hive in 2011.

~~~
tptacek
This is a great source, because it goes into detail about supply and demand
factors that are influencing those numbers, including a historic drought,
hurricanes, and changes in California regulations about importing bee
colonies.

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bjelkeman-again
Key statement:

> The real problem is that populations of these native bees are declining due
> to pesticide overuse, climate change, and rampant development that destroy
> insect habitats.

Add agricultural mono culture. I am a beekeeper, and when people talk about
saving the bees, then the above is more or less what I tell them.

~~~
tptacek
Serious question: as a beekeeper, aren't you a part of this problem? The bees
you're keeping are themselves an invasive monoculture that is outcompeting
native pollinators, and puts demands on acres and acres of surrounding flora,
which is a point this article makes.

~~~
bjelkeman-again
We are also working with the community to increase the conditions for other
pollinators. Beekeeping is very local, they only fly 3km. But it is true, we
don’t need more honey bees where we are so we have decreased the number of
hives we have.

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Normal_gaussian
> It’s what scientists like Charlotte de Keyzer, a pollination ecologist and
> doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, are starting to call “bee-
> washing.” It’s a take on the phrase “greenwashing,” a deceptive marketing
> technique advertising environmentally friendly products or services that
> really aren’t so friendly. Bee-washing, as de Keyzer defines it, is when “a
> product, service, or organization is advertised as being more ‘bee-friendly’
> than it actually is.”

This "x"-washing scenario is tricky. There is a lot of money to be made by
overstating claims, and it is often encouraged in the early days of any
movement.

What can realistically be done to prevent this (or at least mitigate damage)?
What are the success stories where people became suitably educated or
corporations suitably regulated?

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JoeAltmaier
Iowa has conservation measures that leave up to 10% uncultivated, which is
important for ground-dwelling bee species. A decade ago it was only 2%.

But a bee exposed to even very low levels of pesticides is doomed. Its hard
for a bee on 10% of the land to avoid the chemicals on the 90% - they range so
far.

Its a tough problem.

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tastyfreeze
Paul Stamets has a possible solution to help the bees.

[https://fungi.com/blogs/articles/bee-friendly-research-
updat...](https://fungi.com/blogs/articles/bee-friendly-research-update-3)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_lqIUlON1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_lqIUlON1s)

[https://beemushroomed.com/](https://beemushroomed.com/)

To truly save bees (native and cultivated) we need more variety of crops in
range of hives to provide longer periods of food availability. Commercial
pollinators have "fixed" the monoculture blossom desert problem by trucking
bees in to areas that have a crop that needs pollinating.

~~~
JPKab
I really like Paul Stamets, but he suffers from classic hammer syndrome. If I
told him I had a broken leg, he'd tell me about a fungi that mends bones.

That being said, skeptics on his fungal research for treatments of numerous
diseases should remind themselves that penicillin comes from a fungus, and
there's some very legitimate science around psilocybin based cures.

His thoughts on anti-viral fungi helping save bee populations seem very valid,
but I'd like to see more peer reviewed research.

~~~
tastyfreeze
Isn't that what we are all expected to do? Apply our expertise and experience
to the world to make it a better place. This man is obsessed with fungi. Can't
blame him for trying to find novel uses for his obsession. But he isn't going
to hand you a bag of mushrooms if there isn't data to back up the claim it
will heal your bones.

He may suffer from hammer syndrome but he backs up his claims with
experimental data. His bee research is fairly new. His research into human
medicinal mushrooms has been reinforced by multiple studies around the world.

------
neonate
[http://archive.is/iIrqR](http://archive.is/iIrqR)

------
john-radio
> Keep the story going. Sign up for an extra free read. You've completed your
> member preview for this month, but when you sign up for a free Medium
> account, you get one more story.

Why does anyone still use Medium?

~~~
neonate
[http://archive.is/iIrqR](http://archive.is/iIrqR)

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ozten
The amount of prose with strike-through made this unreadable for me. Safari
iOS

Update: Looking at Firefox on Desktop, everything underlined in the article
looked like Strike-through on my phone. Weird.

~~~
jfk13
For some reason, they've gone to considerable trouble to _avoid_ using CSS
text-decoration to underline their links - which could be expected to work
pretty well everywhere - and instead implemented custom "underlining" using an
SVG background-image. I guess Safari on iOS doesn't position the background
quite how they expected.

Designers: when you're tempted to do something like this, presumably because
you think you know better than the browser precisely what an underline should
look like... just don't.

~~~
fwxwi
I think they do that to avoid that thing were Chrome/Safari/etc do not draw
the underline where the letters are:
[https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/er57ioliwktkhzeq7...](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/er57ioliwktkhzeq73x2.png)
(they want it to look like Firefox does in this screenshot but on all
browsers)

It's funny because, back when Safari had just launched this, designers went
crazy with ways of emulating it for those who didn't have Safari. Now they do
the opposite. Designers are a plague on earth.

~~~
a1369209993
As hideous as the Chrome and Safari examples look, that's not a decision a
website should be making, or allowed to make.

> Designers are a plague on earth.

~~~
jfk13
There's a CSS feature for that, actually:

    
    
        text-decoration-skip-ink: none;
    

Admittedly, not all browsers support it yet, but that's what websites should
be using if they want to override the default behavior.

