
U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high - monort
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/23/call-off-the-bee-pocalypse-u-s-honeybee-colonies-hit-a-20-year-high/
======
floatrock
There's a little bit of dodging going around in this article... What's really
going on is we still have a high amount of churn in the funnel, we're just
spending more to hide it.

> "The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of
> managed colonies -- that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed
> by human beekeepers -- is now the highest it's been in 20 years."

So the absolute numbers are up, great, but that did not come for free:

> "The average retail price of honey has roughly doubled since 2006"

Or, put in startup lingo, the churn is still high, but we're just hiding it by
paying more to acquire a larger number of bees. CCD is still killing off bees,
but we're just spending more to compensate.

This is the dodgeyness: any good HN reader knows that it's your churn that
kills your finances in the end.

And that's where the insanity lies: I believe that CCD has basically been
conclusively traced to a certain class of pesticides... what sounds insane to
me is we have created a toxic environment that has increased the leaking in
the boat, but it's okay because we can just spend more money on bigger bilge
pumps instead of addressing the underlying cause of the leak.

~~~
tptacek
You're referring to neonicotinoids. Let's stipulate that neonicotinoids are in
fact the root cause of CCD, which is defined as the increase in overwintering
colony losses.

Honey bees are a livestock animal, tied directly to agriculture.
Neonicotinoids are popular in part because they're a narrow spectrum pesticide
targeted at insect biology, and have fewer ill effects on other mammals than
other pesticides.

Here's the question: if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture, and CCD
can be mitigated by more aggressive colony generation strategies, why would we
need to address neonicotinoids at all? The market seems to have already done
that.

~~~
floatrock
> why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all?

Unintended consequences of large-scale ecological engineering perhaps. Sure,
commercial beekeepers can increase prices and the neonicotinoid users can
accept it as an indirect cost of their choice of pesticide, but what about the
large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied
into commercial interests, but on which we still depend?

Seems to me like there's a huge indiscriminant spillover effect into an
incredibly complex system, the implications of which can not be easily
predicted nor priced.

One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at
pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost
onto carbon emissions. Also note how you said "have __fewer __ill effects on
other mammals "... there are still effects, and asbestos seemed like a miracle
material before the long-term effects were studied.

The indiscriminate usage of an chemical toxic enough to cause measurable
ecological web disruption sounds like a geo-engineering quagmire to me, even
if the commercial front-line can compensate with higher prices. How do you
accurately price what you don't know?

~~~
CWuestefeld
_One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at
pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost
onto carbon emissions._

Actually, this isn't a shortcoming of the market as such. It's a failure in
conjunction of our incomplete recognition of private property rights. By
preventing certain types of property from having private ownership, we don't
allow the market to correct itself. More specifically, if we had some private
entity or entities that were recognized as the owners of air or water, then
they would be able to recover damages from the polluters, thus removing
ability to externalize the cost of pollution.

But once you start removing things from the purview of the market (in this
case by saying that nobody can own it, and thus nobody has an ownership
interest in protecting or has a right to damages), then you're actively
preventing the market from correcting. I think it's really amazing that the
market does as well as it does, considering how ubiquitous are the regulations
that handicap it.

Edit: I should have read farther down the chain, where this [1] mentions the
same idea.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024457)

~~~
lisper
> if we had some private entity or entities that were recognized as the owners
> of air or water

I volunteer to be that entity.

~~~
politician
I _can 't_ upvote you. Bravo.

~~~
lisper
Thanks, but why can't you upvote me?

~~~
politician
I don't want to endorse your position as a monopoly owner of both _air_ and
_water_ , and yet I want to reward you for boldness. There isn't a button for
that.

~~~
lisper
> I don't want to endorse your position as a monopoly

I really don't think you need to worry too much about that.

------
dayaz36
A comment from a real bee farmer on the article: " Mr Ingraham---do not assume
you can read a few papers on CCD and bees and make cogent, authoritative
remarks in a newspaper piece----this piece fails miserably. I AM a beekeeper,
in Los Angeles, using feral honey bees, making public presentations, teaching
beekeeping and selling honey. I am going to fill in your ignorance here with a
few salient points. Making splits causes a yield of TWO WEAK hives, which is
not the same as having the vigorous, healthy original hive. And just so you
know, the splits the commercial folks are making from the survivors of
pesticide, fungicide, herbicide exposure on industrial crops are the already
weakened colonies that happen to make it. So, the splits are not especially
fated to thrive, either. Your little tables showing statistics does not tell
the real story of the insults being suffered by ALL pollinators from monocrop,
industrial agriculture. The typical Consumerist answer to a problem---"just
buy more" bees and queens is not addressing the real problems which are
decline in clean forage from toxic chemical exposure, lack of forage
diversity, trucking bees all over the country, narrow in-bred genetics. The
loss of all pollinators, as well as decline in overall ecosystem diversity
from the same insults, is the REAL issue. Your piece is also old ground
previously plowed over by that corporate apologist and booster at Forbes, Jon
Entine, another geek behind a computer who writes about beekeeping with a
singularly narrow and uniformed arrogance. Like your ballyhooed Tucker and
Thurman, the "economists" (never far from pontificating for the beauties of
the "free market") the people weighing in on the loss of pollinators and
trying to urge us not to be concerned are akin to Climate Change denialists. "

~~~
_delirium
There's already a sub-thread about this in the comments here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10024292)

~~~
dayaz36
I know. I wanted to make it more visible.

------
abakker
From Wikipedia:

The pollination of California's almonds is the largest annual managed
pollination event in the world, with close to one million hives (nearly half
of all beehives in the USA) being trucked in February to the almond groves.
Much of the pollination is managed by pollination brokers, who contract with
migratory beekeepers from at least 49 states for the event. This business has
been heavily affected by colony collapse disorder, causing nationwide
shortages of honey bees and increasing the price of insect pollination...

Does anyone feel that transporting livestock from this many places to a single
place where they can all commingle is a needlessly risky strategy? Assuming
that CCD is caused by pesticides, this seems to guarantee exposure to a large
number of bees that might otherwise live in pesticide-free areas.
Additionally, if CCD has a fungal/parasitic component, then this would be an
ideal way to infect as many hives as possible, in as short a time as possible.

~~~
tedunangst
Wow. 49 states implies that at least one of Alaska or Hawaii is involved.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Why would you be surprised that they grow things in Hawaii.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_B._Dole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_B._Dole)

~~~
zevyoura
The surprising part is that they're shipping live bees back and forth
overseas.

------
nonameface
Buying more and more bees is a very expensive solution. Perhaps I'm just a
poor beekeeper (maybe true?) but I would have to sell my honey at untenable
prices if I was looking to make money on my beekeeping.

For example, I've spent $1600 on bees and equipment, I've harvested 3 gallons
of honey. I would have to sell that honey at $44/Pound to break even. Now
hopefully over the long term this goes down a lot as the upfront capital
investments spread out over the years.

My bee losses have been huge though. The first year I had 3 hives, lost 2. The
second year I had 5 hives and lost 3, last year I had 5 hives and lost 4.
Buying bees at $130/hive isn't sustainable (except through my charity) if I
wanted to actually make any money at this, especially on a small scale.

~~~
tptacek
If reconstituting new hives from annually purchased queens was economically
non-viable, pollination prices --- which is where the money in honey bee
husbandry seems to come from --- would show that. But while prices have risen,
it doesn't look like they've done so at a historically unprecedented rate.

Irrigation is a much bigger economic threat to pollinated crops than
pollination.

~~~
nonameface
Yes, this is true -- in large agriculture, pollination is where the money is
in beekeeping. I know pollination contracts stipulate "frames of bees" to be
considered a hive (for example you might need 20 "frames of bees" to get paid
for that hive) but I also think you're getting weaker hives out there for
pollination. So while the price isn't going up, the size of the product is
going down.

Same concept as the cereal boxes. They look the same from the outside, but
they put less cereal in it and charge you the same price instead of raising
the price.

------
terminado
So, we're " _buying_ " new bees to offset the bees that die?

Uh... forgive me if I seem a little dense here but... where the hell are these
_store-bought_ bees coming from then? The moon? If the mass hysteria of CCD
continues unabated, does that mean that bees _WON 'T_ go extinct because we
can simply " _buy_ " more bees from _God_ at the God® store?

Are we back in the 1800's when spontaneous generation still held some
ostensible sway over mother nature? Do they spontaneously materialize and
transmogrify from some other form of matter? Do flowers transform into bees
because the two are actually the same?

------
pingou
According to the article, the number of colonies is bigger than before because
bee keepers simply buy more bees as replacement, but it doesn't explain where
they come from.

Also: "put half the bees into a new beehive, order them a new queen online
(retail price: $25 or so), and voila: two healthy hives."

Does that mean you have 100% more colonies but the same number of bees? I
suppose not, but I think it would be interesting if we could see the evolution
of the numbers of bees instead of the number of colonies.

~~~
c-slice
A small number of bees when placed with a queen will quickly produce a full
size hive. Bee hives have a size limit, so dividing them into two smaller
hives produces rapid population growth. A queen bee can lay 1000 eggs a day.

~~~
StavrosK
This is the most outlandish attempt at a proof of the Banach-Tarski theorem
I've heard so far.

------
chrissnell
I'm not so sure. I have a large backyard garden and I'm surrounded by
neighbors who also garden. I was chatting with some of them the other day and
we've all noticed a significant drop in fertilization amongst our plants this
year. My tomato plants are typically overloaded with fruit by this time of
year but now only have four or five tomatoes each. Same story with the
tomatillos, the squashes, the cukes and the watermelons. Production is less
than half of a typical year.

My neighbor kept bees but lost his colony last year. I can't say for sure that
CCD is the root of our problems--home gardens are more popular around here
than ever and perhaps the bees have an overabundance of food--but it certainly
feels like something is wrong. Obviously home gardeners and beekeepers don't
have the funds to bolster the bee population like a large commercial grower
might.

~~~
eric_h
Sounds like you need to fashion a bee stick [1] so you can do the pollination
yourself.

We used these in a high school science project to pollinate fast plants.

[1][http://www.fastplants.org/how_to_grow/pollinating.php](http://www.fastplants.org/how_to_grow/pollinating.php)

~~~
schiffern
Even easier: plant wildflowers to feed and attract pollinators. Borage is a
good one (and it repels bunnies too), or just find a good native wildflower
mix.

------
rrss1122
Interesting that the government put together a policy framework to "save the
bees", but the market corrected itself anyway.

Also interesting that you can buy a queen bee online for $25.

~~~
floatrock
The 'market corrected' itself by increasing prices because that's the only way
you can keep up with a high leaky churn.

We haven't 'corrected' anything, we've only found a new (more expensive)
equilibrium because the inputs are still dying off at a higher rate. The
correct thing to do is to address WHY the inputs have become more expensive...
my understanding is that research now points to a certain class of destructive
pesticides.

------
breischl
So the proffered solution is ordering new bees from the internet. That seems
like magical thinking. I don't think Amazon has figured out how to fabricate
bees from base atoms, so presumably somebody, somewhere is breeding those bees
for sale.

Don't those breeders have the same problems? What's preventing the magical
internet bee source from having their colonies die off?

------
tehchromic
The bottom line is there are huge corporate interests willing to spend money
to bury the fact that their investments in toxic agricultural pesticides,
herbicides and fungicides are having a permanent, devastating effect on the
planetary biome.

The collapsing honey bee is the poster child of the irrevocable damage they
are perpetrating on the planet, which is the mostly silent holocaust of our
times.

So take any positive media on the recovery of the honey bee that isn't result
of curbing industrial agricultural practice, with a big grain of organic salt.

~~~
the8472
> irrevocable damage

That seems a bit hyperbolic to me. The damage seems revocable if actual effort
were put into it instead of just papering over the symptoms.

Of course such things often require policy change, change that some people
might oppose. But that does not make the damage itself irrevocable.

It just means that people are prioritizing other goals over it.

~~~
tehchromic
If the monarch butterfly goes extinct like the passenger pigeon, that's
irrevocable. And evidence is mounting that we are at the edge of an man made
extinction event, and by evidence I mean the number of species that go extinct
per year. I don't think the big concern here is hyperbole, but rather the
papering of it over, on which point we agree.

------
orf
So the solution is to... buy more bees of the internet? Thank god we solved
CCD

~~~
tptacek
CCD is an economic problem. The varroa mite wiped out feral North American
honey bees --- which are _not native_ to North America --- a long time ago.
Supposedly, any honey bee you've seen in the wild for the past decade has been
part of a proprietary hive.

So, ordering more honey bee queens off the Internet seems to be a pretty
reasonable response to the problem of a 10-20% increase in overwintering hive
failures.

~~~
thrownaway2424
What would a non-native honey bee in the wild look like? I live in California
and the bees in my garden and in the local parks are various. Some look like
bumblebees and some look like just bees but I don't know bees from bees.

~~~
kaitai
tptacek has a very efficient guide to bees posted. Another nice national one
that is very comprehensive is the USDA's guide at
[http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb530646...](http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5306468.pdf)
. Scroll to page 17 or so to start looking at illustrations of particular bees
if you don't want to read about their habits. But the best for CA is the
Berkeley Bee Lab's page on native bees at [http://www.helpabee.org/common-bee-
groups-of-ca.html](http://www.helpabee.org/common-bee-groups-of-ca.html)

There was a great art & education & science installation on native bees at the
UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley a few years back
([http://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/article/Shirley-Watts-
Mo...](http://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/article/Shirley-Watts-Mouthings-at-
Botanical-Garden-2325642.php)). I know they still have a beehive, and they
might have some exhibits on native bees.

~~~
thrownaway2424
The Berkeley site is neat, but it's got a picture of the european honey bee
right at the top and no mention of it being non-native.

------
nostromo
So was that the solution all along? Just breed more bees to replace the ones
that die?

If that's the case, it seems like a mountain was made out of a mole hill in
the media. I read multiple times that I may never eat a pollinated fruit or
vegetable again.

~~~
Beltiras
No, the article is just putting forth very misleading and cherry-picked data.
It's a little bit amazing that he actually mentions splitting and higher hive
count close to each other without realizing that this will not increase the
pollinator count by twofold. A real beefarmer has a comment on the article
that everyone should read, it's illuminating.

""" Mr Ingraham---do not assume you can read a few papers on CCD and bees and
make cogent, authoritative remarks in a newspaper piece----this piece fails
miserably. I AM a beekeeper, in Los Angeles, using feral honey bees, making
public presentations, teaching beekeeping and selling honey. I am going to
fill in your ignorance here with a few salient points. Making splits causes a
yield of TWO WEAK hives, which is not the same as having the vigorous, healthy
original hive. And just so you know, the splits the commercial folks are
making from the survivors of pesticide, fungicide, herbicide exposure on
industrial crops are the already weakened colonies that happen to make it. So,
the splits are not especially fated to thrive, either. Your little tables
showing statistics does not tell the real story of the insults being suffered
by ALL pollinators from monocrop, industrial agriculture. The typical
Consumerist answer to a problem---"just buy more" bees and queens is not
addressing the real problems which are decline in clean forage from toxic
chemical exposure, lack of forage diversity, trucking bees all over the
country, narrow in-bred genetics. The loss of all pollinators, as well as
decline in overall ecosystem diversity from the same insults, is the REAL
issue. Your piece is also old ground previously plowed over by that corporate
apologist and booster at Forbes, Jon Entine, another geek behind a computer
who writes about beekeeping with a singularly narrow and uniformed arrogance.
Like your ballyhooed Tucker and Thurman, the "economists" (never far from
pontificating for the beauties of the "free market") the people weighing in on
the loss of pollinators and trying to urge us not to be concerned are akin to
Climate Change denialists. """

~~~
tptacek
This beekeeper's comment doesn't appear to contain any testable arguments.
They don't like the fact that maintenance of honey bee stock will require
aggressive colony creation, but they don't appear to have an argument to back
that up that isn't essentially an appeal to the naturalist fallacy.

This is also a beekeeper attempting to husband honey bees using feral bee
populations, 98+% of which were annihilated by the varroa mite a long time ago
(there are people who dispute whether "feral honey bees" really still exist at
all in the US).

I'm not especially moved by arguments that attempt to tar people asking
reasonable questions about insects to climate change denialists.

~~~
stonemetal
It contains several testable points. Does splitting a hive create two weak
hives? How do you characterize this weakness and do they recover from it? What
is the genetic diversity of the bee population? Is it growing or shrinking?
Toxic chemical free forage is it growing or shrinking? Forage diversity should
also be easy to measure and track changes over time. Other than the personal
attacks what did you find not testable?

------
rpenm
Interestingly, European bees hybridized with African bees seem to be quite
resistant to CCD. Makes me wonder if one of the problems afflicting American
honeybees is a lack of genetic diversity.

~~~
dejv
Well there are other factors in this debate. European-African hybrids are much
more aggressive to the beekeeper and there are different conditions that kills
the colony. Another factor is the honey production rates for these hybrids.

There are many different species of bees in use, with different characteristic
in areas of amount of honey produced, aggression, tendency to get different
forms of illness and so forth.

------
c-slice
Life finds a way. I think in some ways, CCD has probably "pruned" the bee
population in a good way. Beekeeping allowed weaker hives that would have
normally died off in the wild to continue to spawn new hives. CCD has reversed
that trend, and may have improved the overall strength of the bee population
genetics.

~~~
maratd
> CCD has probably "pruned" the bee population in a good way

A reduction in the population is never a good thing. Is this some sort of neo-
eugenics viewpoint? Pruning the population will not create some sort of super-
bee. That's not how it works.

It will enhance whatever qualities are being selected for, but it will reduce
the genetic diversity in the population, making it vulnerable to a hole raft
of new diseases and disorders.

Ideally what you want is for the genetic variant that protects against a
specific disease to be already within the population and for that variant to
simply spread, without any population loss. If you're losing population, that
is a BAD thing. That means things are happening too quickly and you're in for
a world of hurt in the long-term.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bottleneck)

~~~
tptacek
Yours is a needlessly inflammatory response to what was in fact a reasonable
question.

Eugenics is a philosophy that suggests _human breeding_ should be controlled
to select for favored features. It's disfavored for a variety of obvious
reasons that connect to our principals about the unique value of human life.

Honey bees are livestock. Livestock has been selectively bred for millennia,
and discussions of long-term genetic selection among honey bees is not an
indicator that participants believe in eugenics.

~~~
maratd
> ... to what was in fact a reasonable question.

There was no question. It was a statement.

> Yours is a needlessly inflammatory response ...

I'm sorry, but what word would you use to describe the theory that selective
pressures that decimate a population will eventually result in a superior
specimen?

It may be inflammatory, but that's the only word that came to mind.

~~~
marknutter
How about "genetic engineering".

~~~
klibertp
I don't think genetic engineering involves killing off large chunks of a
population just because it - for the moment - pays off. I'm not a specialist,
though, so I may well be wrong here...

------
ChuckMcM
Nice to see the other side of the story for a change. While the 'extinction
threat -> loss of all pollinated food -> disaster' narrative gets a lot of
fear views, if we actively assist honey bee colonies in growing on a large
scale we can replace a lot of bees quickly.

~~~
dmritard96
This 'other side of the story' is incomplete. Sure commercial outfits will
just pay more and buy more honeybees, but nature won't.

Given that the entire problem is being caused by a dragnet insect poison, it
would seem the wiser approach would be to find an alternative or improvement
to the poison in its current form.

------
dennisgorelik
Queen-bee sale page is an interesting read too:

[http://wildflowermeadows.com/queen-bees-for-
sale/](http://wildflowermeadows.com/queen-bees-for-sale/)

------
dejv
So, we have learn how to produce bee queens on industrial scale, package them
to sealed bag and sell them for 100 bucks.

We replaced the natural way with industry and the author call it success.

------
ZeroFries
Why was this downvoted? Does CCD selection pressure help or hinder bee
genetics?

~~~
stephengillie
_Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and
it makes boring reading._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
tlarimer
Even when it is paired with a question asking for clarification on the subject
matter at hand?

~~~
dang
Yes, because you can always delete the downvote noise and keep the clarifying
question.

