
Believe it or not, the bees are doing just fine - em3rgent0rdr
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/10/believe-it-or-not-the-bees-are-doing-just-fine/
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reidacdc
That's an infuriating headline.

The upshot of the article is, the bees that were recently in the news for
newly being endangered are a small number of species in a geographically
confined area.

The commercially-important bees that are important for pollination are not
endangered, and while mortality for these bees remains anomalously high due to
colony collapse disorder, available stocks remain high because beekeepers have
largely compensated for the additional mortality with larger investments in
breeding additional queens and splitting of hives. This effort is reflected in
the cost of honey, which has doubled since 2006, and the cost of commercial
pollination services, which has also risen.

I suppose it's a useful description of the scope of the new "endangered"
status, but to my mind, there's a pretty big difference between "the bees are
doing just fine" and "commercially important bee populations remain stable
because the economic burden of colony collapse disorder has been passed on to
consumers of bee services".

~~~
stormcloud
I think the headline of this article should be considered in the context it's
presented, namely the context where I've seen several variations on the same
headline "Bees added to US endangered species list for the first time" shared
dozens of times across social media. Personally, I find that headline to be
much more infuriating than this articles.

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lucideer
I don't understand the purpose of this article. The headline seems to be
pushing the message "relax, forget about it, everything's fine". The content
of the article is much more ambiguous.

It starts by saying a Hawaiian bee has been added to the endangered list,
follows by explaining the effects of colony collapse disorder: little change
in commercial bee numbers, harsh economic times for beekeepers, unmeasured and
likely dire change for wild bees.

There is no conclusion to the article, but the bees do not appear to be "doing
just fine"...

~~~
onewaystreet
Authors for major news sites don't write their own headlines which is why
there is often a disconnect with the actual content of the article.

~~~
ethbro
I see this comment a lot on poorly titled articles. My question, what job
title _is_ typically responsible for writing headlines?

~~~
onewaystreet
Copy editor

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dvh
Coworker's husband is a beekeeper. Recently he read in the newspaper that in
his region EU granted few million euros for bee-reintroducing program. He had
some losses so he went to local government office to ask if he as a small
beekeeper is eligible for subsidies. They told him the money will only be used
for advertisement to recruit new beekeepers.

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JauntyHatAngle
Uh, I thought it was the wild bees that we were concerned about.

And from the article about wild bees:

"Of course, the discussion above concerns only commercial bees that are
managed by humans and businesses. Wild bees — whether they're honeybees or one
of our 4,000 other native bee species — face different difficulties. If those
species suffer die-offs, there's nobody around to breed new queens and help
them recover. Wild bees are on their own.

Recent research has shown that the use of certain insecticides called
neonicotinoids has been linked to declines in wild bee populations. But
assessing the true magnitude of the effect is difficult, because it's a lot
harder to survey wild bee populations than domesticated ones."

So basically, move along, bit of a nothing article.

~~~
tptacek
Wild honeybees have been extinct in the US for decades, owing to the Varroa
mite.

~~~
tupshin
Citation would be nice. This article talks about them having rebounded after
near extinction:

[http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/08/some-honeybee-
coloni...](http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/08/some-honeybee-colonies-
adapt-wake-deadly-mites)

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maxsilver
This seems a lot like Y2K syndrome -- Lots of experts working really hard to
avert a crisis, and if/when they mostly succeed, it gives regular folks the
impression that there wasn't much of an issue in the first place, and it was
all overblown to begin with.

"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all"

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Retric
Bee colonies is a somewhat optimistic number. US honey production is a more
dramatic drop from 2000.
[http://www.capitalpress.com/Nation_World/Nation/20150325/us-...](http://www.capitalpress.com/Nation_World/Nation/20150325/us-
honey-production-up-in-2014-but-colony-losses-continue) even though that chart
looks almost flat from 2000 - 2016

Also of note, this is not in a vacuum the EPA has been active over the last
few years. [https://www.epa.gov/pollinator-protection/epa-actions-
protec...](https://www.epa.gov/pollinator-protection/epa-actions-protect-
pollinators)

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somedangedname
I'm no expert but surveying the number of kept hives doesn't tell you anything
about the health of those hives or the total number of living bees.

If colonies are indeed collapsing, beekeepers may need to start more hives to
deal with greater attrition rates.

~~~
beardicus
The article does address this fact, though the headline writer chose to omit
any such subtlety.

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M_Grey
As with so many of WaPo's articles lately, I'm at a loss as to whether this is
clumsy propaganda, or just incredibly inept reporting.

~~~
lvs
Yes, sadly, the Bezos Post is just a shade of what the Washington Post once
was.

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EGreg
They are talking about commercial bees. Not bees in the wild, which are
dwindling.

Just like tree farms don't mean rainforests aren't disappearing.

People are turning the world into farms and this article is oblivious.

~~~
tptacek
There are no North American wild honey bees.

Honey bees are an introduced species.

The last feral North American honey bees were wiped out in the 1980s, by the
Varroa mite.

There are thousands of North American bee species that aren't honey bees. Some
of them may be threatened by any number of factors (most likely: habitat
encroachment).

But an important thing to remember about wild bees and the honey bee CCD
phenomenon is that many wild bee species, including important pollinators,
aren't social. Mason bees, for instance, don't have colonies: every female
makes her own nest. CCD is a social bee phenomenon.

I think? it's possible that there are no North American native social bees
that overwinter entire colonies the way honey bees do. For instance, all the
_bombus_ bees have colonies that last only a year (the colony produces new
queens, which start entire new colonies). If that's the case, CCD is a
phenomenon that definitionally only affects foreign introduced livestock bees.

~~~
beardicus
> The last feral North American honey bees were wiped out in the 1980s, by the
> Varroa mite.

This is likely overstated a bit, though I can't find any recent definitive
surveys of persistent feral honeybee hives. The best I can do is this:

[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0150362)

but they don't actually test any feral hives, just attempt to determine
factors that could lead to survival with varroa infestation. Anecdotally I
know of a few feral hives that have survived multiple years in trees and
barns, but I can't rule out the possibility that they're "seeded" by swarms
from managed hives every spring (they're too far away for me to inspect
regularly). Also, Youtube has a few folks doing cutouts of wild hives that
have taken up residence in houses and sheds, and there's clear evidence of
multiple years of work in some of these hives.

A bit of a nitpick, I admit, but I'd go with "mostly wiped out" personally.

~~~
tptacek
I'm fine with stipulating "mostly wiped out" rather than "eradicated" as long
as we can both agree that they're not native to the country. They were brought
here as livestock.

~~~
EGreg
It's amazing how much you guys know about bees ... I was relatively sure that
tptacek's main job was computer related security, so having such a deep
knowledge of bees is impressive.

~~~
tptacek
It's the thing I love most about this site, is that it generates an incentive
to go read journal articles about bees.

Things like this usually start with some seed of general knowledge or trivia
--- in my case, it's listening to EconTalk, which had an episode with a bee
economist talking about the misconceptions about colony collapse. But in an HN
thread, you usually need something more specific than the general vibe of an
EconTalk episode, so you go do a bunch of reading.

It's fun! It's like competitive librarianing.

(For what it's worth: that's _not_ what I do in infosec and crypto threads.)

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helthanatos
I thought this article would have to africanized bees. Is anyone else worried
about that? Commercial bees are just fine this says but it's only talking
about population size.

