
Helping Native Bees Thrive in a Honeybee World - chmaynard
https://e360.yale.edu/features/backyard-battle-helping-outnumbered-native-bees-thrive-in-a-honeybee-world
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a_bonobo
'The bees are dying so we should all become beekeepers!' is imho, one of the
biggest failures of science-communication in the past decades.

Honey bees are doing comparatively OK, for honey bees to die out it would
require a much greater catastrophe than what we're seeing right now. Honey
bees are quasi-domesticated with humans pushing colony size, it would be like
milk-cows dying out.

It's native bees that are being killed off by pesticides, monocultures, and
loss of habitat (due to humans encroaching, or feral honey bees pushing out
native bees).

Some examples:

>On organic farms near natural habitat, we found that native bee communities
could provide full pollination services even for a crop with heavy pollination
requirements (e.g., watermelon, Citrullus lanatus), without the intervention
of managed honey bees. All other farms, however, experienced greatly reduced
diversity and abundance of native bees, resulting in insufficient pollination
services from native bees alone. We found that diversity was essential for
sustaining the service, because of year-to-year variation in community
composition

from
[https://www.pnas.org/content/99/26/16812.short](https://www.pnas.org/content/99/26/16812.short)

>Recent studies suggest that the presence of large numbers of introduced
[honey bee] managed colonies can threaten wild bee populations. Therefore,
proposals to exclude A. mellifera colonies from protected areas have arisen.

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016953471...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016953471930117X)

and so on

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UncleOxidant
Whereas I've been seeing less honeybees over the last several years, my garden
this year seems to be teeming with native bumblebees, mason bees and a few
others I do not know the identity of. Perhaps a decline in honeybees will
actually help native bees to recover?

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donatzsky
Some resources, if you want to make a bee hotel.

[https://www.foxleas.com/make-a-bee-hotel.asp](https://www.foxleas.com/make-a-
bee-hotel.asp)

[https://entomologistlounge.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/insect-h...](https://entomologistlounge.wordpress.com/2017/09/18/insect-
hotels-a-refuge-or-a-fad/)

In French, but has some good designs:

1\. [https://www.abeillessauvages.com/nichoirs-a-
abeilles/chalet-...](https://www.abeillessauvages.com/nichoirs-a-
abeilles/chalet-a-abeilles-solitaire/)

2\. [https://www.abeillessauvages.com/nichoirs-a-
abeilles/dortoir...](https://www.abeillessauvages.com/nichoirs-a-
abeilles/dortoir-a-abeilles-solitaires/)

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alaaf
Shameless plug: [https://www.beehome.design/](https://www.beehome.design/) I
worked on an app that lets you design your own Bee Home and let it be
fabricated at a local makerspace. This way you can help the population of
solitary bees.

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Loughla
What kind of file does that process spit out for you to use?

~~~
dubya
dxf

