well if that is the case, humans can take pollinator job roles when AI will take their excel jobs.
I can't find any research on the impact of increased prevalence of vaping on bee populations. I feel there should be scientific studies done on this. It's pretty much sweet smelling sticky bee poison that people are now walking about puffing all over every surface.
Probably the same reason we had 40+ tornadoes, huge hailstorms, floods, and drought-enabled wildfires in six adjacent states within 48 hours. Anthropogenic climate change is real, whether you believe in it or not.
The upside is now farmers won’t have to worry about what to do with the crop surplus from trade wars, dismantled USAID, and defunded school lunch program.
Dont forget that time the hurricane hit Tennessee and it fucking flooded the mountains
Everything is totally normal
Have you tried persecuting all the scientists yet??
They just got fired, together with anyone who might begin to fix this.
We're pretty sure it's the Monsanto pesticide and anyone who suggests it is hit with a litigation threat. Curiously, as we're speed-breeding domesticated bees the wild bees are dying out faster, so as the bee population dwindles it also becomes more domesticated and less wild. I know that's a bad thing, but I am fuzzy on the why details.
I'm a brown thumb, and plants wilt as my shadow falls on them, but if you're a green-thumb, plant pollinators, which will help the bees.
Also plant milkweed for the monarchs.
Some beekeepers actually mentioned that they've been scraping the beeswax clean off their hives more frequently because its known that the beeswax collects pesticides and herbicides over time which affects the colony due to exposure.
The problem is its not just monsanto acid, there's a ton of other issues also correlated like weather/climate, seasonal flowering, untreated parasites, bacteria, etc.
We've literally nuked the environment so hard that even if we fix one problem, the population will not make a full bounce back (although I would think monsanto is the biggest threat)
Biggest scam of this century was corporate produce monoliths convincing people Organic was about health and not the fact that it doesn't use a scorched earth policy and scam one off hybrid plant seeds to grow food which has been setting us up for a widespread fammine for decades.
Some random superweed is gonna crossbreed with some rapid out of control growth plant and wipe out half of the food chain.
Plant native. Plants that are native to your ecosystem. Those are the true pollinator powerhouse plants that bees need to survive
Also, the domesticated bees are generally honeybees. And unfortunately, honeybee and wild bees don't fulfill the same rile, so even if we replaced wild bees with honeybees 1:1, we still wouldn't be able to polinate everything.
I know it’s likely pesticides, but have we officially ruled out bee assassins?
You mean wasps? They have been pretty quiet lately...
Ah cmon now, stop spreading conspiracy theories. They probably just couldn’t prove citizenship and were deported.
it's the European honey bee that's dying in unprecedented numbers
but it's not all bees
European honey bees are the easy button for farmers but they are going to have to decide if pesticide is more important or not
this nobody knows what's happening is bullshit provided by the likes of the Monsanto and other chemical companies
They (save for a smarter minority) are 100% gonna decide that pesticides are more important. Until they learn they aren't, but it will be too late.
I was worried so I looked for the source of the information, it seems to be from 'Washington State University" from their website they say it concerns "Commercial honey bee colony", so it might not be all bees (I don't know enough to say what the difference is exactly), they say "60 to 70% losses" (not 80), and they also say "Over the past decade, annual losses have typically ranged between 40 and 50%.", so it is probably worrying but not as much as the CBS article was making it seem.
I definitely don't want to downplay a crisis, but I feel like I've been seeing headlines saying "all the bees are dying and we don't know why" every year for nearly 20 years now.
I'm no bee expert. Just seems to me, based on the headlines, bees would've been extinct 10 years ago.
Some cursory searching led me to Colony Collapse Disorder which seems to have no agreed-upon cause. It appears devastating losses to honey bee colonies started being reported around 1900. But it also mentions:
In 2024, the United States Census of Agriculture reported an all-time high in commercial honey bee hives (mostly in Texas), making them the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country.[38]
Link to the source cited there: https://archive.is/nfeb2
Apparently last year saw the largest honey bee populations in US history. Though they write that huge boom in honey bee population is a threat to other native pollinators, so I guess that presents its own unique problems.
Usually, when people talk about bees dying, they mean wild bees. Unlike honey bees they aren't cultivated by us. They also tend to be better pollinators than honey bees, adapted to local plants that honey bees can't handle well.
The issue is OP is spreading misinformation. You‘re right, we haven‘t lost 80% of the bee population, because this was a hypothetical statement in the article saying it would have consequences if it happened.
That's $15 billion worth of crops.
They just can't break out of that frame, even when the topic is EVERY LIVING THING FUCKING STARVING TO DEATH.
honeybees are an invasive species, fun fact
unfortunately they outcompeted a lot of the native pollinators so we're fucked without them though
humans are a more invasive species, probably the most
Honey bees are dying but you can help native bees in your area. Find out what they like and plant that shit. Also just letting weeds grow helps a lot of species.
I get leafcutter bees at my place as well as a few other solitary species
Bees live less than two months, so if only 80% of bees died in the last 8 months that would suggest a sharp recent population increase. And even if you take it as read that it means bees dying and not being replaced, 8 months is still a terrible timeframe to use because it's literally saying "there are 80% fewer bees now, at the tail end of winter, than there were at the height of bee season".
I'm not saying there isn't a bee crisis, just that this factoid is very badly worded.
Without looking at data it could also mean "beginning 8 months ago we noticed a downwards trend of bees compared to the prior year(s) that culminates to an 80% decline at the time of writing."
The running thought is these non-native European honeybees couldn't find forage at the right times due to climate change and these massive commercial hives died of malnutrition. That's why introduced species and monoculture agriculture don't work out so well.
Okay, but European honeybees in the US aren't exactly new afaik. That would be like if all of the sudden, 80% of wild horses up and die and the answer is "well, they're an introduced species, so it only makes sense".
Remember that honey-producing bees are terrible pollenators compared to the specific pollenators who don't produce honey. The honey producing bees being kept by everyone are artifically outcompeting the specific pollenators, which are what we really need to be supporting.
Okay, but how do I personally monetize non-honey making bees? Sure, the general ecology needs this, but what's in it for me, right this instant?
LETS KEEP PUMPING CAPITALISM UP
NEW IPHONE WITH AI LETS GOOOOO
Sorry for getting all excited, it’s just we don’t have much time.
Imma go out on a limb here and blame late stage Capitalism and some sort of pesticide or whatever that could solve the problem if it costed 5 cents more but the solution is to save that money and let the bees die.
Imma take my chances on that.
Care about the environment? Great me too. Thats why im asking ya'll to sign up for the General strike.
Generalstrikeus.com
Share it with your family, friends, social media.
Want to help? Plant pollinator gardens. Easy peasy. Even some pots of local wildflowers on your patio. It all helps.
It does, but the problem everyone's talking about isn't about wild bees, it's about farming bees. Monospeecies of non-native bees pollinating monoculture of probably corn. They are dying, but only because they're basically kept in bees analogue of factory farming conditions.
Wild pollinators are fine (well, as fine as any wild species can be in our world, so not really, but at least not worse than others)
Bees have been under assault for a while.
It's hive mites. The Varroa mite is going to wipe out all bees from the planet. And there's not a damn thing we can do about it.
Source: talked to a beekeeper.
there’s a fungus that protects against the mites and it’s being researched. it’s genius, the bee picks up the fungus in a contraption where it has to crawl through to get to nectar and then brings it back to the hive. i read it in Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life.
Shame. The US is a beautiful country and psycho cult rednecks have let deregulation ruin such beautiful wilderness.
make sure you retract words like bias and gender from your articles and they will come back. they are just extremely bigoted.
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