"Scientists synthesize nutrients Bees no longer get because humans destroyed all the flowers, and we think this is a net good."
It's possible to make things worse when attempting to solve a problem made by uncaring people. Making things better, temporarily, often gives them more time to continue to make things worse. Making things better this way also leads people at-large to believe they no longer need to take steps back away from disaster.
The way you're quoting this implies sarcasm or derision. Okay then, we should do nothing? The ecosystem is a wreck, yes, and acting our entire species took part is disingenuous at best.
Don't be unnecessarily negative about this. The people trying to figure this out want to make things good again. Destroying the planet is easy. Fixing it is alot harder!
This isn't fixing. This is a bandaid for some symptoms because god forbid we stop burning the planet to the ground.
Yeah, it's like when firefighters "save" people from burning building and everyone's like, "well done firefighters, you did a good job" and I'm over here being smart and sensible saying "if firefighters were such heroes, why did the building burn down in the first place?" because I am very smart and sensible.
They’ve done far more than you have so far. And maybe because of it some bees will still be around to benefit when people “stop burning the planet to the ground”. Turns out both ecology and environmentalism is more than performative statements.
Yeah. That's unfortunate. An absolute travesty. But we've found a way to fix what we have fucked up. And that's good. Don't minimalize it.
We've broken the system. That sucks. But we've found a way to fix it for now. Not as good, but we are trying to do something.
Give some credit to the folks that are trying to fix our fuck ups. God damn it some people have realized what a mess we've made and are trying to do something to fix it. Small wins may just save our asses if we let them stack up enough.
No no, you see other people did bad things, so the scientists' attempts to make the world a better place are bad. That's just how ethical philosophy works, I don't make the rules
Spouse and I work every year to add native plants and flowers back around our host to give the bees a place to go. Anything to save these amazing, little polinaters.
lets burn everything, then spend all our time working on synthesizing nutrients and give ourselves nobel prizes for saving the world
Let's go sustainable AND reverse the damage already done.
What do you propose we do? Are you going to give up the phone or PC you used to make your comment? Are you gonna stop using electricity? How about your car? Are you going to stop consuming products that come in boxes and plastics? What about your family, going to convince them to do the same? Or is it just enough to leave edgy comments slagging the scientists who did solve a problem created by modern life?
Fucking consumer brain. Buy local, go nuclear. It's that easy. Maybe you've already forgotten how much the air quality around the globe improved when covid hit.
God knows you can't image a world without your drop shipped temu shit.
Get rid of the large swaths of green fucking grass, which completely useless when one cuts it down. Let the Dandy Lions grow like we do in Europe and plant more native flowers too.
Clover. Clover is great:
+1 for clover. I "accidentally" spilled some clover seed outside our place (bugger off HOA), and it's slowly overtaking the grass they planted.
+ a chance at 4-leaf
I spread a bunch of clover seed around my yard, and where the grass was struggling (I don’t water or fertilize at all) the clover took over, and where the grass was doing ok naturally the clover sort of let the grass have that space mostly. Now the whole yard looks nice, and the clover is just fucking loaded with bees all day. It’s great. My dog just lies in the lush clover and watches the bees buzz around.
I have a native meadow lawn and it's awesome. Zero maintenance, barely any watering (just peak dry season) and incredibly beautiful. The ecosystem takes care of itself as long as you don't buff one side by accident.
Let the Dandy Lions grow like we do in Europe
No, Dandy Lions crowd out native North American species and result in less diverse ecosystems, which is bad.
Several bee factions see this as a vaccine and are opting out. /s
Bee do our own rezzearch
Humans: oh sure, let's not change our insane agricultural system that is the major killer of biodiversity but instead create yet another technonfix by now in 2026™ fiddeling with the genes of another species.
When will we finally learn: there are no technological solutions to 'manage' the living. The living is not 'manageable'./We've tried this approach pretty much since 100 years and every one 'solution' created two new problems. Look where we are guys, our planet is FUCKED. 50 years ago it was DDT, now it's Crispr-CAS9...
1000 likes for this celebration of technical human dominance, we're doing quite right, do we? Not our 'dysfunctional' ecosystem is the problem, but our approach to it that is based on control and (technoligical) dominance, instead of humility and respect.
If we had sustainable practices, at least of 3rd of the people in the United States and Western Europe would have a standard of living similar to the people in 3rd world country. This is assuming we don't compensate for things by exploiting more vulnerable populations.
I personally think this is a decent trade-off, but the people my country would end up exploiting would probably disagree.
And so the house of cards grows by another level. We'll just modify this to add this missing thing. Never mind why it is missing. 10 years later we are 9 layers deep on plugging holes we've created that technological advancements got us out if until they don't and whoosh the cards come crashing down. The hardiness of nature replaced by the frivolity of man.
I really wouldn't call nature "hardy" when an entire ecosystem can collapse when you can take one single species out of it
Let's remember that nature is what produced pandas
Though I still agree
I understand the sentiment and don't generally disagree... But in most places around the world, Western honeybees (apis mellifera) are an introduced, agricultural livestock, like cattle, and don't really belong in the natural ecosystem. This is akin to farmers providing grain feed to their cows; they don't have to exclusively rely on pasture grass which didn't evolve to withstand hundreds of hungry herbivores mowing them to the ground every day. Also, honeybees are mediocre pollinators for most native plants. If native bees don't have to compete for resources with honeybees, that's a good thing for both the native bees and the plants that coevolved with them.
Something like this already happened when we traded the long-term health and fertility of the topsoil for the immediate high yield output of artificially fertilized crops.
By outsourcing the repleneshment of fertility to the relatively fragile and unreliable supply chains and social organisations of man, we assumed management over a delicate balance which previously belonged to nature.
I'm not arguing against industrial agriculture and its commodification of fertiliser by the way. If carefully managed it's possible to imagine an endpoint of equilibrium where global supply chains increase total system fertility by selectively resting soil and relying more on imports to then switch once local fertility peaks and so on. Really just sane and unmolested market forces should in theory discover such a negotiated endpoint.
Fertility alone is not descriptive enough to capture, say, the importance of biological diversity or the load bearing capacity of local environments to support ecosystems, while also producing exportable outputs suitable for maintaining population growth in humanity.
Perennial crops are also ridiculously underused in overall food supply chains. They are more difficult to monetize in existing commodity forms because their overall system value is not captured numerically.
I don't have an overall solution, but any solution will require at its core a way to assign value to the work which nature already does to replenish its own local fertility and to price that effect very cautiously in such a way that it becomes cheaper for intensive producers to rest unfertile soil until it becomes fertile than it is to compensate for unproductive soil by importing chemical fertiliser from somewhere else
The solution is so simple. Crop/pollen diversity. Instead of letting fields lay fallow for crop rotation, they could plant diverse wildflower meadows to improve quality of bee health for the traveling bees that get shipped around for crop rotation. Or the bee keepers themselves that sell the services of their bees, could ensure diverse flower and pollen options when their bees aren't traveling.
Get outta here with your sensible, practical solutions! ;-)
Seems easier than engineering edible yeast to get them the sterols they need.
Note for those passing through and not reading articles:
This is not a summary of the article, but OP's suggestion for a solution. The article talks about creating a yeast product that's lacking in bees' diet due to climate change and a lack of diversity in flowers.
OP suggests combatting the effects climate change has on biodiversity by planting your own diverse flowers. Which may work, or climate change may just kill those too.
Soo, beekeepers thought for generations that bees (a animal too) only need sugar to live?
Beekeepers dont harvest the Pollen which the yeast is replacing. The lack of Pollen is most likelly a result of Monocultur.
Why can't they just be easy to exploit gosh darn it
This method is surprisingly effective at bringing back our god damn honey. We may not have to kill Nicolas Cage after all.
This is both great and terrible. Great because "yay bees", terrible because now they have a synthetic stand in for a natural process which will almost certainly be misused
Instead of just PLANTING SOME FUCKING FLOWERS
In a couple years we'll be saying honey "doesn't taste like it used to"
So they're feeding bees Vegemite now.
I guess healthier hives would be less prone to winter die-off. Wonder what they feed the yeast on?
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
