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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.
so worry but not panicking yet. gotcha, nothing will be done then.
Part of the panicking should be wild bees. They’re dying at accelerated rates.
We also know why, commercial bee keeping is part of it, as is hobbies bee keeping.
And pesticides… and monoculture farming.
I don’t know whether you were satiric or not, but it feels like it, hard to tell on a text medium. No hard feelings either way 😄
If you were “mocking my post in a satiric way”: I didn’t mean to say that nothing should be done or that it was not a reason to worry. I actually believe we should protect our ecosystems, but I think we need accurate data and this kind of posts, even if they convey the “right” message according to me, are misleading and create false information about what is going on. I truly believe we should try to avoid doing this.
This story is about domesticated honeybees, which have been declining for decades due to Colony Collapse Disorder and other stressors. Native North American bees are in their own long-term decline, with 1 in 4 species at risk of extinction. However, domesticated honeybees are tremendously important for the pollination and yield of many crops important to humans, and this population drop, thought to be the largest annual losses seen, should be considered in the context of the longer decline, and the possibility that we could hit a tipping point when pollination, and a crucial pillar of our food system, could fail.
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.
Idk about others, but mine died due to temperatures not reaching above 27 for 14 days straight.
there’s a crazy scene in the documentary More Than Honey where they compare beekeepers with US Almond Farm pollenators. It’s all about money and it’s sickening.
I was gonna quote the documentary too. My favourite scene was when they pollinated by hand and said: who’s better at pollinating? Humans or bees? It’s definitely not humans.
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.
But also
“there are now an all-time high number of honeybee colonies in the US – 3.8m, around 1m more than five years previously.”
According to the guardian
We could always eat the rich.
Everybody says this. Nobody posts recipes.
The inherent problem with that is how few there are. Don’t get me wrong–yes, let’s do that, too.
It’s a good starting point. I have a feeling a lot of other solutions will become possible after that step.
They’re hoarding all the wealth and are a rich source of vitamins and minerals
Think of the shareholders!
This is why we’re doomed.
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.
The company that makes roundup and the GMO plants that can resist it will decide for them
Roundup is an herbicide, not a pesticide.
I guess I am going to be that guy…
Roundup is a pesticide. It is an herbicide, but it also is a pesticide. As are insecticides, fungicides, etc. Pesticide is the catch all, herbicide is the descriptive.
I appreciate your sacrifice. It would’ve been me if not you
Say what you will about RFK, but he’s broken clock right on a couple of issues, pesticides being one of them. Sure, maybe his rationale isn’t right, but his end game may be a benefit. Unfortunately it’s at odds with Trump’s complete destruction of regulation, but he (RFK) seems to be chugging along. I think making America healthy is good; I don’t think pesticides or ultra processed foods make kids transgender.
I don’t think pesticides or ultra processed foods make kids transgender.
Of course not. That requires being infected by a trans first - they work under vampire rules which is why we need to keep trans and children away from each other! /s
I’m not too up to date with this story, but haven’t pesticides been used for forever now? Why would the suddenly cause a 80% drop in population?
I think bee populations are under threat from pesticides, habitat reduction, disease, climate change, nutrition, et cetera.
Of that list, pesticides are probably the easiest to solve.
It’s not the same pesticides year over year. My bet is some MBA pushed a tweak to the formula for short term gains.
resist
neonicotinoids were invited in the 1980s and it’s been recently understood that it’s like a forever chemical. it will get into the dirt and go through the plants and pass on through pollen
Different pesticides?
Finedust from traffic, mircoplastics, insecticides, GMO infertile weeds… etc. Bayer as well.
This doesn’t say 80% of the bees have died.
I agree it does mention hundreds of millions but is confusing because…Shook said. “If we lose 80% of our bees every year,…” Not very clear in the article on exactly what percentage of the bee population died.
Pretty huge distinction
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.
Honeybees cant buzz pollinate for shit, lazy ass bee
It’s Bayer’s now. Monsanto sold it to Bayer when they started getting heat for neonicotinoids killing all the bees.
I’ll hop in here and add that your locality probably does pesticide fogging/spraying. For what it is worth, you can ask them not you spray your property. Make some local wildflower patches in your yard. Less stuff you have to mow, more food and habitat for native birds and insects. It’s a win-win.
Native plant patches can also absorb some of the harmful crap like pesticides to a degree. It does help.
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
Well, one would expect mountainous areas to flood because elevation focuses water flow. I’m in Florida, flattest state in the union. We never flood except in hurricanes, and those floods don’t last like they do in other places, in and out.
Still… I expect hurricanes in Florida, not in Tennessee.
Hurricanes are known to travel in land and up North though. The fact a hurricane hit Tennessee isn’t odd. It was the strength and the length it lingered over the state that made it devastating.
It’s always the lingering part. What was that one that fucked Houston not long ago? Sat on top of them forever. Hurricane Ivan was like that down here. Only a CAT-3 at landfall, but I listened to that freight train sound for over 10 fucking hours.
Anthropogenic climate change is real, whether you believe in it or not.
You know who believes in climate change? Fossil fuel companies, insurance companies, the military industrial complex, and every single politician talking about buying or taking Greenland by force. All the very same people who have spent the past half century publicly denying the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Not only do they believe in it, but they are designing their profit models around it at our expense.
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Slap her in the face for me.
Please stop saying sacreligious comments like this. It’s offensive to religious people.
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well if that is the case, humans can take pollinator job roles when AI will take their excel jobs.
Have you tried persecuting all the scientists yet??
They just got fired, together with anyone who might begin to fix this.
And the US government banned words related to climate change from any future studies. If your grant proposal includes those keywords, it’ll get denied automatically without a human even looking at it.
Refer to Ambience Adjustments in your research proposal?
Make America Green Again
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.
Is now a bad time to get into mead making?
I wonder if I can return my yeast…
It’s a bad time to enjoy being alive
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.
All those darn African killer bees! Stealing all the jobs!
i personally just think the bees are sentient and have depression
Idk, I heard that trans people and immigrants are murdering bees.
Isn’t pesticides just bee assassination on a mass scale? Thus, I argue, we cannot not yet rule that out.
Care about the environment? Great me too. Thats why im asking ya’ll to sign up for the General strike.
Share it with your family, friends, social media.
I am in Canada. But I wholly support this. We must defeat the cheeto madman.
As one stuck in Cheetoland, I deeply apologize for what he’s doing despite the efforts that had been undertaken to stop him and if he does end up attempting to annex your nation, I want you to know I preemptively surrender and defect to the Canadian Armed Forces.
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
No “probably” about it.
Dunno man. That army ant seems pretty powerful too.
Also, what about bamboo
and don’t get me started on tumbleweed
Bees are not the only native pollinators, though, plenty are extinct
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.
The person in the article says you can’t keep up the industry if 80% of the bees die every year.
