Comment by whiddershins
3 years ago
So with all of this talk for years about colony collapse and food shortages yet moths were doing the bulk of the pollinating the whole time?
Or am I missing something.
Not that colony collapse doesn’t worry me, it does. But if I was being baselessly told to fear agriculture production issues, I am super mad.
(This is a hobbyhorse of mine...)
At least in North America, the "colony collapse" stuff was a livestock phenomenon more than it was a wildlife/ecology issue. Honey bees aren't native to the US; if you see a honey bee in your back yard, there's a pretty good chance that somebody owns it.
>if you see a honey bee in your back yard, there's a pretty good chance that somebody owns it.
This is true even in Europe. If memory serves the percentage of "wild" honeybees (feral may be a more fitting adjective) is in the order of 1%.
I have wild honey bees in my yard (New Mexico) and have seen them in other places. I believe they are Africanized but just looking I can't tell the difference.
At any rate, in warm areas of the US there are many feral old world bees.
They're africanized if they are very aggressive.
Recently I saw a talk where the speaker said that if you find any africanized beehives in the wild, you should kill the hive because you don't want the africanized bees to spread. (Or if you have an africanized beehive, re-queen it.) I don't have any, and I'd be loathe to kill bees because I'm quite fond of them, but it's probably good advice.
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So what species are the native pollinators here in North America?
There's lots of them, including a huge variety of bees, but many (most?) of those bees are solitary, and aren't battery-farmed the way honey bees are.
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> Or am I missing something.
One of the things you may be missing is that the article is about "efficiency" as opposed to total impact.
"researchers found that 83% of insect visits to bramble flowers were made during the day. While the moths made fewer visits during the shorter summer nights, notching up only 15% of the visits, they were able to pollinate the flowers more quickly."
Moths are doing great work, but they don't have much time to do the work in and they are not doing the bulk of the work. Also it seems that the night pollinators actually may largely work different flowers than the day pollinators so one can't necessarily pick up the load left by the absence of the other.
Per the article, the bulk of the pollinating happens during the day. Moths being individually more efficient at pollinating is only one of several variables at play here; others include the pollinator populations, the length of daytime v. nighttime, and whether or not flowers bloom during daytime v. nighttime and for how long.
> Not that colony collapse doesn’t worry me, it does. But if I was being baselessly told to fear agriculture production issues, I am super mad.
Maybe before getting emotionally attached to a position (again) you should understand what’s going on.
Just be an expert in everything. See easy. And experts never get mislead either, just repeat all research yourself, double plus good. /S
I’m suggesting not to get too emotionally invested in something you don’t understand. It does not fill that you need to be an expert in everything.
Beekeeping is a business. Much beekeeping business lies in renting hives to farmers (meaning: driving them to far away farms where the bees are then allowed to pollinate for a few days, then on to the next far away farm). Hive renting is pretty stressful to beehives, and farmers tend to use a lot of pesticides. And guess what: pesticides are pretty indiscriminate, so they hurt bees too. So yeah, this particular business has colony collapse issues. Beekeepers who produce honey, queens, and hives mostly only have to deal with varroa mites and such predators.
Where I'm at colony collapse is not really a big deal. Beekeepers manage to keep the number of hives up, we're trying to get agribusiness to reduce the usage of pesticides, we have ways to deal with the varroa mites, etc.