Comment by moebrowne
15 hours ago
> The honeybee is not endangered. It never was.
There are several severe threats to honey bees which without human intervention would cause a significant number of hives to be lost.
There's the varroa mite and the things it carries like deformed wing virus, then there is the increasingly prevalent Asian hornet which European honey bees are unable to deal with, and colony collapse disorder where the bees literally disappear for reasons we current don't understand, and climate change is causing colonies to starve over the winter.
Honey bees are not going extinct tomorrow but they are not doing well.
Humans also face severe treats and are not doing well but are not going extinct tomorrow. Honeybees seems to only decline in North America, especially the USA, but as you said it’s human intervention that keeps their population booming years after years. Perhaps a decline wouldn’t be so problematic it doesn’t go to extinction? A decline in chickens population wouldn’t lead to extinction, to elaborate on the funny authors take:
> Promoting honeybee hives to save pollinators is roughly the equivalent to building more chicken farms to save bird biodiversity
The other problems you raise are important but are also a treat to others bee species and insects.
https://earth.org/data_visualization/bees-are-not-declining-...
Honeybees aren’t native to North America
Fascinating fact. Begs the question what pollinated agriculture (squash, tomatoes, peppers, berries etc) prior to the introduction of the honeybee and the equally fascinating answer is that there were many species but all of them were SOLITARY and NON-HIVE DWELLING!
Neither are humans, apparently.
I wonder if it would be possible to experiment a bit - ban honeybee hives in a 10 mile square radius, or perhaps in that area that bans all radio transmitters. See what happens.
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Neither are earthworms.
Honeybees are livestock. They're no more endangered than chickens or cows. If we need more, we just breed more.
In most places honeybees are raised they couldn't even survive in the wild. Just like cows and chickens and pigs. As with most livestock, without human intervention they would probably be wiped out.
If humans didn't manage risks to livestock on an industry scale they would be at risk. It requires a constant investment from both commercial industry and government. Activities like the dept of agriculture and university ag depts have been really so good at what they do. Its like the rest of civilization has forgotten what it takes and the costs involved if we neglect the investment. Agriculture and livestock is just one foundational civilization technology where we have forgotten the significance of
What is considered livestock varies over time - chickens range from "free range and can survive in the wild" to "so fat they can't live". One guess as to which is the most common by numbers - one reason that if you do decide to have a backyard flock, go with something "more natural".
More dangerous in all these is the monoculture - a hundred years ago we would have a wide range of crops and livestock; now 90% of meat chickens are probably the same genetically; similar with cows and bananas and corn and rice and pigs, etc. That sets us up for a "wipe out 90% of chickens" risk.
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“Breeding more” bees is not as trivial as raising other animals, because bee reproduction depends on hive stability. Other animals are kept fully enclosed in captivity and can be artificially inseminated in some cases. Bees are semi-wild and have to be free to leave the hive to forage, and if they don’t return or if the hive collapses, you can’t “breed more.”
Fun fact: queen bees can be artificially inseminated, and most commercial queens are. Beekeepers prefer naturally-inseminated queens, because they're stronger, but "nature" can't keep up with commercial demand.
You're correct about "breeding more" not being trivial, but they do it on an industrial scale. In really broad strokes: in late winter, in preparation for pollination season, they feed their hives intensively (with sugar syrup) and add extra brood boxes for the queens to fill with eggs. Then they split the hives, leaving the old queen in one box, and adding new queens to the box(es) they take off. Voila! Double (or more) the hives.
Pollination is where commercial beekeepers earn their living, by renting out hives of bees to farmers. Honey production is not necessarily an afterthought, even though it doesn't really turn a profit - it's worth doing because you'll be putting the bees on nectar flows for the summer, anyway, so you won't have to feed them, and extracting (some of) the honey covers transportation costs - but all the money's in pollination.
I could keep going and going - queen production and hive splitting are fascinating topics on their own - but I'll stop before I risk boring people with an over-long comment. I have commercial beekeepers in my family, and I've worked (summer / vacation jobs, when I was a kid) every part of the process.
(This is all in a USA-ag context. Beekeeping is - very! - different in other parts of the world.)
There's also the massive problem of fake honey (i.e. manufactured sugar syrup illegally sold as honey), which is much cheaper than real honey and pushing actual beekeepers out of the market.
Wild honeybees adapt to deal with mites. What they struggle with are insecticides and monoculture deserts. Domesticated varieties that have been selected for productivity and placidity are the ones that haven't quickly adapted to the introduction of parasites, diseases, and predators, because they don't have to, as the humans worry about those problems.
Now think of bumble and other wild bees who catch the mites from the blossoms but get no treatment with formic or oxalic acid.
To add, most farming relies precisely on honeybee for pollination, and losing 2/3 of them would be quite devastating.
Of course nobody cars about wild bees, our lives don't depend on them nearly as much.
Is that really true? My layman's understanding was that ~10-20% of the calories in a typical American diet comes from crops which need pollinators: grains (which feed livestock too), legumes, root vegetables, leafy greens, mostly can be grown without them, using self pollination or wind pollination.
It may be that agricultural mechanization requires honeybees simply because they're the ones we can farm themselves.