Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever U.S. honey bee die-off

Unless we change our farming practices there isn't much else you can do. You have acres and acres of land that are completely dead (as far as pollinators are concerned) for almost all of the year and then suddenly every plant blooms all at once and then goes away.

This is what so few people realize -- farming, as it's practiced in the US, is basically mining.

It might appear to be lush nature, but the places we farm are deserts in many ways. We kill insect life, birds, mammals, and other supporting species. We remove most of nutrients from the soil and replace them chemically. A commercial orchard might as well be an Amazon datacenter from an environmental standpoint.

If we want to change things, we need to fundamentally alter the way we grow food. It will be a bit harder -- we'll need regenerative methods, less reliable methods, more human labor, more weed prone, etc. -- but we can build food production into something that's much more sustainable and ecologically sound.

Some farmers are already doing this, or experimenting with it, and I think there's at the very least a growing soil health mindset among small farmers.

From what I've read, the hives that are seeing these severe die offs are the commercial hives that are being shipped around.

It is possible to have local beekeepers who don't ship their hives across the country, and there are still untended wild hives. Those seem to be in better shape.

And the only way for that change to happen is to bake in monetary incentives that help drive it, whilst doing so in a political climate that is just fine with the way things are.

I like to bring this up in regards to livestock. "If we shouldn't eat chickens, then why are they food shaped?" Well, they are food shaped! Most of the animals we eat are designed to be eaten, born and bred over thousands of years to achieve that goal. A chicken is a most unnatural animal. No other bird has any reason to lay 300 eggs per year.

Livestock is as GMO as they come, just on a longer scale.

Untended wild hives are probably also more genetically diverse, and therefore more robust to parasites and viruses.

What a strange response to "monocropping is bad, we should probably follow the science and farm in a way that keeps pollinators around and soil healthy". They didn't say anything about not having chickens or cows.... in fact most regenerative farming practices need chickens and cows (and pigs and goats) to make the soil healthier and keep pollinators healthy.

The comment you responded to didn't say anything about GMO

Exactly. Honeybees are a monoculture bandaid slapped on top of the monoculture farming problem, and ultimately suffer the same fate.

Many people don't realize that honeybees are not native to North America. Bringing them in massive numbers crowds out the native species and causes further ecosystem breakdown. It's good that people now understand that pollinators are important and insects need to be protected. But that means prioritizing the health of native species and creating a healthier ecosystem from the ground up (literally).

I actually think this is where smaller more "organic" type robots and AI will play a role. We can do more restorative and mixed farming and then have a legion of robots doing all the picking. The way agricultural automation is currently with equidistant rows all with the same type of plant because it's basically impossible to make a machine that can take apples off a tree and pick blueberries but you can make a very optimized machine that can do either. Kind of like 10,000 cheap drones or 1 fighter jet.

The comment GP responded to was talking about how we have modified the environments of farms - talking about GMO livestock is a stone's toss away.

This reads as a kneejerk reaction to the mention of GMO as if the person you responded to has an agenda. I think their point is that we need to be aware of what is natural (aka tested to equilibrium over huge periods of time) and what is artificial (propped up by human practices on the relatively short timescale of centuries and millenia).

It seems the baseline drifts and we could stand to take certain environmental cycles and/or livestock lifecycles for granted as though they exist purely through evolution or untouched ecological processes.

FWIW, I am not opposed to GMOs broadly. But I am opposed to GMOs for the purpose of enabling more industrialization in agriculture. I don't see, e.g., red grapefruits as bad, even though they used an early form of genetic engineering (seeds were exposed to radiation in hopes of creating random mutations.)

I disagree. We can also continue to engage in revolutionary thought and practice locally. We can decide that collective and community health and wellbeing are more important than individual success. It's a more difficult road, but the capitalist mode of "just tweak the financial curves" is not the only way we can approach this problem. Just the most well supported today.

FWIW, I do object to the industrial raising of animals for food as well.

Have a few pigs rummaging around your food forest? Some sheep to keep grasses and weeds in check? Some poultry to remove pests and aerate the soil? Sure! Love that, it's using behaviors in complementary ways to create a healthier system.

Cram thousands of animals into cubes and process them with machinery? Truly awful in my view.

I think I see your viewpoint and agree with it. It isn't a matter of "do we modify or not" but rather "how, when, and for what purpose? who benefits? does this damage the land or species lineage? etc"

To be clear, the hives that are systematically reporting these severe die-offs are largely commercial hives.

There isn't a reporting structure for hobbyists. Look down-thread for an example of a hobbyist who lost their hive (and whose neighbor lost their hive).

This isn't limited to big operators.

Try this: go find a place that sells honeybee nucs (a starter hive). Then go to Archive.org and compare the prices 10 years ago. I took the first "storefront" hit on Google, and found archived pages back to 2016 --- in 2016, a queen was $40; today, $42.

If it's a collapse it seems like a slow collapse.

It is important to remember that the hives out in the woods are not wild but cast-off swarms of domesticated honey bees, and that the mating behavior of honey bees will fold in genetics from many hives in a region ( drone congregation areas represent feral and backyard and commercial hives in a rather vast area ).

The genetic research seems to point to the opposite happening - that because of pressures on honey bees from pesticides or pests ( and thereby viral pressure carried by various pests ) the feral and commercial populations track quite closely.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8991 - there's a lot here specifically relevant to this discussion but especially note the emergence of African Honey Bee genotype in wild populations. This paper is from 2015 analyzing the biodiversity response to the arrival of V. destructor ( varroa mites ) and Africanized bees were introduced in the early 1990s as well.

The take-away is that until you have a 3 mile separation of water, assume that populations of bees in a land area are more related than not and face similar pressures in a given climate, whether feral or managed. Honey Bees especially ( but of course every living thing ) should be managed with an ecosystem mindset.

Project Apis m. ( data source cited in the article [0] ) is not limited to commercial beekeepers, but many backyard keepers are not plugged in to the research on either end. I responded to the survey as a backyard keeper with 4 surviving hives.

[0] https://www.projectapism.org/colony-loss-information

A few things:

a) African honey bees aren't domesticated populations, challenging your overall point.

b) A 3 mile separation is not substantial (though I grant you that if most of the bees in any given cluster are introduced, then it might lead to more homogeneity).

c) even within "wild" populations of whatever, you see local clusters of genetic similarity. It's been a while since I took population genetics, but IIRC this kind of local equilibrium was well-covered.

Also, I haven't read the paper, but the abstract sure sounds like what I'm describing -- a sudden population bottleneck leads to rapid evolutionary adaptation in wild populations:

"These findings suggest that genetically diverse honey bee populations can recover from introduced diseases by evolving rapid tolerance, while maintaining much of the standing genetic variation."

We absolutely should continue to engage in revolutionary thought and practice locally, but without buy-in by the owners of the system it will always be just that: "local"