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It may not be related but forest fires are raging in many US states and it isn’t even summer yet
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.
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.
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.
Plant native. Plants that are native to your ecosystem. Those are the true pollinator powerhouse plants that bees need to survive
I forget the term for non native, non invasive plants (naturalized?) but those are good too. Native is best, of course. I see a ton of carpenter bees (native bees to my area) on my red clover (non native, non invasive).
Unfortunately, naturalized plants are not good. It’s a scale, with invasive plants being extremely bad. Naturalized plants aren’t as bad. But still bad
In the end, our native insects rely on native plants (with extremely few exceptions to not be distracted by). A native plant can support hundreds or even thousands of species.
A non native / naturalized plants cannot support even a fraction of that. They can also support… Non native insects. Which in turn fuck up the ecosystem, either by displacement or direct damage.
I’m not gonna tell you to rip out naturalized plants like clover. I’m not gonna say you should destroy your garden. You should just know that native plants are superior in literally every possible way, and your NEXT plant choices should be as native as you can get :)
If you can suggest native ground cover that is low maintenance and easy to start I’d consider it. I’m not going to put plugs in my yard when I can just over seed with clover. Clover is strictly better than turf grass.
It is better than turf, but I’m not talking about grass lawns, I’m talking about plants like for a garden. It’s better to have more garden plant masses, less grass lawn.
Most people don’t need as much lawn as they have and reducing down to more what you actually use is great, but it’s totally situational.
If you wanted a NorthEast suggestion for general ground cover I’d say wild strawberry. But if it’s like … Lawn then just stick with what you’re doing.
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Why?
Because someone told us
You know.
I have no idea
Rhymes with Bonsanto
Bees live less than two months, so if 80% of bees died in the last 8 months that would suggest a sharp recent increase. And even if you take it as read that it means bees dying and not being replaced, 8 months is still a terrible timeframe to use because it’s literally saying “there are 80% fewer bees now, at the tail end of winter, than there were at the height of bee season”.
I’m not saying there isn’t a bee crisis, just that this factoid is very badly worded.
Without looking at data it could also mean “beginning 8 months ago we noticed a downwards trend of bees compared to the prior year(s) that culminates to an 80% decline at the time of writing.”
The running thought is these non-native European honeybees couldn’t find forage at the right times due to climate change and these massive commercial hives died. That’s why introduced species as a monoculture don’t work out so well.
Okay, but European honeybees in the US aren’t exactly new afaik. That would be like if all of the sudden, 80% of wild horses up and die and the answer is “well, they’re an introduced species, so it only makes sense”.
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?
Remember that honey-producing bees are terrible pollenators compared to the specific pollenators who don’t produce honey. The honey producing bees being kept by everyone are artifically outcompeting the specific pollenators, which are what we really need to be supporting.
I was watching some of my native plants and noticed a fair amount of house flies crawling on them. So, I looked it up. It turns out that flies as a group are the second most important pollinator behind bees as a group.
Okay, but how do I personally monetize non-honey making bees? Sure, the general ecology needs this, but what’s in it for me, right this instant?
Those bees sure have plenty of legs for plenty of bootstraps
A bee petting zoo! Bumblebees are very cute and very fluffy. Having a petting zoo would help people get I touch with nature, and if the guests are too belligerent about it then the bees will just sting them. I think that bumblebees might also not die after stinging, and if so they’d learn how to fight humans. When the time is right you can unleash a swarm of cute fluffy bees trained in anti-human warfare. You could use them to crush any competition. If you still want more money you can become a bee-based supervillain and rob banks or something.
Hey, it doesn’t need to be right this instant. It could instead be projected revenue next quarter.
All you can do is add to pollen I guess. Plant seeds of native plants that bees love. Indiscriminately in random places.
Maybe someone else has some better ideas.
Tear out the lawn and re-wild the yard? Wild flowers, clover, etc. Less watering and mowing, and not just bees will love it - all kinds of insects and wildlife from birds to deer.
make sure you retract words like bias and gender from your articles and they will come back. they are just extremely bigoted.
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nice one!
I’m not a bee, you’re not a bee, so it sounds like a them problem.
(On the internet, nobody knows you’re a bee.)
You can say whatever you want about them in text. As long as you don’t dance it, they’ll be none the wiser.
Those bees know what they did
Pesticides, same as always.
It’s because of shareholder profit
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)
Honey bees aren’t even native to the US
