There's a lot of weird assumptions in the article. "Normal" beekeepers try to breed varroa resistant bees as well, but still trying to keep the non-resistant ones alive too. It might be faster to just let nature deal with the issue, but that means losing an insane amount of hives. It's basically the same as claiming that hunters don't care about animals or the forrest, or that dairy farms don't care about their cows. All beekeepers want the same thing, health bees, being able to go out and just watch them, it's not like we have some weird need to open a hive every week and inspect 30 frames for bad signs... That's the boring part.
Most of the bees being kept by beekeepers aren't natural as such. One of the most common types is Buckfast and that's a cross between a number of different species. So is the suggestion that we kill 75% of the bees in apiaries to "keep it natural"?
Normally you also only buy one or two colonies, the rest of you apiary will be made from those original colonies and you only buy new ones in case of disease or if you want to build a larger apiary faster. So I don't get the negativity towards "buying bees online". While I do think swarm catching is great, I'd recommend getting the swarm checked for disease before placing it in any apiary.
Strong, no-chemical-treatment hives with "good genetics" in low-pesticide environments have low loss rates.
Even the loss rates we see advertised (38% or whatever) are not existential problems for beekeeping because you can split hives (i.e., reproduce) at a higher rate anyways. So the switch to no-chemical-treatment plans is not that hard.
Honeybee colonies are mainly stressed by a) pesticides (in the pollen and nectar that they gather, in the wax that beekeepers give them to accelerate comb building, in the water they drink, and in the mite treatments they are subjected to), b) the varroa mites that have inadvertently been bred to be strong while the bees have been inadvertently bred to be weak.
As an urban beekeeper I find this argument a bit odd and not matching my experience. I'm not trying to optimize for growth rate or monocrop pollination and frankly find that the hives grow quite fast and can swarm multiple times per season (late spring early summer). However, they seem to swarm most WHEN they start being stressed by varroa! I haven't seen a clean hive go a year without developing varroa so it's endemic in my area.
I treat the hives once a year (after honey harvest) to protect other native pollinators. It's easy to know when mites boom just by looking at viral infection effects (deformed wings etc). That starts in mid-early summer (not when most people would be treating with insecticide) and builds into fall. Yes, I can count mites on sticky paper, but once you get to know the hive cycle for an area it's rarely necessary. My queens/drones mate with the local population, but I don't see significant queen/brood changes in them so they're as "natural" as a european honey bee is in the US.
I prefer to alternate Apiguard ("natural" thymol) and Apivar (miticide) to minimize tolerance effects and they both work quite well (100x reduction). However, going a year without mite treatment is often a death sentence for the winter hive, and I haven't had a hive fail since I started annually treating. Winters are mild and there's barely a month without pollen so there's really no reason for a healthy hive to fail. When untreated hives do survive they are very weak going into spring and have huge mite load in summer.
Are you not concerned that your practices are breeding bees who survive only with medical treatment while empowering the genetics and miticide resistance to reinforce endemic condition of your region?
It would seem some others are breeding bees successfully with zero miticide while you're building a Sardaukar force of mites, bred to tough conditions that even the healthiest of bees cannot survive without help.
Not really because of the number of generations (12 months is ~50 generations of mites and the miticide is every 2 years) between treatments and the effectiveness of the treatments. It's like breeding cockroach resistance to stomping with a foot (the kill is almost completely total and I remove the miticide before concentration drops). It would need to be really incremental and this is not. I go over 6 months without noticing any (which may mean the hive was actually clean before it was reinfected by an external reservoir).
The real breading of deadly mites is leaving your hives thronging with them and bees covered in mites spreading them to every other population of bees/pollinators in your neighborhood. It's like putting SARSCoV2 in an AIDS patient and keeping them alive on a ventilator for months spewing novel viruses with minimal isolation... and that's where we likely got the really virulent strains of COVID.
p.s. I take care of 2-3 hives with about 5mi of separation. So I don't really have many local captive hives nearby, but my queens seem to breed pretty true anyway. I'm not a pro, but I've got 10 years of experience in my local area.
My girlfriend has this nice little book on managing an orchard, published in the '20s.
It has modern orchard management tactics in there, like spraying with lead arsenic to reduce pests, and regular cultivation to destroy all nearby plants so there's no competition.
..of course, this was just before the dustbowl era.
Have you tried oxalic acid treatment instead of apiguard/apivar? Way more effective and cheaper for me. Also there's a strong argument its more 'natural'
Overall I agree with your points completely. Honeybees are not native to North America and we're doing animal husbandry and farming on what's basically an invasive species. There is no such thing as doing it "naturally"
I've overwintered once. So far so good. No treatment. I've hives that have zero mites, and hives that have moderate mite load. We'll see what happens this coming winter.
You're right - and due to panmixia and the strong capacity for beehives to spread and intermingle their genetics, a site treated with 'standard' practices with many hives acts as a genetic bomb, damaging the whole species in the region, while the owner likely complains about natural beekeepers being at fault for distributing varroa.
Of course, they'll never get rid of varroa without also getting rid of all natural, feral (or wild) hives. That would be an immense natural loss, and it's the direction that commercial beekeepers (and those influenced by commercial practices) are taking things.
Fortunately, there are some sharp people with a solid understanding of bees and bee genetics that are fighting this tendency, breeding bees with new behaviors, and tracking down isolated wild/feral hives that are surviving well because they have adapted characteristics that help them fight varroa. The wild/feral hives have to be pretty far from commercial facilities, because of the massive capacity of these facilities to pump out poor genetics.
So far, there are brood-killing behaviors (checking on the developing bees, sniffing for varroa, and killing the immature bee of it's infected), and mite-biting behaviors (grooming other bees to remove or harm the mites directly).
The sad thing is, that the bees can largely adapt to Varroa. It's the beekeepers that can't let them do it, because it means taking losses.
Yeah, lots of questionable assertions made there by author and/or interviewees, eg:
> “I don’t think anybody contests that free-living bees have a better, easier life,”
This feels wrong - supplemental feed, internal space that grows and shrinks with their colony size, well insulated & single-entrance (easier to defend) home, a mesh base they can push their detritus through, pest / predator control, etc.
The bit about wild colonies:
> The bees lived in smaller groups, relatively far apart, which made it harder for varroa to spread. They swarmed every year, which broke the reproductive cycle of the mites. (If a colony swarms, the nest is left without bee larvae, which is where varroa mites take hold.)
The relatively far apart thing isn't a natural consequence of wild colonies, unless there just isn't food to sustain them. (If there is, then bee / nest population would increase.)
Swarming every year isn't guaranteed - I suspect even new 'wild' queens don't get itchy feet until their second birthday.
But even if they do, swarming doesn't mean there aren't larvae in the original nest. A normal swarm process means the original colony is without an egg-laying queen for maybe 10-14 days. However, assuming the departing queen was laying up until departure, you've got ~8 days of larvae in that nest, and that means a further ~13 days those exist as pupae (which I understand are also vulnerable to varroa). At that point your new queen's progeny are already into their larvae stage.
I do get the pastoral idyll being painted by some of the people involved here, but I'm unconvinced.
Where I feel they do have a point is that traditional beekeepers are meddling too much with systems that are more complex than one might think. At the start of the article, they mention the routine clipping of queens' wings to prevent swarming. And then, at the end, they mention that queens used to "last" several years, whereas nowadays they are rejected by the hive after only 1-2 years. Maybe there was some natural selection going on there which beekeepers are hindering by preventing the bees from swarming?
Farmers want less stressed cows because they produce more milk. The underlying economics means they have other concerns, but even “factory” dairy farms will tend to optimize more for cow comfort than you might think.
People also overly focus on density without understanding cows are herd animals. They form dense herds even in empty fields.
There are a lot of cow pastures around where I live, and trust me, the herds are not as dense as the density in a cow barn - you could fit at least two more cows between two cows on the pasture. Maybe they would stand closer together if they saw a bear or a pack of wolves, but that rarely happens around here...
While their living conditions are better it seems a stretch to say that these farmers "care" much for the beings they imprison, artificially inseminate, and extract resources from.
I imagine they aren't providing much care for the males born from their cows.
Most dairy farmers I've met in Australia care about their herds emotionally. Even though they send old cows and bobby calves to the knackers, they still build relationships with individual animals. It can seem paradoxical to anyone who hasn't watched them.
If it helps, consider a farmer with a tractor. The tractor is a beloved tool that's integrated into daily life, and yet it's going to end up as scrap metal when it breaks beyond repair. The emotional connection to the thing exists, yet the farmer doesn't believe the thing has the rights of a person, and there's no cognitive dissonance.
There is but I've grown tired about arguing this on the internet.
Once you dive deep enough there aren't a whole lot of logically sound ethical theories that allow for one to systematically imprison, enslave, and murder these beings without allowing us to do the same to less intelligent humans (which most agree is horrifying).
It's a horrible thing that humans subject these beings to and we will look back on it with great shame.
If anyone reading this is open minded and interested in reading more, I'd recommend diving into the arguments against speciesism.
I would argue that veganism and vegetarianism due to a belief that keeping livestock is wrong come about from either disgust at the process of butchery, or a modern alienation from the way your food is produced, and that neither of those are morally consistent.
In a mouse plague, there's a sowing of grain, which becomes edible; it is eaten by a burgeoning wave of mice; following that, there's a smaller wave of rats, which feed on the mice; and according to urban legend, in really bad years there's an increase in the number of snakes. When you eat a bagel, there's a strong possibility it was made from grain grown by farmers who put buckets of water under the legs of their beds to drown the mice and rats that try to climb on them in the night. It is not clear to me that the "enslavement" of a somewhat-happy herd of cows that all end up slaughtered is worse than this boom/bust famine cycle where the rodents spend a substantial fraction of their lives starving and either die from that or from getting ripped apart/swallowed whole by predators.
You can track the deaths per calorie, in fact: https://www.animalvisuals.org/projects/1mc/. It's slightly higher for dairy than for grain, and much higher for meat[0], but deaths are an unavoidable part of human agriculture. If you genuinely believe the lives of mammals are morally equivalent to human lives, where does that leave you, with regard to cognitive dissonance?
[0] Arguably not so high for pasture-fed beef and dairy! This applies to most Australian cattle. Some of the year they'll be eating silage or hay, or fattened in feeding lots that provide death-inefficient grain calories, but it's still a big factor.
"If you genuinely believe the lives of mammals are morally equivalent to human lives"
I didn't say this ;)
Of course all human agriculture leads to animal suffering.
A more pertinent (and difficult to measure) metric would be suffering per calorie. Industrialized dairy is brutal. Momma cow is forcefully impregnated and separated from her baby so you can have that baby's milk in your coffee.
One could also argue that you have a higher moral obligations to a cow that you are exploiting than a mouse attempting to eat your grain.
https://aabentlandbrug.dk/faq <- In Danish though. Dairy cows must have access to pastures from April 15th until November, for at least six hours per day.
Inside a cow must have at least 6.6 - 8m2, depending on the size of the cow.
Note that the rules are worse for cows breed for meat.
>It's basically the same as claiming that hunters don't care about animals
Is there a suggestion here that people who kill animals for fun/leisure care for them? In the same sense that one might use the word 'care' when referring to a loved one or a pet?
Yes... I mean you probably won't shoot the family dog if it's sick, you'd take it to the vet.
Arguably hunters don't think in terms of single animals, unlike farmers, they care about the overall welfare of the ecosystem so that it may support sufficient number of animals to allow for hunting. I don't know how it works elsewhere, but I'd bet that Danish hunters do more to protect nature than any vegan or vegetarian organisation and they almost always work with nature preservation organisations.
On the other hand, the head of the french hunting federation has openly said he couldn't care less about animals and regulations. While receiving public funds to fulfill a mission of regulation.
Like it or not predators hunting prey is part of any natural ecosystem. A necessary part.
I don't know what it's like where you are from, but in general I'd say hunters care a lot more about, and do more for, nature in their local ecosystem than your average city dwelling vegan hipster.
I've heard people casually make the argument that human hunters function similarly to natural predators in terms of increasing population fitness -- but does that actually make sense?
A natural predator is incentivized to identify and go after a weak prey animal, b/c it's easier. Maybe this shifts the prey population to be a bit faster, or have sharper reflexes or something. But a modern human hunter may feel drawn to try to take the choicest specimen (e.g. a mature male deer with large antlers), and shoots from a distance, and a bullet moves too fast for the variance in reaction time or running speed of the animals to matter. Do human hunters using modern tech really select for fitness?
I do know that in fisheries around the world, when regulations said that only fish of a given species above a given size could be kept, fish got smaller. I.e. they were "fitter" in the sense of being more likely to be released by a human fisher, but not in the sense of having gained any advantage wrt the natural parts of their ecosystem. There are a lot of fishing competitions where the size of the largest fish trends down over time (and the records were set decades ago) not because individual competitors got worse at fishing, but because we selected against large fish.
I think the most plausible argument for human hunters being a net environmental good is just that in many places the fees associated with hunting licenses are a source of funds for actual conservation work.
What have those vegans done for animals? Just because they can’t stomach eating them doesn’t mean they actually “care” about animals enough to do something productive.
In the US, hunters have long spearheaded conservation efforts. Theodore Roosevelt said, over a hundred years ago:
> “In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen. The excellent people who protest against all hunting, and consider sportsmen as enemies of wildlife, are ignorant of the fact that in reality the genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.”
He a prolific hunter himself was responsible for significant expanding the national park system and founded the wildlife refuge system.
Yeah ok, but have the vegans done anything to help those species? Apart from not killing them I mean. Hunters, on the other hand, while yes, historically they may have technically sent some species extinct, they truly lead conservation efforts. Stupid hipster vegans need to pick up a gun and show that they actually care.
I cant tell if this is sarcasm or not... In case it isnt, the abstinence of eating meat has an abundance of easily verifiable conservation benefits which far outweigh not eating meat. That in itself shows that they care about species. I really hope it is sarcasm though...
Not to say that we haven't hunted some species to extinction, but the vast majority of how we kill them is habitat destruction through our expanding civilization. Both are factors, but hunting is by far not the primary one.
>Both are a travesty fwiw, but habitat destruction is easily 10x worse when it comes to endangering species.
So you're saying that if we care about the animals, we should reduce our impact on the environment? For example, pick a diet that causes less greenhouse gas emissions? Ideally one that also results in significantly less harm to water, land and biodiversity? Makes sense.
Most of the habitat destruction is directly manmade, not indirectly through climate change. Way to put words in my mouth I never said, but no :)
Desertification due to unsustainable farming practice, deforestation for industrial farming (for vegetarian meals!), logging, and habitat clearing for homes and cities is the biggest contributor.
They’re literally cutting down or burning the Amazon in Brazil to keep livestock and to farm the land. They do it unsustainably and the soil is robbed of all nutrients. This results in most plants dying and desertification.
Want to see the best way to reverse this? Watch the (most fabulous) movie “the biggest little farm” where they turned a plot of land suffering from full desertification from monoculture farming into a small paradise teeming with life and diversity.
Also, to counter your point, it’s possible to add red seaweed to livestock feed which contains enough bromoform to counter around 80% of methane production. It does this by inhibiting the enzyme that creates the methane as a byproduct.
> I'd say hunters care a lot more about, and do more for, nature in their local ecosystem than your average city dwelling vegan hipster.
I don't think you've met many vegan hipsters, as while I can't claim to be either of those things I've known many, many of them and would pretty much universally disagree with you.
(Though a) I'm in UK which maybe makes a different compared to where you are, and b) anecdotes are of course not data, and the one thing we can say for sure is that within types of people such as "vegan" or "hunter" there are certainly going to be some who are absolute cunts, some who are practically angels, and everything in between. But despite only having anecdotes not data, I feel pretty confident in my anecdotal experience backing up the notion that the average vegan is generally going to care more about animals than the average non-vegan).
I guess there is the idea that hunters wish the animal species well so they can continue hunting. Tell that to the passenger pigeon, whose last existing flock was knowingly hunted, making the species effectively extinct.
Not all hunters are conservationists but most are and laws and regulations are in place to protect animal species from over hunting (at least in Canada most of the US). Some conservation efforts are almost entirely run by hunters, for instance Duck's Unlimited has majority of its members as hunters.
The people who hunted the passenger pigeon to extinction were driven less by the usual desire to get meat for their families and more by how much money they could make by bringing hundreds or thousands of birds to market for sale in cities. I would argue capitalism killed the passenger pigeon. The people with shotguns were its designated representatives.
I know a lot of hunters. Fun and leisure is exactly how I would describe it. Do you really think most hunters kill animals out of necessity? There are exceptions of course but, lol.
There is certainly a place for hunting and there are certainly hunters who care deeply about ecology. I don’t see how it’s not a combination of fun and leisure though.
You're probably right. I might be reading too far into them posing for photos with the dead animal, or them having the animal's head mounted on a wall in their home, or travelling to far away places to hunt a particular type of rare animal. These are no doubt very important parts of maintaining a healthy ecosystem.
I highly recommend Top-Bar Beekeeping: Organic Practices for Honeybee Health, by Les Crowder.
My bees are treatment-free and going strong, and we'll be converting all of our Langstroth hives to top-bar hives this coming Spring.
Basically, honeybee hives with mite treatment have high failure rates, and honeybee hives with no chemical treatments do better when the bees have been bred for mite resistance, so do the latter.
As for top-bar hives vs. Langstroth, it's nigh impossible to keep from killing bees with Langstroth hives every time you get into them, and that's what makes them sting. Besides wanting a better relationship with the bees, it feels real bad to kill any, so why do it? Langstroth hives are only advantageous for large-scale commercial beekeeping (because the "supers" stack, and because the frames fit neatly in honey extractors), but in every other way Langstroth hives are just awful.
I am new to beekeeping this year and just trying to build my colonies up from the nucs I received. I have not done mite checks as I don’t want to kill a cup of bees every few weeks just to do the check, and a shocking number of beekeepers I’ve met have mentioned that they lost entire colonies as soon as they treated for mites. I desperately want to be treatment-free - if I pick up that book would the lessons be applicable if I stuck with Langstroth hive bodies?
Whilst not as effective as an alcohol wash, a sugar shake will show you some number of varroa, without killing (m)any bees. At the very least it'll show you if you've got lots of mites in your hive, but might report a false negative at low numbers.
I've done more sugar shakes than alcohol tests. Besides powdered sugar being a mite test, it's also a mite treatment because a) it triggers hygienic behavior in the bees and that helps them get rid of mites, and b) it makes it harder for mites to hold on to the bees.
Starting from nucs is hard work. I also wouldn't bother testing for mites because killing a few hundred bees from a very weak colony is not really a good idea. Also, be very careful not to expose bees -especially young nurse bees, which don't fly yet- to the hot summer Sun -- I once killed hundreds more bees that way than I'd needed to for a mite test.
> I desperately want to be treatment-free - if I pick up that book would the lessons be applicable if I stuck with Langstroth hive bodies?
I would be focusing on other types of farming long before I worried much about beekeeping. It's a wild stretch to consider it harmful for bees, and if the planet is to survive we should probably do all we can to keep them around.
You could argue that you are benefiting from them still I suppose, but we all benefit from bees pollinating even if they are wild bees. We are still part of the ecosystem, we can't remove ourselves entirely (even though we seem determined not to make it through The Great Filter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)
Very interesting read, even for someone who has some exposure to these ideas as a beekeeper. A lot of it really comes down to personal theories and opinions.
I keep my bees as "treatment-free". I don't treat for mites. I haven't had anything like AFB, but that would require drastic measures. I leave on plenty of honey for the bees and try not to feed at all. I use foundationless frames. I want to have "survivor" stock, but that might take a few more years.
The average colony loss in the US is around 50% last time I looked. It seems most people have good years and bad years regardless of the management. I've had years when all, or nearly all, hives have survived. I've also had years where all, or nearly all, had died.
For anyone that isn't aware (and the following depends on your jurisdiction), the treatment for American Foul Brood (AFB) is pouring petrol into a sealed up hive and then burning the hive and hiveware.
It's typically spread by poor beekeeping - infected hiveware being shared or infected, dead hives getting robbed by healthy bees. It's all bad and really sad. I haven't had it, but it's within a few kilometres of me (which is well within bee flight range).
A different article I read this week says urban bees exceed the feeding capacity in the city in some places and we need to be more circumspect about who, and how many bees.
More diverse pollination insects would probably be net beneficial in bee pollinated foods.
A recent popular science book I'd recommend is "Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps" by Seirian Sumner. It speaks to wasps' utility as pollinators, pest eaters and how bees and ants are descendants of wasps. After reading it I turned over a dirt dauber next and showed my kids the wasp larva with the separate chamber of immobilized but living spiders and other bugs the mother wasp had apportioned for the larva.
That’s one approach. Or we could advocate for more pollinator friendly plantings on boulevards and the edges of parks, and advocate for the outright banning of pesticides/herbicides in parks and on lawns. I find it unconscionable that we have elevated green, non-native monoculture lawns to the highest order, allowing people to spray what they want and waste up to 75% of household water on irrigating their lawns for… the ego stroke of green lawns in August?
In the US, urban beekeepers are harming native pollinators by keeping livestock bees --- all honeybees are livestock in the US, where they're invasive.
I've seen more native pollinators when I've gone looking than honeybees. I can't tell you what that means. Maybe the native pollinators are eating the things that honeybees don't like that the native pollinators don't like either but it's all that's left. But in the hill country in Texas wet Springs produce endless fields of flowers for months. The flowers around my hives never seemed to be devoid of pollen or nectar (you can imagine that I go looking). I think there's enough forage, at least around here.
Honeybees aren't native to the US, but there are lots of native bee species. I see no reason to assume that every beekeeper is only in it for the honey.
> I see no reason to assume that every beekeeper is only in it for the honey.
Excluding commercial beekeeping operations, the profit motives that small operations and amateur beekeepers keep bees include:
- for the honey (to sell it at a profit)
- for the hives (to sell them at a profit)
- for side-lines like queen rearing (to sell them at a profit)
- for property tax breaks
There are also reasons that have no profit motives. Some beekeepers do it to "save the bees", but the bees don't need saving. Others do it because it's fun (yes, it is fun!). Some might even do it because the hum of the bees is so relaxing, and some even believe that bee venom stings are therapeutic (I've heard this from some friends).
We acknowledge that the land on which we pollinate is the traditional territory of the plasterer bee, the southeastern blueberry bee, and the ogallalla fruit bat. As we gather the nectar that sustains us all, we honor them and the wasp and placental mammal ancestors who have been stewards of this land for countless generations predating our arrival.
I am OK with beekeeping as long as beekeepers recite land acknowledgements to solitary bee species!
I think you know my position on this already though: fuck bees. Imagine getting on a high horse about exactly how people keep a bunch of non-native bugs. That's what this is a thread about!
(everybody else: if you live in a locale where honey bees are native, I'm not talking about your bees.)
> Imagine getting on a high horse about exactly how people keep a bunch of non-native bugs. That's what this is a thread about!
We're all invasive. And we've brought a ton of non-native species to all parts of the world over the millennia we've been doing this. I'm not sure what you propose we do now about that. You can't unbreak that egg. I could stop beekeeping, and it wouldn't make a difference. We could stop all commercial beekeeping and that would likely be an agricultural disaster for many crops.
Given all of that, why should one not look into how best to "keep a bunch of non-native bugs"?
There is a balancing act here: while beekeeping does in many ways help support the population of non-native species, you are right in noting that a lot of eurasian plant species that we rely on need domestic bees – and honey bees, in particular – to produce our food. At the same time, that modern monocrop agriculture is further exacerbating the problems faced with non-native species – especially in the case of those eurasian plant species. It seems to me that honey bees must be kept in agricultural settings – and in that case, I hope that they are kept responsibly – but the urban beekeepers discussed upthread should, perhaps, put a larger part of their effort towards keeping native species.
> We're all invasive.
Humans are absolutely not an invasive species in the americas. We may have been when we first arrived – and many native species went extinct as a result – but humans have been a part of the local ecosystems for tens of thousands of years and – where I'm from in canada – have been here since the ice sheets receded and the local ecosystem began to evolve. We are far past the point of being an invasive species and have (had?) long been integrated into the ecosystems in question.
> At the same time, that modern monocrop agriculture is further exacerbating the problems faced with non-native species
For sure.
> but the urban beekeepers
Are they really a problem? How many hives are they keeping? I've no idea. I know it's hard to come up with numbers in that regard because most such hives are -presumably- completely not registered.
Urban and suburban beekeeping can only be considered a hobby. And a risky one at that. Bees don't like lawn mowers running near them, and neighbors don't like getting stung. I think urban beekeeping must be a non-problem.
> Humans are absolutely not an invasive species in the americas. [...]
It's not really my point that beekeepers should feel bad about what they're doing, only that they should stop moralizing so much about it. Unless they're in the UK. I guess honey bees are allowed there.
I can get behind that. I don't like moralizing either.
There's still lots of practical reasons to want and recommend treatment-free beekeeping practices:
- it's easier on the beekeeper
- less labor
- not working with dangerous chemicals
- it's cheaper (no need to buy said
dangerous chemicals)
- less time doing things to the bees
that the bees don't appreciate ==
fewer stings
- it's easier on the bees (no pesticides)
- it breeds stronger bees and weaker mites
It might be easier on the environment too (not so strong mites might not affect native pollinators much), or maybe not (stronger honeybees might really out-compete native pollinators).
Plus if the loss rates w/ and w/o treatment are similar, why bother treating?
Similarly there are moral and practical reasons to switch from Langstroth to top-bar hives:
- moral: kill fewer bees
- practical: get stung less,
no need for gloves
nor full suits, only veils
If a beekeeper lacks empathy for the bees, they might still have empathy for themselves!
tptacek - normally I find your commentary insightful, but I'm a bit taken aback by your stance on bees, plus feel its a bit out of step with many beekeepers / researchers. There are commercial and research beekeepers who are also taking steps to protect native bees and pollinator habitats and spread awareness of the same. In my "backyard" there are at least three types of native bees in addition to my hives. Would be very interested to understand the root of your fervor against apis mellifera.
I don't really have a problem with backyard beekeepers; it's just in the US, they've become emblematic of a kind of evangelical and ill-informed faux-environmentalism and I'm fond of pointing out that, here at least, they're essentially the battery-farmed hogs of the insect world. Also I'm scared of them.
I wish we were closer geographically - would love to invite you out to connect with our local beekeepers and share a frosty beverage as it sounds like it would be a positive exchange. I can't speak for those in urban areas - I can imagine the type you are describing though and I can see how that would be grating. Here in the middle of nowhere, I think many are aware that we are fundamentally keeping livestock that are not native to this continent. The commercial beekeepers in particular see no romance in what they do - it's about 18 wheelers of boxes headed to CA for almond pollination.
And commercial honey producers also see no romance in what they do.
We're switching to top-bar hives, and after that it will be comb honey only, because I don't want to bother extracting honey if it's not in Langstroth frames, and I don't want any more Langstroth. I'm thinking I'll still have some Langstroth supers because, well, I don't kill bees when inspecting supers or harvesting, it's when I get into the deeps that killing bees becomes almost impossible to avoid, and if that works out I think that will yield better-looking comb honey. I'm done with plastic foundation, too, and therefore also with centrifugal extractors.
You must be referring to the beekeeping hobby developing as a "zomg the honeybees are in trouble and we have to halp!". It's trueish that that happened, and that the colony collapse disorders didn't really warrant hobbyists jumping in.
On the other hand, I think that hobbyists are doing some of the driving towards better mite treatment practices. It's new eyes on the problem. It's also driven some investment in research. Texas A&M's honeybee (and other bee) research budgets have gone up in recent years, and I suspect part of that is that interest in beekeeping is way up, and part of that has to do with Texas allowing beekeeping as a type of ag activity that can earn one an ag exemption on property taxes but also with the rise of beekeeping as a hobby.
> I like a mason bee. Docile and fuzzy, those guys.
Even Apis mellifera is fairly docile if, you know, you don't kill any of them. The bees in my nucs never ever sting -- they don't have that much to protect, but also I never kill any at that stage when I inspect those. The real problem with beekeeping is the bleeping Langstroth hive -- it might as well have been designed to kill lots of bees. Even with lots of practice and patience, and having put a lot of effort into finding ways to avoid killing bees, I still manage to kill one or two when I get into a Langstroth hive -- it's infuriating, to me and my bees.
The genie is out of the bottle though. If all beekeeping stopped, honeybees would still be everywhere -- perhaps in smaller numbers, perhaps not.
Are there any proposals to ban beekeeping?
It's possible that in Texas the property tax break incentive for beekeeping will be removed, because it's fairly new and because it's getting abused. But I seriously doubt that a ban on beekeeping will pass anywhere.
There are non-native plants (like almond trees) in the North Americas that are mainly pollinated by non-native bees. We couldn't realistically outlaw even just commercial beekeeping, though politically it may be possible to outlaw amateur beekeeping (would that make a dent?).
Mason bees lay nest in holes. Hotels are bundle of tubes mounted on wall. It is supposed to be important get goods ones, which seem to have wood trays instead of tubes, but I don't have a source on those. Some people bring the full hotels inside for winter but I get mild winters and figure bees know what they are doing. Then the bees emerge in the spring and lay eggs for winter. The tubes need to be cleaned or replaced, but not sure when.
Thanks for reminding me, I've been meaning to put up a mason bee hotel. I hope not too late.
Most other native bees are ground nesting. Leaving bare earth or brush piles can help.
I love insects, all of them, they all participate in pollination, there's no reason to have a so big focus on honey bees. Let alone that honey is not really optimal for us, we need fibers. So I'd rather have many various plants, fruits trees (figs - some depend on wasps, persimmons, ..), other trees, and insects varieties than this formatted landscape
> But they’re not dependent on you. They don’t need you.
Here in New Zealand we have too many bees, and they are most definitely dependant on humans. If you don't treat them, they'll die in a season from varroa. They might survive a little longer, but not much. There are wild colonies sin a nearby park, and all fail.
You can tell who didn’t bother to read the article here, by the people who clearly assumed the article was asking “Is Beekeeping Morally Wrong?”, as opposed to the actual topic of the article which might have been better titled “Is Beekeeping Using the Wrong Approach?”
Or maybe people are just more interested in arguing for/against the first one and a comments thread like this seems like a good place for it? It's not like they're such unrelated topics that discussing beekeeping ethics in this thread is ridiculous if that's what people want to discuss, it's not like discussing potato chips in a thread about CPU chips.
I'll also add that I don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong, as you seem to, with coming straight to a HN comments thread without first reading the article. I know I'm not alone in intentionally doing that quite often, partly because for many subjects (including this one) I'm not really interested enough to want to read an article-length deep dive of any single person's opinion, whereas seeing a wide range of views in comment-length bee-sized pieces has the potential to be interesting to me. I've always got the option to go read the full article if after reading the comments it seems like I'd find it interesting to do so.
I think bees can easily live without humans, they would just became another insignificant species like many others, say for example, like Alburnoides Bipunctatus. Wait, why did I picked that one? What's so special about it that I picked it? Nothing, that's why I picked it.
That's true, but I do agree in part that we've a pretty good relationship with bees.
And, any beekeeper will respect the bees and only take what's needed without making their life harder.
> Beekeper extracts almost all bee and replaces it with sugar
If you mean that the larvae combs are removed and replaced by sugar... most probably not. The idea is having as much bees by beehive as you can breed.
If you mean that beekeepers remove "almost all" honey leaving bees to starve, this is an oversimplification. Any professional beekeeper know that will need to leave enough honey for winter. Leaving a minimum of 12-15 Kg of honey is standard and should suffice for the bees. If the beehive looks weak may not be harvested at all. Sugar is provided if needed as winter emergency feeding. The beekeeper will feed the bees in autumn also to assure that the fall born bees are as strong as fatty as possible.
> If you mean that the larvae combs are removed and replaced by sugar... most probably not. The idea is having as much bees by beehive as you can breed.
GP almost certainly meant that beekeepers take all the honey then they feed the bees sugar-water. That actually is true of some (many?) beekeepers.
It depends strongly on location. Winter bees live on autumn fat. If the bees are well feed in fall and the winters are warm, will need much less honey to survive. The beehive will not be required to be warmed against chilling temperatures for example so bees don't need to spend so much energy warming it
Not I! Sugar water is terrible for the bees. If you want strong colonies that over-winter fine and bounce back fast in the Spring to make lots of honey, then you'd best leave them plenty of honey to make it through the winter. I only extract half of what I harvest (freezing that which I don't extract so I can give it back later if the colonies need it), and I leave a fair bit in the hives too.
Don't buy commercial honey. Buy local, small- and medium-batch honey.
Basically this. Colonies stay for the room and occasional board, as well as all the flowers that beekeepers typically plant in the hopes of making their bees productive.
Colonies do abscond, absolutely, and there's lots of feral honeybee colonies out there.
> As always with these kinds of headlines the answer is no.
The article is making the case that the answer is Yes. It goes over the reasons why the current way of Beekeeping (predominately for harvesting their honey) could be bad for bees and explains methods that the 'natural beekeepers' are using to make their pollination role more sustainable.
From the article:
> Most beekeepers’ colonies are much larger than those which occur in the wild, and rival colonies might be separated by only a few yards, rather than by half a mile. Much of the bees’ honey, which is supposed to get them through the winter, is taken before they have a chance to eat it. A queen bee goes on a spree of mating flights early in her life, and then lays the fertilized eggs until her death. In apiaries, queens often have their wings clipped, to interrupt swarming (a colony’s natural form of reproduction), and are routinely inspected, and replaced by newcomers, sometimes imported from the other side of the world. Propolis—a wonderful, sticky substance that bees make from tree resin and that has antibacterial qualities—is typically scraped out of hives by beekeepers because it is annoying and hard to get off their hands.
> Natural beekeepers leave their bees alone. They seldom treat for disease—allowing the weaker colonies to fail—and they raise the survivors in conditions that are as close as possible to tree cavities. They fill their hives with swarms that come in on the wing, rather than those which come from dealers who trade on the Internet.
> > In apiaries, queens often have their wings clipped, to interrupt swarming
This is nonsense. Beekeepers like to do "splits" (simulated swarming) because it increases the number of hives they have (and if they have too many, they can sell them), and mated queens don't and can't fly far unless the colony prepares her for swarming by making her lose weight for a couple of weeks before swarming.
> > and are routinely inspected, and replaced by newcomers, sometimes imported from the other side of the world.
This is true. Well, the queens themselves don't get "inspected" so much as the whole colony, because the beekeeper wants to see the queen laying lots. Re-queening is very much a thing, and quite frequent too.
> > Propolis—a wonderful, sticky substance that bees make from tree resin and that has antibacterial qualities—is typically scraped out of hives by beekeepers because it is annoying and hard to get off their hands.
I never scrape off propolis (which really is wonderful), and all beekeepers really should not scrape it off. But it's generally understood that propolis is very good. Indeed, there are beekeepers who stimulate production of propolis to harvest and sell it (you can definitely find propolis products out there), but only ignorant ones scrape it of because it's annoying.
> > Natural beekeepers leave their bees alone. They seldom treat for disease—allowing the weaker colonies to fail—and they raise the survivors in conditions that are as close as possible to tree cavities. They fill their hives with swarms that come in on the wing, rather than those which come from dealers who trade on the Internet.
True! Except that catching swarms is no guarantee that those are not "from dealers who trade on the Internet" (oh noes, not the Iinnnternet! and dealers!!). I've bought queens "on the Internet", though not from dealers but from beekeepers who do queen rearing. The problem with those queens is that they're often not very good, possibly because the larvae used for the grafts was too old, or because they didn't get enough chances to mate, or because of in-breeding.
> replaced by newcomers, sometimes imported from the other side of the world
Depending on how you view it that bit is actually wrong. You are specifically NOT ALLOWED to ship bees between e.g. Europe and North America. I think you can send sperm and maybe eggs (not sure if that's possible).
Our current civilization certainly seems to score very high on neuroticism.
50 years from now, people will label the Zeistgeist as a resurgence of old Victorianism, with different (in direction, not in kind) racial and sexual taboos and an extra dollop of hairshirt environmentalism.
Not quite. Much of the industry for growing fruit depends on beekeepers renting out their bees as pollinators. As for cattle, well, yeah, they wholly depend on us. If you are in doubt just look at the relative sizes of populations of cattle vs mammalian wildlife.
I don't think you appreciate quite how many heads of cattle exist compared to comparable mammals that live in nature, and what it would look like if the world's cattle population was "free range".
The way we raise cattle is extremely efficient. Not least in terms of space.
> I don't think you appreciate quite how many heads of cattle
Born and raised on a cattle station with multiple STEM degrees and decades mapping the world (large scale geophysical land and ocean survey) behind me ..
I don't think you appreciate how laughably condescending you come across.
Points being:
* I understand the total number of cattle under direct human management,
* I know that cattle can survive just fine without human management .. even in urban environments (ever seen free range unowned cattle in India?),
* I've already linked to what feral cattle look like and the damage they do.
In a way, beekeeping is stealing nectar from wild bees.
I pretty much never see wild bees in my garden anymore - they're all honey bees, and usually some human is keeping/farming them - effectively stealing nectar from my garden and that of thousands of my neighbours that we had left out for wild animals.
It may have to do with the flowers you have in your yard. I have a beehive and a large number and diversity of native pollinators, but I plant to attract and support them.
This is completely anecdotally but keeping honey bees in my garden appeared to attract a large number of wild bees, like bumblebees, ground nesting and solitary bees. Part of it might be that I've attempted to great an good environment for my own bees, part of it might also simply be that I notice bees a lot more.
Commercial beekeepers are a different story, but they mostly place their apiaries in areas where wild bees couldn't possibly manage to cover the entire area anyway, like fields.
One issue that might be at play in your case is that types of bees beekeepers normally keep are way better at dealing with pesticides, as compared to bumblebees and solitary bees. Your neighbors might be going a bit heavy on the spraying and some might actively be destroying the nests of ground nesting bees out of fear. For a few weeks each year my sidewalk is alive with ground nesting bees, while just a few meters away everything is fuck dead, because a stupid neighbor is allergic to bees and wasp and assumes that every bee is going to kill him (he doesn't keep an epi-pen so I question the seriousness of his affliction), so he sprays pretty much all sidewalks around here, except mine.
Stealing is a weird choice of words. Do you steal the oxygen that you breathe, or the water that you drink ? For it to reach your tap, it has been stolen by some fish's lake
The nectar and pollen that flowers produce is in fact a limited resource, both in quantity and in time available.
Honeybees have the capability of depleting such resources because they are far more active than they actually need to be, which is one of the reasons we use them for crops with very high densities of flowers, like blueberries. They are efficient and thorough enough to get the job done.
There are times of the year (in particular, late summer/fall) where good flowers are especially hard to come by, and so solitary bees can have trouble trying to compete against a hive in the area when they are trying to gather the resources they need to reproduce. Meanwhile a hive also has honey stored so dips in availability during the year matter much less.
The parent has a point, though I never thought about it that way. In a way a similar case would be if you had a squad of squirrels that gather seeds and nuts from your neighbour's gardens, and you would then take and sell the bounty that they bring back.
If the bees are in a man made hive they need you to remove honey so that they have room to lay. If you don't they will leave and not all of that honey is going with them.
Honeybees produce more honey than they need for several reasons, mainly that a) they are natural hoarders, b) we've bred them to hoard even more.
It's true that colonies can become pollen-bound and/or nectar-/honey-bound, and thus have too little space for brood. When this happens it's very likely that the colony will swarm off, leaving behind as few as 20% or so of the bees behind, as well as and swarm cells from which one victorious queen will emerge, and then the rump colony will have plenty of honey while it's weak and recovering its numbers. During that time they'll consume whatever it was they had too much of and thus make room for brood.
Yes, and you will have happy neighbors... I do understand that the natural reproduction cycle isn't quite that simple. However for "normal" operation some removal is beneficial and not "stealing", so long as they have adequate supplies.
Not only that, but what beekeepers do is give the colony more room as it fills the hive with honey. The bees don't realize they have enough and just gather more and more, thus ending up with a large surplus that the beekeeper is happy to harvest.
The neighbour example is about wild critters getting the harvest from your own yard vs. your neighbour running a farming operation and keeping the proceeds.
Bees and flowers have a commensel relationship where the flowers provide nectar and some pollen to the bees in exchange for distribution of the flower's pollen for fertilization. The bees aren't "stealing" anything. That nectar has no purpose to the plant if it doesn't attract pollinators.
Of course neither the bees nor the flowers are conscious of this relationship or their roles in it as it evolved naturally from the natures of both plants and insects.
People take honey, but in exchange bees receive a few things
1) Pillbox Housing. Expensive beehive, made from metal and wood, and with only a few narrow entries easy to defend.
2) Comfort. In a quiet sunny place without loud music or sounds. A lid protecting from rain and storms and walls able to stand winds guarantee a dry and warm inner area. A lot of clean wax combs ready to be occupied with minimum effort and a structure to put each comb apart exactly how bees like it.
3) Free medical care. Provided by the species with the most advanced medicine known in the universe.
4) Free emergency help. Including extra food rations in winter and beehive rescue in case of wildfire or flood
5) Bodyguard services. Anti bear stone walls, Anti-wasp electric fences and Bee-eater deterrents if needed. Banners against human trespassers and regulation discouraging thieves.
8) Holidays. Free vehicle transport to visit fields in bloom exactly in the be-est touristic season.
9) Dating services at intercontinental level
10) All you can eat buffet. Gardens designed specifically and seeded with the best international selection of premium nectar.
I think the idea was that the native bees lose share of the resources to honeybees that are artificially supported. Which is not something I had thought about before.
> the idea was that the native bees lose share of the resources to honeybees that are artificially supported
This is not true necessarily (it depends on the context)
Most solitary native bees will not compete with honeybees (or will compete only partially) because they favor different flowers. In general if you find bees of very different sizes they basically will not compete. Honeybees rarely will touch small Fabaceae and are not common on Apiaceae. Alfalfa fields are pollinated by tiny native bees.
Pollen also has fats. Bees very much need some of those fats. I recently saw a presentation on a paper about bee diets where they tested honeybee pollen preferences, and they tend to like pollens with omega-3-rich fats, up to 25% or so.
The real headline could be more accurately put as "Is modern amateur/hobbiest beekeeping making bee's genetically weaker?"
"None of us knew at the time how strong the selection would be in the wild,” Seeley told me recently. “It turned out that the bees had the variation needed to develop the traits to resist the mites.” While beekeepers were experimenting with chemical treatments and hive designs, the bees in the forest were changing genetically. Their life styles helped them, too. “Colonies living in the wild have many things going for them,” Seeley said. The bees lived in smaller groups, relatively far apart, which made it harder for varroa to spread. They swarmed every year, which broke the reproductive cycle of the mites. (If a colony swarms, the nest is left without bee larvae, which is where varroa mites take hold.)"
Heres a small snippet that briefly explains some of the things some Beekeepers think amateur beekeepers do incorrectly.
