There's a little bit of dodging going around in this article... What's really going on is we still have a high amount of churn in the funnel, we're just spending more to hide it.
> "The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies -- that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers -- is now the highest it's been in 20 years."
So the absolute numbers are up, great, but that did not come for free:
> "The average retail price of honey has roughly doubled since 2006"
Or, put in startup lingo, the churn is still high, but we're just hiding it by paying more to acquire a larger number of bees. CCD is still killing off bees, but we're just spending more to compensate.
This is the dodgeyness: any good HN reader knows that it's your churn that kills your finances in the end.
And that's where the insanity lies: I believe that CCD has basically been conclusively traced to a certain class of pesticides... what sounds insane to me is we have created a toxic environment that has increased the leaking in the boat, but it's okay because we can just spend more money on bigger bilge pumps instead of addressing the underlying cause of the leak.
You're referring to neonicotinoids. Let's stipulate that neonicotinoids are in fact the root cause of CCD, which is defined as the increase in overwintering colony losses.
Honey bees are a livestock animal, tied directly to agriculture. Neonicotinoids are popular in part because they're a narrow spectrum pesticide targeted at insect biology, and have fewer ill effects on other mammals than other pesticides.
Here's the question: if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture, and CCD can be mitigated by more aggressive colony generation strategies, why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all? The market seems to have already done that.
> why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all?
Unintended consequences of large-scale ecological engineering perhaps. Sure, commercial beekeepers can increase prices and the neonicotinoid users can accept it as an indirect cost of their choice of pesticide, but what about the large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied into commercial interests, but on which we still depend?
Seems to me like there's a huge indiscriminant spillover effect into an incredibly complex system, the implications of which can not be easily predicted nor priced.
One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost onto carbon emissions. Also note how you said "have fewer ill effects on other mammals"... there are still effects, and asbestos seemed like a miracle material before the long-term effects were studied.
The indiscriminate usage of an chemical toxic enough to cause measurable ecological web disruption sounds like a geo-engineering quagmire to me, even if the commercial front-line can compensate with higher prices. How do you accurately price what you don't know?
>what about the large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied into commercial interests, but on which we still depend?
Going even further, what about the side-effects on the very same field?
Pesticides kill insects, but they kill both beneficial (pest eating) and pestilent insects. The problem is the bad guys can bounce back faster - picture the deer population vs. wolf population. This means that, paradoxically, the use of pesticides now leads to a greater need for pesticides later.
The solution is to step back, recognize this negative feedback loop, and address the root causes of pest invasion: dead soil and loss of biodiversity. This is where techniques like cover cropping, interplanting, and inoculating with compost (soil microorganisms) come in.
One of the shortcomings of "free market systems" is they historically fail at pricing ecological consequences... look at the fight around putting a cost onto carbon emissions.
Actually, this isn't a shortcoming of the market as such. It's a failure in conjunction of our incomplete recognition of private property rights. By preventing certain types of property from having private ownership, we don't allow the market to correct itself. More specifically, if we had some private entity or entities that were recognized as the owners of air or water, then they would be able to recover damages from the polluters, thus removing ability to externalize the cost of pollution.
But once you start removing things from the purview of the market (in this case by saying that nobody can own it, and thus nobody has an ownership interest in protecting or has a right to damages), then you're actively preventing the market from correcting. I think it's really amazing that the market does as well as it does, considering how ubiquitous are the regulations that handicap it.
Edit: I should have read farther down the chain, where this [1] mentions the same idea.
I don't want to endorse your position as a monopoly owner of both air and water, and yet I want to reward you for boldness. There isn't a button for that.
>if we had some private entity or entities that were recognized as the owners of air or water
How exactly would that work? Say I buy a piece of land. Under your proposal, I presume I would have to pay a licensing fee to Nestle whenever it rains, and to 3M for the privilege of breathing?
So are you saying that the solution to externalisation of damage to the environment by a corporate entity is to have other corporate entities own everything? All the air, all the sea, all the rivers etc?
It's certainly one possible solution. This isn't just my idle speculation; see Coase Theorem [1] in economics:
The theorem states that if trade in an externality is possible and there are sufficiently low transaction costs, bargaining will lead to an efficient outcome regardless of the initial allocation of property.
In the interest of intellectual honesty, I should go on to quote:
In practice, obstacles to bargaining or poorly defined property rights can prevent Coasian bargaining. ... Coase argued that real-world transaction costs are rarely low enough to allow for efficient bargaining and hence the theorem is almost always inapplicable to economic reality. Since then, others have demonstrated the importance of the perfect information assumption and shown using game theory that inefficient outcomes are to be expected when this assumption is not met.
That being said, it should be equally clear that the failures of public choice [2] are also legion, and in the example of pollution, it's clear that the regulatory system has bungled quite a lot of it, so it's far from obvious that the private ownership approach would be any worse.
Unintended consequences of large-scale ecological engineering perhaps. Sure, commercial beekeepers can increase prices and the neonicotinoid users can accept it as an indirect cost of their choice of pesticide, but what about the large chunk of the ecosystem you're engineering which is not directly tied into commercial interests, but on which we still depend?
Is it relevant that honeybees are not native to North America, and can't pollinate many native American plants?
One thing we can stipulate is that the chemistry of our planet is changing rapidly as result of human industry. We might not be able to prove that fact with conclusive evidence before any fallible human court of law, or public opinion. But whether we do or not doesn't change the fact that big changes in planetary chemistry mark major extinction periods in our planetary past, and that we are messing with forces far beyond our control. That is the height of hubris.
So we can also stipulate that the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance.
Unfortunately our corporate law and ideas of rightful production were founded before accurate concepts of our place in the ecology of the planet were fully formed.
So we are dealing with a lot of retrograde ideas of a human centered produce chain, and these are based very firmly in law and ideas of right and good that are outdated in the anthropocene.
You can talk about a "net win for agriculture" and "aggressive colony generation strategies", however net wins and aggressive strategies need to be evaluated in the larger context of their impact on life on earth - the whole thing, not just human ability to pig out for another 50 or 100 years before we go extinct! Cheers.
I will not stipulate that "the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance", because I don't even know what that means. The Precautionary Principle works well in some places and not in others. In this case: you're pretending that the policy you're advocating doesn't have an embedded tradeoff, but it does. If you use less neonicotinoid pesticide, which you're hyperfixated on because of what seems to be a BS media trend story about bees, you will use more of other pesticides (or, worse, more land, which destroys habitat for all animals) which may be more harmful in the aggregate.
Honey bees are not a natural part of our ecology. They are a livestock animal. Worrying about their population and the energy it takes to sustain them is a lot like worrying about the population of dairy cows.
>If you use less neonicotinoid pesticide, you will use more land
If you think that the only possible way to grow food is monoculture fields sprayed with poison and fertilizer (aka the "green revolution"), then you'd be right.
But is that really true? Is that the only possible way to grow food?
I ask because forests seem to grow lots of food (an unmanaged forest generates many times more biomass per hectare than a farm field), without requiring nitrogen, potassium, phosphorus, neonicotinoids, glycophosphates, diesel fuel...
But surely there's no way to design a system that operates with no inputs like a forest, and also turns much of that biomass into food for humans, right?
Just because the forest has more mass does not mean it produces more food. Trees produce tons of mass in an evolutionary war to be taller than all the other trees and get more sunlight. None of it is edible though.
All of them are in a highly competitive war for resources. Plants produced poisons to kill other plants. They try to spread their seeds faster. They try to grow taller and faster and steal sunlight. They grow bigger roots to steal water.
No plant wants to be eaten, and so many produce poisons and thorns other deterrents. Few of them keep all their calories in one place, and require highly specialized digestive systems which humans don't have.
The exception is fruit plants of course, but they only produce the minimal amount of food necessary. The fruit you buy in a store has been extensively bred by humans to be so large - and this domestication has a massive energy cost that makes them uncompetitive in the wild.
Anyway the point is that the wild is not optimized for humans at all. It's an incredibly inefficient way to produce food. The plants are spending most of their resources fighting each other, and insects, and everything else. The winner of this game is whatever plants reproduce the most, not the ones humans want. Permaculture is really cool, but you are never going to get anywhere near as many calories per unit of land.
Permaculture is really cool, but you are never going to get anywhere near as many calories per unit of land.
Permaculture means living such that we don't go extinct. Having a great portion of our workforce return to bucolic agrarian pursuits is one way to get there! As they say: it beats flipping burgers.
The point of a food forest is that it has been carefully cultivated to maximize your human edibles, without needing energy expensive, oil based, or otherwise negatively impactful external inputs. When you subtract the non renewable energy expenditure, you certainly will get as many calories per unit of land!
The energy costs of fertilizer and pesticides are the problem not the cost of robots/tractors.
All fossil fuels are going to be gone within 5k years. Humans are several times that old and presumably humans will want to survive that. Sure, we can kick the can on this one, but it is a long term problem.
Any agricultural system that won't support near total automation of the harvesting of staples will not be sustainable for a planet with over 7 billion people. A food forest sounds great, but there's no way to drive a combine over it and feed a hundred thousand people with the labor of one.
(an unmanaged forest generates many times more biomass per hectare than a farm field)
Biomass is not the same thing as food. Are food forests actually capable of growing more calories (or fewer calories with enough compensating micronutrients) per unit area over an extended time compared to industrialized fields?
Ah but it isn't true. What is true is that industrial agriculture is the product of pecuniary exploit, not economy of scale, and definitely not the quest for the greater good.
You not knowing what that means is a good thing. That's where you and all the industrial production chain should start PRIOR to deciding that one toxic chemical really ought to be used in place of ten others, etc. A proper foundation for any use of industrial, planet scale chemistry is: I don't know what the effect will be.
That's why I'm not narrowly focused on neonicotinoids at all, and didn't mention them in my post. I'm focused on the entire supply chain, from legos to legumes. It should all be looked at with a big dose of critical skepticism.
From there, understanding the difference between growing beans and dumping weird plastic molecules into the ecosystem is pretty fundamental to knowing what is and isn't a natural party of our ecology. That's the wisdom that should sit at the top of our supply chain.
"PRIOR to deciding that one toxic chemical really ought to be used in place of ten others"
Points 1 and 2 from "5 Simple Chemistry Facts That Everyone Should Understand Before Talking About Science[1]" apply here.
1) Everything is made of chemicals, and
2) There is no such thing as a toxic chemical, there are only toxic doses. Let me say that again: all chemicals are safe at a low enough dose, and all chemicals are toxic at a high enough dose.
The idea that we can live in a world in which humans do no harm is untenable. Almost every single action we perform does some harm to some thing, and picking and choosing which things we can harm and which we cannot is rather arbitrary. Further, the idea that proving that "my chemical" does no harm is quite an impossible task, no matter how noble the chemical. H2O is responsible for innumerable floods, drownings, mudslides, erosion, etc. If your test fails for water, I think it's safe to say that your test is broken.
If you and I are responsible for a man who is exposed to doses of radiation everyday and I stand up and say, you know, we shouldn't have this guy exposed to radiation because it could be lethal, and you say, hoooold on, there's no such thing as lethal radiation, just lethal doses of radiation ... then I gotta wonder who you are working for!
Because both our points are that you gotta know how much radiation he is getting, and not according to some chart generated by someone who is benefitting from the labor from a distance, but actually what the effect of the dose is over the course of the guy's life.
We agreed about dose, but you don't tell me that I'm in the wrong for saying "halt work", by saying " but it's a question of dosage " and let the guy keep working while you do a 20 year study! You protect him first!
I disagree. The point isn't that no research should be done, but that nothing is safe. Your point was
"So we can also stipulate that the onus is on an the producers and beneficiaries of all the toxic mess of industry, to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that their profit isn't coming at a permanent cost to the full realization of planetary health and sustenance."
That is an impossible task. Water is not safe. Oxygen is flammable. The number of things we can do that are not harmful to anyone or anything is closer to zero than you think.
If you set the bar at impossible, and I lower it to something achievable, it is bad form to evaluate my reasonableness as duplicitous.
Oxygen is not flammable (neither is fluorine... every other element is, in the sense that it forms stable compounds in exothermic reactions with oxygen.)
Oxygen is, however, fairly toxic (2 atmospheres partial pressure starts to get pretty dangerous after relatively short times.)
You are indeed correct, and had I taken more care, I would have stated that oxygen encourages flammability... which is still not entirely correct, but closer.
But you destroy your own point. Everyone on earth is exposed to "doses of radiation" every single second. It's just a small enough amount of radiation as to be benign.
Is the answer partly that its a classic Pigouvian property rights issue? The pesticide users are not compensating the bee users for the damage to their property. There may be some overlap in the forms of agriculture, but I'm guessing its not 100%.
> Here's the question: if neonicotinoids are a net win for agriculture, and CCD can be mitigated by more aggressive colony generation strategies, why would we need to address neonicotinoids at all? The market seems to have already done that.
I'm concerned that we haven't proven yet that we can properly mitigate CCD long term with aggressive colony generation strategies, at least not long term. We need more data.
Use of the three most common neonicotinoids has been severely restricted in the EU since 2013. If they can withstand the lobbying pressure from Bayer, who makes literally billions of dollars selling these, we'll hopefully have good data in a few years time.
Because honeybees are just one of many pollinating insects whose numbers are falling dramatically. They just happen to get talked about a lot in the press because there are people with a direct economic interest in them.
>Using historic data sets, we quantified the degree to which global change over 120 years disrupted plant-pollinator interactions in a temperate forest understory community in Illinois, USA. We found degradation of interaction network structure and function and extirpation of 50% of bee species. Network changes can be attributed to shifts in forb and bee phenologies resulting in temporal mismatches, nonrandom species extinctions, and loss of spatial co-occurrences between extant species in modified landscapes. Quantity and quality of pollination services have declined through time. The historic network showed flexibility in response to disturbance; however, our data suggest that networks will be less resilient to future changes.
Because wild populations of bees are affected too.
From a strictly utilitarian point of view, that reduces biodiversity, which increases the risk of disease. The narrower the gene pool, the greater percentage of animals could be lost to a particular virus or bacteria.
From a broader perspective, it would be a bummer of a world of the only bees are managed colonies that are trucked around from farm to farm. Goodbye to fields of wildflowers with bees buzzing around, and goodbye to all sorts of wild plants that depend on wild bee pollination.
So brutally rapid market driven natural selection of the honey bee population is a good thing, hmm. Darwinian both financially and biologically, and fits with prevailing American economic philosophy.
I venture that we're performing an uncontrolled experiment with known benefits and risks we are just beginning to understand. Not worth it. One can only hope the E.U invades in Operation American Freedom and imposes the Precautionary Principle on us.
* Therefore, neonicotinoids have a net positive effect on agriculture.
(in other words, like a good libertarian you are assuming that the market has complete/perfect/accurate information)
Unfortunately that's just not true. Today's farmers simply don't have the required soil science/botany/ecology/hydrology knowledge. Worst, they are actively misled by biocide and fertilizer salesmen, who have a natural profit motive to convince farmers that their products are essential.
Far from being essential, in reality pesticides destroy the nutrient harvesting ability of healthy soil. Soil microbiologist Dr. Elaine Ingham explains: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag
I would appreciate it if you would not call me a libertarian, as I am not one of those, and you couldn't possibly know anyways. This mistake --- the fundamental attribution effect --- causes more bullshit misunderstandings on HN than anything except for perhaps the is-ought fallacy.
Whether or not you call yourself the "L" word, you argument relies on free market fundamentalism, which is just as bad.
Free Market Fundamentalism: the belief that markets are giant calculating machines that output optimal social relations, i.e. Pareto optimal transactions
Because the alternatives to neonicotinoids are broader-spectrum pesticides that affect other kinds of animal life, including mammals, as I've said repeatedly on the thread.
I don't know why you insist on being so overtly hostile, but whatever the reason, let me promise that it doesn't make you more persuasive.
>Because the alternatives to neonicotinoids are broader-spectrum pesticides
Well 'ere's yer problem! ;)
You're starting off by assuming that agriculture must use pesticides to grow food. But is that really true?
I submit to you that it is not. Furthermore, I submit that a food system that depends on pesticides is doomed to self-destruct (because of inevitable biogeophysical processes). Pesticides destroy the nutrient cycling microorganisms in the soil leading to infertility, erosion, and ultimately desertification. Again, soil microbiologist Elaine Ingham explains the process better than I could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2H60ritjag
>I don't know why you insist on being so overtly hostile
To be fair though, neonicotinoids have become popular since the 90's because they are much more narrow spectrum than previous pesticides. In particular, they are not harmful to mammals, which is often seen as a good thing.
I'm not disagreeing with you. I definitely agree that using less (ideally no) pesticides is the best. But moving from a pesticide with more side effects to one with less is an improvement any way you look at it. Also, I believe it's an open question whether we would be able to feed the world population without using pesticides. If you have to choose between adverse affects on soil quality and potentially having people starve, the choice for policy makers is obvious.
Step 1: devise a sustainable system of growing food, where "sustainable" means that the process can be maintained for at least five hundred years without exhausting resources.
An example of unsustainable agriculture is a model based on mining phosphate.
An example of sustainable agriculture is a model where human waste can be converted into fertilisers (e.g. by processing sewage using reed beds, then charring the reeds to use as biochar and mulch).
Turn our attention to plants which will efficiently store phosphorous in a biologically available form, and ensure that the phosphorous we currently discard in effluent can be captured.
Treat spaceship Earth as a closed system and relise that we have to plumb our outputs back into our inputs or there will be a heck of a mess to clean up later.
There is also the issue of the begged question when asking, "how do we feed 9 billion people?"
I don't understand how this would work. You can't turn money into bees. You can turn bees into more bees, and money can be used to persuade people to put in more effort to make this happen, but at some point the bees themselves have to be reproducing.
I thought the whole problem with colony collapse and the honeybee crisis was that bees were declining and nobody knew how to stop it. If you can stop it with money, maybe that's not ideal, but is it a major problem anymore?
By segregating a colony in a clean room with high quality feed and optimal conditions you could quickly bulk and split colonies. That would basically turn money in to bees.
The argument is that either the honey gets more expensive, or all other food does. If you want to refute that as a false choice, you need more than populist rhetoric.
It's not quite money into bees, and it's not quite more human effort.
The problem is that building up a new hive is a lot of work for the bees themselves. A new hive needs to collect its own store of honey, raise the new comb to put this new honey in, and raise a lot of new bees to collect the honey, raise the comb, and tend the bee larva. All of this takes a lot of time and energy, and the bees will not be able to collect pollen and nectar as fast while under-beed, so the bees will produce a lot less extra honey for the beekeepers to harvest.
From a survival-of-bees perspective, the critical point is the point at which you can no longer split the surviving hives enough times each year to replace the ones lost overwintering; we're still probably a long ways off from that point.
From a beekeeping and honey perspective, the problem is that you essentially can't count on hives that are new or were split to generate any extra honey for harvest. This means that you need to increase the total number of hives being kept to harvest the same amount of honey. If you want to be able to harvest honey from 100 hives each year, you may need to keep 400 hives around -- 200 will die in the winter, 100 will be used to generate 200 new hives to replace the ones lost overwintering, and the last 100 you can actually take honey off of, which was your goal all along.
If the problem is fewer bees, and money is able to compensate by creating more bees, then there is no problem.
If you view the problem as being that bees are being killed by something, then yes, this doesn't solve the problem. But isn't the problem ultimately how many bees you have, not the rate at which they're reproducing and dying?
The comment I replied to seems to be implying that the death of the honeybee is still nigh, and that this extra money is just temporarily hiding it. But how could that be?
The empirical existence of rising marginal cost (as you point out) is not evidence of non-viability. Every economic 101 good is thought to be produced until its marginal cost is sloping upward. Economically coherent industries will continue to produce widgets. And increasing costs do not simply make an industry incoherent. Both social value ($demand/subsidization) and technology (cost/difficulty) come into play. It seems a bit arbitrary to make adverse assumptions about future ecosystems a bit more evidence.
Absolutely agreed. And it's a bit arbitrary to make favorable assumptions about future ecosystems (as this article does) without a bit more evidence too.
Since the colonies are still collapsing without explanation, a modicum of pessimism might be understandable, even if it isn't completely justifiable.
That's the trouble, all this startup mumbo jumbo makes no sense to me!
Anyway, I think these analogies fail because they keep talking about investors, where you're supposed to be spending money up front for a great return later on. If you're spending more and more money to maintain the same future return then you're in trouble. But things like money spent on bees and honey prices are just straightforward money-for-product transactions.
The author is actually expliciting stating "Yep, there is an increase in bee deaths but the total number of bees is substantially higher so the supposed negative effect of these increased deaths is overstated or wrong" I don't think that's dodgy.
[1] the author is claiming that the number of colonies of domesticated bees is higher (not the number of bees),
[2] the author ignores non-domesticated bees and thus misses a significant economic contributor that matters for agricultural pollination, if not honey.
It's particularly dodgy because you're an example of a reader who came away thinking, "But there's more bees so that's good!" That's a false conclusion, the blame for which I lay partly at the feet of this author.
You can spend more money on your Adwords campaigns and get a measurable increase in absolute page views or absolute conversions. However, the KPI's that your investors care about are things like your cost-of-acquisition.
If it's actually the case that you're spending more just to maintain the same conversion because you're losing customers at a higher rate, that indicates something is wrong.
I know all analogies break down with scrutiny but I think the major issue here is you're assuming bees are customers when in actuality bees are the workers, honey is the product or service and the customers' consume honey. To put this in startup terms "We're seeing higher employee turnover and so our expenses are rising because we're spending more to recruit and retain works and those workers are more expensive and less productive till they get up to speed (and with high employee churn might leave us before they're fully productive) Higher costs suck because we've had to raise the prices for our service to offset but the market has absorbed a 2x increase in our prices since 2006 so it's not exactly all bad"
... and in that situation, a headline suggesting the crisis is over ("Call off the Bee-pocalypse") would be misleading. Especially since the all indications show the problem continues to get worse.
Moreover, the article entirely ignores wild bees. That's somewhat understandable as they're not as well studied, but they're a significant pollination force nevertheless -- according to this White House fact sheet [1], wild bees accounted for $9 billion of the economic benefit of pollination (compared to $15 billion for domesticated bees). The wild bees are not being replaced. This article really does have a lot of dodgy accounting (esp ignoring externalized costs).
Shamelessly plugging a related project, I recently contributed to a game [1] designed to illustrate that wild bee populations have economic value. Jana Vamosi, a biologist from the University of Calgary, submitted the project idea to the Mozilla Science Lab [2] to get help building it. There's a lot of room for improvement, actually, if anyone wants to lend a hand.
I find it incredibly sad that the only way to make people care about the destruction of wild bees is to talk about how much economic benefit they provide.
CCD hasn't been traced to insecticides though. It's a contributing factor. But there are multiple causes. Parasites and diseases are big factors too.
Honeybees are not native. They have low genetic diversity from domestication. They are transported around the country by beekeepers every year, spreading their diseases and parasites. And they have their produce taken by humans.
Even if you removed all insecticides, they might improve a bit, but I doubt they would be doing well. And if they did get wiped out, so what? They aren't native, and there are wild bees that would replace them.
I keep seeing comments and articles implying that all bees are going extinct and that this will be cataclysmic. It's just a ridiculous misunderstanding of what is happening.
There are problem causes that are very hard to address. E.g. alcohol consumption causing a lot of traffic accidents.
Or massive corporations, with huge lobbying budgets, releasing toxins in the environment. Toxins that cause no obvious harm, but kill a lot of bees or cause cancer in some humans after 20 years of exposure.
Do they actually die as a result, or just continue living somewhere else? Because if the problem is just that beekeepers lose them, that doesn't seem so bad as if it actually decimated them.
> I believe that CCD has basically been conclusively traced to a certain class of pesticides.
However, the initial data on bee deaths following the use of dust-off mitigation strategies, like using Fluency Agent, looks promising. Granted, it is still early days to be forming any formal concluions, but the data that is available shows a significant change. Even if we can point to neonicotinoids as the cause, where do we go from here if changing our handling strategies resolves the problem?
It's unlikely. Wild bees are not affected by the same diseases and parasites, have much more genetic diversity, and are adapted for this climate. Honeybees are not native, they have less genetic diversity from domestication and importation, and they are transported around the country by beekeepers every year (spreading their diseases and parasites around.)
Nor do they have to deal with their produce being taken by humans.
Consider perhaps a speed boat. You find that by lowering the freeboard (height above waterline) you can go faster. But this means more water splashes in, necessating a bigger bilge pump. People like their speedboats to go fast, they're probably ok with this trade off.
A comment from a real bee farmer on the article: " Mr Ingraham---do not assume you can read a few papers on CCD and bees and make cogent, authoritative remarks in a newspaper piece----this piece fails miserably. I AM a beekeeper, in Los Angeles, using feral honey bees, making public presentations, teaching beekeeping and selling honey. I am going to fill in your ignorance here with a few salient points. Making splits causes a yield of TWO WEAK hives, which is not the same as having the vigorous, healthy original hive. And just so you know, the splits the commercial folks are making from the survivors of pesticide, fungicide, herbicide exposure on industrial crops are the already weakened colonies that happen to make it. So, the splits are not especially fated to thrive, either. Your little tables showing statistics does not tell the real story of the insults being suffered by ALL pollinators from monocrop, industrial agriculture. The typical Consumerist answer to a problem---"just buy more" bees and queens is not addressing the real problems which are decline in clean forage from toxic chemical exposure, lack of forage diversity, trucking bees all over the country, narrow in-bred genetics. The loss of all pollinators, as well as decline in overall ecosystem diversity from the same insults, is the REAL issue. Your piece is also old ground previously plowed over by that corporate apologist and booster at Forbes, Jon Entine, another geek behind a computer who writes about beekeeping with a singularly narrow and uniformed arrogance. Like your ballyhooed Tucker and Thurman, the "economists" (never far from pontificating for the beauties of the "free market") the people weighing in on the loss of pollinators and trying to urge us not to be concerned are akin to Climate Change denialists. "
The pollination of California's almonds is the largest annual managed pollination event in the world, with close to one million hives (nearly half of all beehives in the USA) being trucked in February to the almond groves. Much of the pollination is managed by pollination brokers, who contract with migratory beekeepers from at least 49 states for the event. This business has been heavily affected by colony collapse disorder, causing nationwide shortages of honey bees and increasing the price of insect pollination...
Does anyone feel that transporting livestock from this many places to a single place where they can all commingle is a needlessly risky strategy? Assuming that CCD is caused by pesticides, this seems to guarantee exposure to a large number of bees that might otherwise live in pesticide-free areas. Additionally, if CCD has a fungal/parasitic component, then this would be an ideal way to infect as many hives as possible, in as short a time as possible.
Buying more and more bees is a very expensive solution.
Perhaps I'm just a poor beekeeper (maybe true?) but I would have to sell my honey at untenable prices if I was looking to make money on my beekeeping.
For example, I've spent $1600 on bees and equipment, I've harvested 3 gallons of honey. I would have to sell that honey at $44/Pound to break even. Now hopefully over the long term this goes down a lot as the upfront capital investments spread out over the years.
My bee losses have been huge though. The first year I had 3 hives, lost 2. The second year I had 5 hives and lost 3, last year I had 5 hives and lost 4. Buying bees at $130/hive isn't sustainable (except through my charity) if I wanted to actually make any money at this, especially on a small scale.
If reconstituting new hives from annually purchased queens was economically non-viable, pollination prices --- which is where the money in honey bee husbandry seems to come from --- would show that. But while prices have risen, it doesn't look like they've done so at a historically unprecedented rate.
Irrigation is a much bigger economic threat to pollinated crops than pollination.
Yes, this is true -- in large agriculture, pollination is where the money is in beekeeping. I know pollination contracts stipulate "frames of bees" to be considered a hive (for example you might need 20 "frames of bees" to get paid for that hive) but I also think you're getting weaker hives out there for pollination. So while the price isn't going up, the size of the product is going down.
Same concept as the cereal boxes. They look the same from the outside, but they put less cereal in it and charge you the same price instead of raising the price.
Honey sales aren't your only revenue source. You can also charge farms for transporting your bees there and pollinating their crops. And I believe the article said this price point is also increasing.
They are your only source on the small "hobby" scale (maybe wax and pollen too but that is more labor intensive) but pollination contracts aren't open to you until you're doing this full time.
Now, Hobby scale honey can usually be sold for more than wholesale honey that the pollination guys use to offload their crop so hopefully that makes up the difference.
For me, I'll never catch up if I keep having the massive losses I've been having -- even if I sell my honey for $7/lb ($8 total including the jar and label). The wholesale price is around $2-2.50/lb
Also more anecdotal evidence, but I was talking to a local beekeeper. For fields that they sprayed, the lost over 60% of their bees per year. They got sick and tired of it and decided to place their bees long term in fields that do not spray. Now, their bees are less stressed, don't get sprayed, and the bee deaths plummeted, and they do less work trying to build the ranks after than they were dying.
I know next to nothing about this, but I have a question. Couldn't you make more hives yourself? What prevents you to 'cultivate' (or whatever it's called) queens and let them mate?
Yes, bees create new hives by themselves. Every year there are couple of swarming that include young queen leaving the hive to build new colony. In traditional beekeeping, the owner will catch the swarm, put it to new home and you've got another hive, which you either sell or use for more produce.
The problem is that a lot of hives die during winter (because of various form of illness and conditions) and the population couldn't sustain themselves.
Hives are only swarming if in very good health, and even then both new colonies are more vulnerable than the former one... It's certainly not "every year a couple of swarming" (how would that be sustainable anyway).
If they have to split hives forcefully, it's because they are not healthy enough to do it naturally...
So, we're "buying" new bees to offset the bees that die?
Uh... forgive me if I seem a little dense here but... where the hell are these store-bought bees coming from then? The moon? If the mass hysteria of CCD continues unabated, does that mean that bees WON'T go extinct because we can simply "buy" more bees from God at the God® store?
Are we back in the 1800's when spontaneous generation still held some ostensible sway over mother nature? Do they spontaneously materialize and transmogrify from some other form of matter? Do flowers transform into bees because the two are actually the same?
According to the article, the number of colonies is bigger than before because bee keepers simply buy more bees as replacement, but it doesn't explain where they come from.
Also:
"put half the bees into a new beehive, order them a new queen online (retail price: $25 or so), and voila: two healthy hives."
Does that mean you have 100% more colonies but the same number of bees? I suppose not, but I think it would be interesting if we could see the evolution of the numbers of bees instead of the number of colonies.
A small number of bees when placed with a queen will quickly produce a full size hive. Bee hives have a size limit, so dividing them into two smaller hives produces rapid population growth. A queen bee can lay 1000 eggs a day.
Sure it does. They come from the Internet, it explicitly stated that.
Joking aside, from my understanding, the issue with bees is a combination of multiple factors, such as pesticides, disease, parasites, etc.
Those are primarily local issues. So it's perfectly feasible to find some isolated spot in the US, grow a ton of bees, and ship them across the country to wherever they are needed to make up for any local losses.
We can easily engineer around this issue, by increasing the bee population, genetically engineering them to be more resistant, wipe out parasites, or change the formulation of pesticides. It seems the market is responding by simply growing more bees to make up for the losses, which should be a viable solution in the short-term.
You are at least the second commentor to suggest neonicotinoids as the primary factor. I've seen them discussed elsewhere too, but cannot figure out with the modest data available how folks can state such a thing with anything approaching a reasonable level of confidence.
And that's consequential if that causes one to stop looking too early. Maybe I've missed something. Is there some persuasive evidence you can make me aware of that points to neonicotinoids likely being the primary culprit?
Thanks for the link. Yes, neonicotinoids are bad for bees, but so are lots of other things. Other than one special symptomatic consistency (aside from death), there still doesn't appear to be an especially good reason to peg most of the blame on them yet. Doesn't mean they aren't to blame in a large measure, but it doesn't appear there is any reason to think that YET. It's one of those annoying "more study is needed" situations. Several original hypothesises as to the cause of CCD have been ruled out by more study, but none confirmed yet.
The linked wikipedia article says neonicotinoids' role is being studied as a cause if CCD, perhaps in combo with other factors, but doesn't draw a clear line from one to the other. However, it does, as the parent post mentions, provide some nice references for more info.
Well-documented neurotoxicity and bioaccumulation seem good reasons to me. Of course there will always be colony collapses without neonicotinoids too. How about we stop using them until we fully understand their effects?
> How about we stop using them until we fully understand their effects?
Because doing so would ignore the benefits they provide. The reasons we started using them over the alternatives. Their effects are reasonably well understood, enough to use them in a likely safe manner. The EU experiment (the ban) will provide another data point to inform the cost-benefit calculus.
Relying on complete knowledge of somethings effects before use is impractical. Do you know for certain that goat milk doesn't cause Alzheimer's? No? That doesn't mean we ban its production until it is better understood. Yes, this example is a a bad one, not exactly analogous, but only because I didn't take the time to think up something better. I think the point is clear enough.
I'm not so sure. I have a large backyard garden and I'm surrounded by neighbors who also garden. I was chatting with some of them the other day and we've all noticed a significant drop in fertilization amongst our plants this year. My tomato plants are typically overloaded with fruit by this time of year but now only have four or five tomatoes each. Same story with the tomatillos, the squashes, the cukes and the watermelons. Production is less than half of a typical year.
My neighbor kept bees but lost his colony last year. I can't say for sure that CCD is the root of our problems--home gardens are more popular around here than ever and perhaps the bees have an overabundance of food--but it certainly feels like something is wrong. Obviously home gardeners and beekeepers don't have the funds to bolster the bee population like a large commercial grower might.
Even easier: plant wildflowers to feed and attract pollinators. Borage is a good one (and it repels bunnies too), or just find a good native wildflower mix.
The 'market corrected' itself by increasing prices because that's the only way you can keep up with a high leaky churn.
We haven't 'corrected' anything, we've only found a new (more expensive) equilibrium because the inputs are still dying off at a higher rate. The correct thing to do is to address WHY the inputs have become more expensive... my understanding is that research now points to a certain class of destructive pesticides.
So the proffered solution is ordering new bees from the internet. That seems like magical thinking. I don't think Amazon has figured out how to fabricate bees from base atoms, so presumably somebody, somewhere is breeding those bees for sale.
Don't those breeders have the same problems? What's preventing the magical internet bee source from having their colonies die off?
The bottom line is there are huge corporate interests willing to spend money to bury the fact that their investments in toxic agricultural pesticides, herbicides and fungicides are having a permanent, devastating effect on the planetary biome.
The collapsing honey bee is the poster child of the irrevocable damage they are perpetrating on the planet, which is the mostly silent holocaust of our times.
So take any positive media on the recovery of the honey bee that isn't result of curbing industrial agricultural practice, with a big grain of organic salt.
If the monarch butterfly goes extinct like the passenger pigeon, that's irrevocable. And evidence is mounting that we are at the edge of an man made extinction event, and by evidence I mean the number of species that go extinct per year. I don't think the big concern here is hyperbole, but rather the papering of it over, on which point we agree.
CCD is an economic problem. The varroa mite wiped out feral North American honey bees --- which are not native to North America --- a long time ago. Supposedly, any honey bee you've seen in the wild for the past decade has been part of a proprietary hive.
So, ordering more honey bee queens off the Internet seems to be a pretty reasonable response to the problem of a 10-20% increase in overwintering hive failures.
What would a non-native honey bee in the wild look like? I live in California and the bees in my garden and in the local parks are various. Some look like bumblebees and some look like just bees but I don't know bees from bees.
There was a great art & education & science installation on native bees at the UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley a few years back (http://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/article/Shirley-Watts-Mo...). I know they still have a beehive, and they might have some exhibits on native bees.
If honey bees in the wild are an invasive species decimated by another invasive species, and pollinating honey bees in practice are all proprietary, than discussions of honey bee populations in the US aren't much different from discussions of dairy cow populations.
So was that the solution all along? Just breed more bees to replace the ones that die?
If that's the case, it seems like a mountain was made out of a mole hill in the media. I read multiple times that I may never eat a pollinated fruit or vegetable again.
No, the article is just putting forth very misleading and cherry-picked data. It's a little bit amazing that he actually mentions splitting and higher hive count close to each other without realizing that this will not increase the pollinator count by twofold. A real beefarmer has a comment on the article that everyone should read, it's illuminating.
"""
Mr Ingraham---do not assume you can read a few papers on CCD and bees and make cogent, authoritative remarks in a newspaper piece----this piece fails miserably.
I AM a beekeeper, in Los Angeles, using feral honey bees, making public presentations, teaching beekeeping and selling honey. I am going to fill in your ignorance here with a few salient points. Making splits causes a yield of TWO WEAK hives, which is not the same as having the vigorous, healthy original hive. And just so you know, the splits the commercial folks are making from the survivors of pesticide, fungicide, herbicide exposure on industrial crops are the already weakened colonies that happen to make it. So, the splits are not especially fated to thrive, either. Your little tables showing statistics does not tell the real story of the insults being suffered by ALL pollinators from monocrop, industrial agriculture. The typical Consumerist answer to a problem---"just buy more" bees and queens is not addressing the real problems which are decline in clean forage from toxic chemical exposure, lack of forage diversity, trucking bees all over the country, narrow in-bred genetics. The loss of all pollinators, as well as decline in overall ecosystem diversity from the same insults, is the REAL issue.
Your piece is also old ground previously plowed over by that corporate apologist and booster at Forbes, Jon Entine, another geek behind a computer who writes about beekeeping with a singularly narrow and uniformed arrogance. Like your ballyhooed Tucker and Thurman, the "economists" (never far from pontificating for the beauties of the "free market") the people weighing in on the loss of pollinators and trying to urge us not to be concerned are akin to Climate Change denialists.
"""
This beekeeper's comment doesn't appear to contain any testable arguments. They don't like the fact that maintenance of honey bee stock will require aggressive colony creation, but they don't appear to have an argument to back that up that isn't essentially an appeal to the naturalist fallacy.
This is also a beekeeper attempting to husband honey bees using feral bee populations, 98+% of which were annihilated by the varroa mite a long time ago (there are people who dispute whether "feral honey bees" really still exist at all in the US).
I'm not especially moved by arguments that attempt to tar people asking reasonable questions about insects to climate change denialists.
It contains several testable points. Does splitting a hive create two weak hives? How do you characterize this weakness and do they recover from it? What is the genetic diversity of the bee population? Is it growing or shrinking? Toxic chemical free forage is it growing or shrinking? Forage diversity should also be easy to measure and track changes over time. Other than the personal attacks what did you find not testable?
It really was. Colony collapse disorder was bad for the colonies and breeders that experienced it, yes. But the honeybee industry has been going strong, contradicting all the apocalyptic warnings.
Also, there are dozens of different pollinating species in north america which are doing fine and have been doing fine throughout all this since they were not subject to the same stressors as domestic european honey bees. For example, one factor is european honey bees have their honey taken by people and replaced with corn syrup, which does not contain the antibiotic elements they produce in their own honey that they eat themselves. The claims that pollination was going to stop and the world come to an end were entirely hysterical, political, and totally without basis in science.
Just think about it. Consider tomatoes, a new world crop. How were they pollinated before the arrival of the european honey bee? The answer is they were pollinated by various north american pollinating insects, which has continued to this day. European honey bees are notable because they produce an especially large volume of honey which makes them a little more economically useful since they can contribute to two different revenue streams: honey and pollination services. Native american bees such as Melipona beecheii and Melipona yucatanica which produce honey produce it in smaller quantities. Both those species are domesticated and stingless and historically were kept as pets by native americans such as various Mayan tribes who used the honey, pollination for their own local use, and religious ceremonies. The reason they are not used in modern production is because of the quantity of honey, not because they can't produce it or don't pollinate.
Interestingly, European bees hybridized with African bees seem to be quite resistant to CCD. Makes me wonder if one of the problems afflicting American honeybees is a lack of genetic diversity.
Well there are other factors in this debate. European-African hybrids are much more aggressive to the beekeeper and there are different conditions that kills the colony. Another factor is the honey production rates for these hybrids.
There are many different species of bees in use, with different characteristic in areas of amount of honey produced, aggression, tendency to get different forms of illness and so forth.
Life finds a way. I think in some ways, CCD has probably "pruned" the bee population in a good way. Beekeeping allowed weaker hives that would have normally died off in the wild to continue to spawn new hives. CCD has reversed that trend, and may have improved the overall strength of the bee population genetics.
> CCD has probably "pruned" the bee population in a good way
A reduction in the population is never a good thing. Is this some sort of neo-eugenics viewpoint? Pruning the population will not create some sort of super-bee. That's not how it works.
It will enhance whatever qualities are being selected for, but it will reduce the genetic diversity in the population, making it vulnerable to a hole raft of new diseases and disorders.
Ideally what you want is for the genetic variant that protects against a specific disease to be already within the population and for that variant to simply spread, without any population loss. If you're losing population, that is a BAD thing. That means things are happening too quickly and you're in for a world of hurt in the long-term.
Yours is a needlessly inflammatory response to what was in fact a reasonable question.
Eugenics is a philosophy that suggests human breeding should be controlled to select for favored features. It's disfavored for a variety of obvious reasons that connect to our principals about the unique value of human life.
Honey bees are livestock. Livestock has been selectively bred for millennia, and discussions of long-term genetic selection among honey bees is not an indicator that participants believe in eugenics.
I'm sorry, but what word would you use to describe the theory that selective pressures that decimate a population will eventually result in a superior specimen?
It may be inflammatory, but that's the only word that came to mind.
To wit, the phrase "Survival of the fittest" was not coined by Darwin. It was coined by Herbert Spencer when he was taking about corporate survival in a free market. Any argument that boils down to using that phrase to describe the natural world is suspect at best.
You've mistakenly abused a very inflammatory word. I understand how it happened: eugenics sounded like a generally descriptive term about selective breeding; it is not: it's a philosophy about the genetic superiority and inferiority of different human beings.
It's no big deal. Helpful tip for future reference: avoid calling people eugenicists.
If you are incapable of it, then eugenics was the right word to use, regardless of your sensibilities. It was not my intention to offend, but to accurately identify. If you have a better word for it, I would certainly like to hear it.
Again: What word would you use to describe the theory that selective pressures that decimate a population will eventually result in a superior specimen?
I don't think genetic engineering involves killing off large chunks of a population just because it - for the moment - pays off. I'm not a specialist, though, so I may well be wrong here...
Reduction in population allocates more reproduction-relevant resources to the survivors. Resistance genes spread faster if the threat kills the non-resistant. (It is much easier to outcompete a corpse than an invalid.)
But ancestor post is also presuming that it is possible for bees to acquire genetic resistance to CCD. As we are not entirely certain about the exact mechanism involved, which may or may not have something to do with pesticides, chemicals in HFCS, dietary deficiency disease, or mites, it's hard to say whether any random mutation could protect against CCD without also making the colony unable to reproduce. For instance, if CCD is caused by a dietary deficiency, a colony is very unlikely to spontaneously acquire the ability to synthesize the missing nutrient, unless the species lost that ability at some point.
For instance, it is far more likely that humans could re-acquire the ability to synthesize ascorbate than it is that we might spontaneously gain the ability to synthesize our own omega-3 fatty acids. E. coli evolution experiments show it is possible, but the selection pressure has to be maintained over thousands of generations.
Applied human brainpower to the specific mechanisms of the threat is going to cure CCD much faster than bee breeding, which in turn is faster than natural bee evolution.
The only good behind the pruning of the population is that it is scaring the human agricultural industry into investing resources to stop further losses.
But the way it should be reduced would be by limiting "family size" not "family number". This allows for higher genetic diversity among the population. Which is always a good thing for long term survival or future genetic engineering experiments.
It seems that the way beekeepers raise bees, spreading positive genetic variants happens often. They split healthy colonies into two to hedge their bets against bad colonies bringing down the entire population.
If you select for resistance to CCD, other characteristics can (and will) vary negatively. Organisms have a finite amount of energy to grow and breed. If increased energy is channeled into one particular characteristic, then there is less energy for other characteristics.
You are right and wrong. It's true that introduction of new diseases and parasites were a part of what is called CCD, and to the extent that hives with genetic strategies both of immunity and behavior were the survivors in the usual evolutionary way, then the remaining stock should be more robust (although of course that isn't necessarily "weaker" hives, and who knows what kinds of genetic variation was lost due to a lack of a particular success strategy against varroa for example). However, CCD is rightfully attributed to pesticides, fungicides, and a host of other human created stress factors on bees. Colonies survive these collateral stresses for the most part by luck, and not by any generic advantage. You are right that beekeepers have artificially extended generations of bees whose natural defenses might have failed against new parasites and diseases (that we ourselves imported into their populations), and that some die off was inevitable as result of natural balance being reached, but I'd say there is a good argument to be made that CCD interfered with this process rather than aiding it.
Nice to see the other side of the story for a change. While the 'extinction threat -> loss of all pollinated food -> disaster' narrative gets a lot of fear views, if we actively assist honey bee colonies in growing on a large scale we can replace a lot of bees quickly.
This 'other side of the story' is incomplete. Sure commercial outfits will just pay more and buy more honeybees, but nature won't.
Given that the entire problem is being caused by a dragnet insect poison, it would seem the wiser approach would be to find an alternative or improvement to the poison in its current form.
We've detached this subthread from its original parent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10023994) and marked it off-topic. You're welcome to repost the on-topic part if you want to.
Except it was decisively upvoted, not downvoted, in the end. It's pointless to ask why there was a bit of downage in the vote stream. Maybe someone misclicked. Maybe someone was mistaken. Most of these cases sort themselves out rather quickly; meanwhile a comment about it sticks around inaccurately forever.
> "The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies -- that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers -- is now the highest it's been in 20 years."
So the absolute numbers are up, great, but that did not come for free:
> "The average retail price of honey has roughly doubled since 2006"
Or, put in startup lingo, the churn is still high, but we're just hiding it by paying more to acquire a larger number of bees. CCD is still killing off bees, but we're just spending more to compensate.
This is the dodgeyness: any good HN reader knows that it's your churn that kills your finances in the end.
And that's where the insanity lies: I believe that CCD has basically been conclusively traced to a certain class of pesticides... what sounds insane to me is we have created a toxic environment that has increased the leaking in the boat, but it's okay because we can just spend more money on bigger bilge pumps instead of addressing the underlying cause of the leak.