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Colony collapse is no longer an issue, but nice article from 2014. It vanished as quickly as it appeared. The big challenges facing honeybees right now, in descending order: varroa mite, lack of good forage, trouble safely wintering. Varroa mite's pretty scary though, it can cause major die-offs. |
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Jun 1, 2017 01:52
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 11:22 |
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You may be wondering why I know a bunch of bee facts, however, *a single bee crawls out from under my eyelid before I manage to adjust my skin* |
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Jun 1, 2017 01:53
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A good start: https://www.epa.gov/pollinator-protection/colony-collapse-disorder This page hasn't been Trumpified, the info's the same as it was a year ago. Certain pesticides are also an issue, but the research is still coming in w/r/t their impact. A certain amount of pesticide is needed to kill varroa mite. It's why the only organic honey you'll find is from Mexico or the southern US. "Africanized" honeybees were real - an African subspecies of Apis m. (American honeybees are all Italian, and importing new bees is illegal due to disease concerns) interbred with many North American hives. But they don't like cold weather, so they didn't get far north. They're more aggressive and harder to care for, but also resistant to Varroa mite, so they don't need as many pesticides. They're less popular due to the difficulty though, but they were so successful at breeding that the Italian honeybee line no longer exists once you go south too far. Unfortunately, interbreeding bees for specific traits is very difficult, because honey bee genetics is completely insane. |
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Jun 1, 2017 01:58
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jazzyhattrick posted:What if we developed some kind of virus that specifically attacked the varroa mites? Would africanizing more bees help at all? The issues with using the African subspecies to breed for varroa resistance are twofold: 1. That same subspecies is vulnerable to cold, hence why it didn't naturally spread north, and 2. they're more aggressive and harder to keep and use. The latter matters because when we talk about honeybee sustainability, we aren't talking about the survival of the species. Honeybees, like most animals we raise domestically, are a fast-breeding, highly efficient exotic species. They're essentially an invasive species. Some bees are threatened, but not honeybees. In North America it's largely solitary wild bees of various sorts, like bumblebees, which don't hive or produce honey. Instead, it's a question of economic sustainability. There's a lot of money to be made in beekeeping, but it's a big initial investment and a huge risk. It's normal to lose about 40 percent of your bees annually. That's just built into the costs. But bad year can ruin a beekeeper financially: the bulk of their income isn't from honey, but from renting bees out to farms as pollinators. By far the biggest time of year for that is the California almond bloom, and that hits very soon after winter. A bad winter means a beekeeper might not have his bees ready to rent out in time for the almonds, and that's a huge income loss. Varroa mite weakens bees and makes them more likely to die in winter. This all means younger people aren't getting into beekeeping. Beekeepers are increasingly older, and many are aging out. It's a particularly brutal job even for agriculture: one keeper told me that it's routine to barely sleep for two or three weeks at a time when things get rough, because bees need so much attention. That means fewer bees available to rent as pollinators, and that drives up rental costs, which in turn drives up food costs. Honeybee extinction isn't going to happen, no matter how hysterical the report, but honeybee health problems mean potential price jumps for both producers and consumers. |
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Jun 1, 2017 13:28
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