More honey bees dying, even as antibiotic use halves

I wonder what it would be like to have a giant Mason Bee hotel in a riparian buffer strip alongside a plot. One problem would be as you point out that predators could find them easily. Another might be that pollinating one crop doesn't do enough for a mason bee all season long.

It looks like some folks use them for berries though: https://backyardbeekeeping.iamcountryside.com/plants-pollina...

We have some of those in our wild crazy yard. I gotta build me some homes for them because you're right they are so cute.

Just to go off of this, carpenter bees are closely related to mason bees and are another kind of solitary (non-hive bee). I think carpenter bees are the greatest and I can't stop thinking about carpenter bees. They are a bee, which is cool, but also a lone wolf, also cool. In my wooden house I have several carpenter bee nests. My neighbor Mr. Grubb hates all my carpenter bees because he says all the holes they are making in his walls will make his house collapse, but he doesn't see it, he doesn't see carpenter bee magic. 10/10 please consider adopting some carpenter bees!!

During the season we had a bunch of mason bee nests inside the hollow metal of our porch furniture. Supposedly, mason bees can sting, but the sting is barely perceptible.

Here is a video tutorial on hosting Mason Bees - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQhg82f-OPI

You can start out simple, but you might need to be more involved if you want to prevent the spread of parasites since they are more easily spread when all the mason bee larvae are in one place.

You have now convinced me to be the biggest supporter of mason bees now, thank you.

I've got a ton of mason bee tubes. They are awesome.

To use a silicon valley analogy, nobody has figured out how to scale out mason bees. Not to the > 200sq miles of pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds owned by the Resnicks. The Resnicks funded some in-house research and apparently considred it a failure.

It's probably possible. Might not even be hard once you know the trick, but it's certainly not a slam-dunk.

Not to be confused with mining or carpenter bees that also like logs. My mom's yard has some carpenter bees that live in the ground. They are as big as bumble bees but more black and a male drone hovers around in a certain area above the females and will dive bomb other male carpenter bees. The male bees will follow you around if you go into their area but they never stung anyone.

I have a line of big orange flowers lining the border of my front lawn. Sometimes ill just sit in the mulch and watch a dozen kinds of bees I’ve never seen before happily moving amongst them. Green bees and all sorts. Never a lot of any species just a wild variety

To me, one of the most fascinating facts about pollinators in general is their interconnectedness, which spirals off into a myriad of everyday touch points for most people.

One fact a friend shared recently was that magnolia trees pre-date many modern pollinators.

>> At the time of their evolution, many common pollinators we think of today, such as bees, butterflies, and moths had not evolved yet. As a result, magnolias developed flowers for pollination by beetles and flies, which were the primary insect pollinators 100 million years ago. https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/garden-scoop/2018-05-05...

I let the wildflowers grow in my lawn, and in the summer there's a constant hum from the bees. I enjoy the sound and their industriousness.

My only problem is the invasive plants which are determined to overwhelm everything.

> in urban environments, and it' still debatable

In all environments.

The source argues this competition is fine in urban environments because we’ve already displaced the native pollinators there.

People can plant beneficial plants without introducing invasive competitors.

> And very useful because their hives are large and portable.

I have no proof of this, this is just my theory, but the "portable" might be the issue. I think industrial beekeepers in the US might be part of the problem. Yes you can technically move the bees, but should you? You're moving around disease, you might be overworking and stressing the bees. Meanwhile you have farmers create massive fields with nothing but corn, grass, wheat, whatever, leaving you with essentially green deserts from the pollinators perspectives.

Again just a theory of mine, but the reliance of "portable" bees is what's causing the problem. Other countries have beehives for rent, but they aren't moved constantly. Often they stay in the same location all year and the bees are allowed to follow their natural cycles.

Trucking around hundreds of hives always seems rather stupid.

Right, it's interesting from a technical perspective, but it's a story about battery-farmed livestock, not about North American ecology. My guess is they'll figure out how to keep growing more bees. The prices of honey bee queens have been pretty stable for the past 15 years.

> probably a touch oversold? I don't think people putting in a single beehive are doing much to impact a neighborhood

Probably not, especially if they’re in an urban environment. The bees being shipped to farms, on the other hand, are ecologically destructive (as well as economically invaluable).

My takeaway is not that honeybees are evil. It’s that we need more pollinators in more stripes, and that the agricultural industry has successfully confused pollinators in general with honeybees in particular.

Industrial farming scales. And that scales better (until it breaks) with fewer variables. Aka mono crops.

Similar to many, many other things.

The damage is largely already done because the non-native bees are now a feral invasive species that have out competed natives, and the invasive honey bees haven't co-evolved to pollinate native plantlife

Looking through this, beekeeping is a strange and interesting world that I know so little about. Cool!

I have no idea how you could actually be confused about this.

- I can sell 100 units of product for $2. I feel good I am ethical and responsible.

- I can sell 300 units of product for $1. Everyone buys from me and I make more money, but I poison the land.

Capitalism does not account for externalities. Because businesses never have to pay the cost of poisoning water supplies or destroying ecosystems until he societal bell tolls - and because "if I don't, they will and I will go out of business" - unsustainable and unethical practices are the norm in late stage capitalism.

I mean, for real? Are you confused why mine operators encouraged taking more material at the expensive of structural integrity? Are you confused why gas barons don't like paying the cost to cap NG wells? Are you confused why big agri uses petrochemical fertilizers to grow subsidized ethanol and HFCS?

And neonicotinoids are directly thought to increase susceptibility to Varroa mites

Yeah, it really gets me irritated when people seem to think that honey bee colonies are something to be celebrated from an ecological perspective.

The EU neonicotinoid ban seems potentially very useful but do we have data that it actually was effective?

Agreed. I mentioned this as a reason why antibiotics are not a solution. Antibiotics do not treat viruses.

I left a lot of the leaves on my lawn this year and only thinned out the spots where they were thick enough to kill the grass.

Huge increase in lightning bugs this summer.

I believe the same decrease is visible when driving older (less aerodynamic) cars, but I don’t have any studies on hand

While this claim is plausible, it’s (admittedly pleasing) conjecture until you provide evidence.

That's a neat possibility. Do you have any sources to share that go into more detail?

Seems hard to believe but I want to believe

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon

The reduction in windshield bug splats has more to do with the decline in insect populations.

EDIT: I originally said 75% decline over 30 years. Those are the results for studies in parts of Germany. We don't have solid data on global loss in insect populations.

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what is it with racist stereotypes and the south