Despite the hype, there’s still no bee-pocalypse. Two weeks ago, the U.S. Department Agriculture released its latest count of commercial honeybee hives, and although the figure dipped 2.9 percent from the 20-year record-high set in 2014, the overall count of 2.7 million hives in 2015 remains strong. You wouldn’t know it from the news coverage.
One Michigan television station recently led with the headline: “Numbers of managed honey bee colonies plummeting.” It explained: “According to the USDA the total number of managed honey bee colonies has decreased by 2.5 million since the 1940s.”<1> This is misleading for a number of reasons.
First of all, there’s no plummeting of bee numbers. A full-strength hive can easily hold 30,000 or 40,000, which means there are around 80 billion honeybees in the United States—ten for every human on the planet. The United Nations counts about 80 million hives worldwide, meaning the global total of honeybees is a 13-digit number of a magnitude more commonly used to measure government debt.
And secondly, honeybees are just one of over 20,000 known bee species, so it’s safe to conclude that the managed honeybee shortage just isn’t a real thing, especially since it has become an amateur fad and that has led to many deaths from mismanagement.
Activists want everyone to think otherwise for a simple reason: Dead bees are great for fundraising. Depending on the time of year, a worker bee might only live five or six weeks before keeling over. Even so, sometimes activists can’t find any bee corpses to mourn over and have been forced to resort to dressing up in bee costumes to stage a “die in.”<2> The impression that they mean to convey is that big, bad pesticides are wiping bees out to the edge of extinction. The activists single out neonicotinoids, the most popular, most modern and most effective insecticide as the cause of the supposed decline.
It’s a nice story, but it doesn’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny. Neonicotinoids, or neonics for short, came on the market in the mid-1990s, back when U.S. honeybee colony numbers hovered in the 2.6 million range. There are more colonies today, even with the latest dip, than there were in 1995. In other words, bees aren’t dying off in the wake of modern pesticides, they’re growing.
you really need to stop with this "end of doom" stuff
people may get the idea that the end isn't near
or is it?
did i tell you i lay awake at night (well some nights) and worry about the "big crunch"
you know when the whole universe goes into reverse and shrinks back down into a preon
a preon! fsm knows it's going to be pretty crowded
(and you thought thanksgiving at your house was tight)
i've already started to downsize...
I thought the big freeze was the newest fear? Where all the stars stop with the fusion and all the molecules have expanded their way away from the reach of their neighbors gravity. It's billions of years away, but you know how stuff comes up - better get started on preparations now.
Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the country’s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And that’s not just a west coast problem—California supplies 80% of the world’s almonds, a market worth $4 billion.
Well sure but there's the fact that the bees pollinating the almonds are starving... when the almonds bloom, great, but for weeks before and after the bloom, there's nothing for them to eat. Beekeepers actually feed the bees corn syrup. So maybe the stress of that is what makes colonies less able to fight off disease?
Commercial pollinating bees are transported cross country on flatbed truck trailers in their wooden hives from field to field to pollinate this crop and that crop. Years ago I had one rig pull up at the TP plaza I was running for some fuel and a queen and a small swarm of drones took off from the truck and headed up into the canopy. They were there for about a week until we got someone to come out and "move" them.
And them California almonds aren't doing very well with the lack of water these days ...
We had a panic a few days ago; actually forgot what day the show was. We only remembered that it was sometime in May. Yoiks! Bought the tickets a loonnng time agooo.
Yoiks! Bought the tickets a loonnng time agooo.