In other good news, I have a concord grape arbor in my yard. This morning I noticed that it was swarming with honey bees. I've had a few bumblebees in my yard in the spring but in very small numbers, 1 or 2, but I've never seen honey bees. But this morning I saw hundreds on my grape vines. Has anyone else noticed an increase in the bee population? I'm in Massachusetts.
In what way is that "good" news? You have a problem: Because of their herding behavior that leads to total domination of food sources, AWA their spreading of diseases and infestations (mites) against which native populations have no defenses, European honeybees are decimating native solitary bee (such as bumblebee) populations; how, one might well ask, is that a "good" thing? The very behavior patterns that make "tame" European honeybees so highly valuable to commercial, mono-cropping, Earth-damaging "AGRICULTUREmoneymoneymoney" are the same behavior patterns that, along with their diseases and parasites, make them so devastating to native insect populations. The presence of honeybees in the "woodlands" is always -->100% the fault of negligent beekeepers
You have to be expert enough to tell the difference between honeybees and many other species. -- There are a lot of look-enough-alikes on the flowers in great enough numbers to confuse just about anyone, let alone the experts who sometimes say that you can't tell some species apart until you get them under a scope.
Whatever your opinion of escaped millifera, this djinn has left the bottle and can't be stuffed back in. Apis mellifera in the wild is there to stay ...and might become part of the solution to CCD.
It seems good practice to call a local beekeeper and try to save a colony before someone with more fear than good sense wastes it.
The up-front assumption that these bees are from a wild colony is a big leap into a dark hole. A neighbour could have taken up beekeeping.
I think you'd better get your facts straight. First of all, the tracheal and varroa mites that are killing honey bees do not have ANY effect on native bees, so they are not "decimating native solitary bee populations" in any way. Secondly, your claim that honey bees "totally dominate food sources" depends entirely on the variety and number of plants in the area. There are many flowers that honey bees will not enter due to their shape and size, leaving nectar and pollen sources for native bees, and solitary bees fly longer hours, and in rainy and windy weather, when honey bees stay in the hive. And are you aware that native bumble bees are also used as 'managed' pollinators?
How disturbing that you begin your day killing honey bees. Like it or not, one out of every three bites of food we eat depends upon pollinators, and native bees cannot accomplish that alone - even if every honey bee disappeared. We need to encourage all types of pollinators, including honey bees.
So instead of killing, here's a healthier solution to the pollinator demands of our food system: let's all concentrate on improving habitat in our gardens and on our farms by planting native wildflowers and flowering shrubs into field borders, hedgerows, and buffer strips. This approach will reduce the need for all managed pollinators (both native and non-native) by supporting vigorous wild bee populations.
How do they dominate food sources?
Do honeybees spread diseases where the other bees do not?
What proof do you have that it is the honeybee decimating the native bees? Are you sure other factors at work, like pesticides, herbicides and GMO,s are not responsible for the decimation of native bees, bee inbreeding?
What makes you the law giver that determine "what is right"? Are you going to remove what is not native? Or is it natural selection?
Honeybees do not travel much more that one mile from their hive. if a swarm escaped, honeybees typically will not survive a cold winter without a hive. My guess there is a local beekeeper nearby. A swarm of bees is worth about $80 US, if the queen is in the swarm. A local beekeeper would love to have it!
The honeybees arrived in North America the day after the horse arrived hundreds of years ago. If following your rational, do you believe that all humans should be exterminated that are not native as well?
Where there humans, their favorite food sources will be there also!
With that in mind, I have noticed that the honey bees here are strongly attracted to catnip. I have cut the flowers twice, and it just keeps making more.
It probably depends on the importance you put on the survival of a huge slab of the human race. Personally, I think humanity needs a good scourge, but most people don't see it the same way as I do. I reckon that at least half of the human race could disappear and that that would be a good thing. Bees are important when it comes to feeding humans so those European honey bees are needed as part of the feeding process regardless of whether we have a scourge or not.
I used to feel this way until I realized that a disease that can take out 50% can take out 100% by itself without considering waves of disease, vermin, etc. that would follow.
You volunteering?
Seems like birth control would be a better idea. Tax breaks (or cash) for the childless and draconian surcharges for the prolific. Of course that would probably lead to many more males being born, as in China, which may lead to wives with multiple husbands. Oops, I hope that wasn't too shocking of an idea for you ;O) Maybe we could encourage gay marriages ;O)
Great book, "The World Without Us", by Alan Weisman
If you liked Jerod Diamond's books, you'll like this one.
In a hundred thousand years (the blink of an eye in geologic time), things could get back to normal(?) on Earth.
Well I'm just taking my chances with cancer which keeps trying to get me but so far I've survived all four types. I'm fairly sanguine about crossing the bar.
It would indeed, but everyone thinks it should apply to someone else rather than themselves.
Tax breaks (or cash)
I don't find either of those things shocking.
My Sweety has dodged it three times. Who knows what it can be, some 20 year old chemical insult to the body, or just eating too many croissants (highly processed carbohydrates)? Neither of us is in great health, but what can you do? We just try to enjoy what each day brings (and eat as much as possible from our garden).
Neither do I, but I suspect those who want to feel free to have a half dozen kids would.
I'm blaming my cancers on exposure to Agent Orange :-))
Years ago, when the Vietnam War was still going on (or the American War as the Vietnamese call it), I was watching the news with my father one day when there was some mention of Agent Orange. I asked Dad what it was and he said "Blackberry Spray".
I had instant recall of the smell and feel of it from my childhood.
Blackberries are a noxious weed in Oz and local authorities used to come around in big trucks with tankers of the trayback and spray the blackberries in mid summer. Being country kids with no swimming pool anywhere around us, a big pack of kids used to follow the truck as it spayed and we'd try to outcompete each other to stand in the spray drift. It was nice and cool on a hot summer's day.
Neither of us is in great health, but
Yep. It's a case of jt keep on keeping on and never give in.
Ah, yes, 2,4-D for civilians, but still contaminated with dioxin, one of the persistant organic pollutants (POP). Like radiation before, at first there was no appreciation for its consequences. Laughing children, dancing in a contaminated mist. A modern version of going into the gingerbread house. The thought gives me goose bumps. Excuse me while I step up on my soap box for a moment.
The World Without Us (Paperback) by Alan Weisman
At better libraries near you (and a real page turner).
POLYMERS ARE FOREVER / 151 Tokyo University geochemisr Hideshige Takada, who specialized in EDCs?endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or "gender benders"?had been on a gruesome mission to personally research exactly what evils were leaching from garbage dumps all around Southeast Asia. Now he was examining plastic pulled from the Sea of Japan and Tokyo Bay. He reported that in the sea, nurdles (precursors to molded plastics) and other plastic fragments acted both as magnets and as sponges for resilient poisons like DDT and PCBs (including dioxin).
The use of aggressively toxic polychlorinated biphenyls?PCBs?to make plastics more pliable had been banned since 1970; among other hazards, PCBs were known to promote hormonal havoc such as hermaphroditic fish and polar bears. Like time-release capsules, pre-1970 plastic flotsam will gradually leak PCBs into the ocean for centuries. But, as Takada also discovered, free-floating toxins from all kinds of sources?copy paper, automobile grease, coolant fluids, old fluorescent tubes, and infamous discharges by General Electric and Monsanto plants directly into streams and rivers?readily stick to the surfaces of free-floating plastic.
One study directly correlated ingested plastics with PCBs in the fat tissue of puffins. The astonishing part was the amount. Takada aad his colleagues found that plastic pellets that the birds ate concentrate poisons to levels as high as 1 million times their normal occurrence in seawater.
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The plastic will slowly degrade to smaller and smaller pieces, which means that it will be ingested by smaller and smaller organism, who will be consumed by predators with the toxins being concentrated in their flesh.
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We have black berries as well. My memories of them are as cobblers. They grow along the roadside, but I go into the forest to get mine, where they are cleaner and don't get sprayed with the "poison du jour".
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"we'd try to outcompete each other to stand in the spray drift. It was nice and cool on a hot summer's day."
If I think about that too long, I may have to go and join Shelly in his bottle.
à ta santé
You are correct. I inadvertently implied that a "wild" colony was the most likely source of the bees and that is not so. It is perfectly plausible -- quite likely, in fact -- that the bees come from the hive of an irresponsible beekeeper, and more's the pity. You are also correct that their naturalization is past rectifying. That fact, however, does not prevent me from protecting _my_ small (± 4-acre) patch of dirt and garden from them, refraining from buying so-called "wildflower" honey and exhorting bee herders to restrain and control their livestock. It can be done. IMO, anyone who can't discern working-class honeybees from the most commonly seen native bees (and wasps) has vision problems that, most likely, preclude gardening. Personally, I take deliberate steps to encourage proliferation of indigenous bees and wasps. It is easy enough because I'm in a (rapidly suburbanizing) rural area. Of this 4+ acres, only less than an acre is "improved", the balance enjoying virtually no (significant) human intervention since the early 1960's. Fortunately, I am bordered on three sides by land that is unimproved or minimally improved. Of course, aerial power lines must be kept clear, but that's the extent of it and I attend to that task personally, the utility company's contractor being banned from here due to incompetence.
You apparently missed my reference to their importance to the large-scale monocropping agriculture as practiced in most of the so-called "developed" world and on which we now depend. However, the predictable behavior patterns that make them so valuable to agriculture also make them easy to control.
Take a few minutes to read a book and you'll know.
Who said other bees do not. But they got the mites and funguses from the honeybees.
Get a book a read it. It's been a growing problem for at least 40 years.
Those named items are rarely, if ever, applied in the wild. However, they do take out honeybees in greater proportion due to the bees' proximity to commercial crops and "improved" human habitat where, despite beekeepers' best efforts, exposure is inevitable.
Where did I say that? Careful; your mental capacity is showing.
No; just the invasive/destructive ones, such as: "walking" catfish; talapia (Nile perch);"wild" horses; free-ranging pythons; iguanas; European house sparrows; European starlings; Muscovy ducks; free-ranging parakeets; free-ranging parrots; spirolina; water hyacinth; kudzu; melaleuca; Casuarina equisetifolia (Australian "pine"); Schinus terebinthifolius (Brazilian pepper); Hydrilla verticillata; Egeria densa (elodea); all introduced grasses; mullien; Dioscorea bulbifera (air potato); Democrats, for starters. Get your head out of your ass and locate your state's "invasive" or "noxious" weeds/animals lists for a few more.
There is nothing "natural" about the means of arrival of the above-named plants and animals, including honeybees. Obviously, over time, some of them _may_ have eventually got to the Americas by natural processes but who's to say if or when; you? I don't think so....
News flash: Not the entire planet, not even the entirety of North America has sufficiently cold winters. Where I live, they survive for years and years in trees, between inner and outer walls of buildings, in unused outbuildings....
Clearly, reading for comprehension is not your strong point. I'm not advocating exterminating honeybees. Get your mother to read and explain the original post to you. Man, I cannot believe I deliberately bypassed my twit filter just to read your silliness to see what evoked another asshole's followup to your inanity. I certainly know better now, don't I? Back into your box you go....
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