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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Honey bees in the United States are livestock. Their existence on this continent is mediated entirely by our actions.

Do you mean to say that the ones I see in grass and parks are some beekeeper's? I'm doubtful, but that would be pretty interesting. Are there that many amateur beekeeper's? I figured they were much less common a backyard project than chickens.

There are very many backyard beekeepers, even in urban areas. I have a pair of hives on my small city lot and most neighbors don't even know. This isn't uncommon these days.

Having said that, there are wild bees, and bees 'escape' from beekeepers by swarming and forming new hives on their own. They try to reproduce by creating new hives as frequently as they can.

I guess my question would be, why should I care about isolated feral honey bee colonies? They're not a native species; they don't "belong" here. As long as beekeepers can cost-effectively maintain their pollination capabilities (perhaps at marginally higher cost), what's the public policy implication of CCD?

Poison builds up in comb and honey from the agents required to treat mites. It's making beekeeping harder, and the relationship between bee keepers harder (e.g. People treat diseases out of sync with each other, messing up the treatment process as bees drift to each others hives, spreading disease). Pollination as a service is expensive and lastly, it's a bit sad walking past a feral colony that's been there many years and seeing it dead.

But this isn't unknowable. The prices for pollination are basically public, as are the prices for precursors of bee colonies. If beekeeping is getting untenably expensive, that should be reflected in both those prices. Why isn't it?

Here in NZ, Manuka honey. It commands a serious price and is what everyone is after. Last season bordered on disastrous due to the weather but the aim of the big players is to get Manuka. If you haven't heard of it I'm not surprised - it's a dark, not particularly nice honey that has some pretty amazing anti-bacterial properties. It's being used in all sorts of things, cosmetics, medications, dressings, foods etc.

If CCD is causing a real economic problem in the US, we should see its impact in the prices of pollination services and in the cost of colony precursors. Do we?

Good question. We see it here in the price of hives and nuc colonies. It's gone up as they take more effort to build and maintain.

Not all bees are honey bees. GP was talking about Apis mellifera. You probably encountered Bombus impatiens.

Bumble bees aren't honey bees just like buffalo aren't wild milk cows.

Some have recommended farmers replace pollination with hardier indigenous mason bees or bumble bees, rather than use domesticated honey bees, in response to CCD.

The bees I've seen swarming my garbage all my life are definitely not bumble bees.

might not be bees at all. yellowjackets like trash.

Had to look up yellowjackets. Here's what Wikipedia says:

Yellowjacket or yellow jacket is the common name in North America for predatory social wasps of the genera Vespula and Dolichovespula. Members of these genera are known simply as "wasps" in other English-speaking countries.

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

Hornets are also members of this sub-family. These are really nasty. There are many wasps that are not very aggressive, they'll sting you if you literally hit their nest, or accidentally sit on one, but hornets and yellowjackets are very aggressive near their nests, really nasty bugs to accidentally encounter when mowing the grass or sitting on a bench when they have built homes.

I would say most people would easily be able to distinguish between a honeybee and any wasp (once shown what each looks like obviously).

An interesting thing that allows the killing of these wasps without harming bees - they go for protein in a big way, while bees usually don't.

http://www.doc.govt.nz/waspcontrol

Of course there are wild honeybees. Non-native (to the US), yes, but definitely wild.

It's highly unlikely that GP cannot tell the difference between a bumble bee and a honey bee.

> Of course there are wild honeybees.

Huh.

For me, the word "honey" in front of the word "bee" indicates a function it is performing for humans. If that's the case, then well, you can't have a "wild honey bee;" it'd be self-contradictory. It'd be like talking about a "wild milk cow" or a "wild show dog" or a "wild support animal."

It just sounds... off.

So, no, I didn't think you could have wild honey bees. You seem pretty certain I'm wrong though, so I'm thinking it over.

Also, n.b., maybe the confusion is partly about "wild" vs. "feral?"

http://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-feral-an...

Maybe you and I just use a few of these words in radically incompatible ways.

> It's highly unlikely that GP cannot tell the difference between a bumble bee and a honey bee.

It honestly wasn't very clear.

CCD is one of those topics where lay people and especially journalists get really confused or possibly just lazy about what bees are relevant to the conversation. So I took tp's comment way back as noting that we're mainly talking about domestic bees here, as a shot at focusing the discussion. He got a response about random bees found in parks, which, what with the comparison to chickens especially, seemed either sarcastic and missing the point or just deeply confused.

So I started at the lowest possible level of confusion and decided we could work up from there if necessary. Maybe I should have been more charitable to start, but I didn't want to risk another detour because we skipped too many steps ahead, which seemed to be the exact problem the first time.

Maybe the comment was literally just expressing excitement at the possibility that the apis seen in parks are related to backyard cultivation, and I read it completely the wrong way.

Unkept honey bees can be either wild or feral. And the distinction is not always clear -- how many generations does it take for a bloodline to revert to "wild"?

And of course, a honey bee is any apis that produces honey. While not species-specific, it is genus-constraining, instead of function-labeling. More like "sugar maple" (most of which are untapped, but they still produce), and not "milk cow".

Fair points on the confusion and ambiguity. My comment wasn't really worthwhile (and you obviously know all of these rejoinders) but the floated implication seemed absurd and a little pointed. Future self will endeavour to be more valorous.

The standard range is given as 3km, but have been observed far further out than that at times. Given that they communicate to each other where food sources are, they can efficiently harvest for a long way off. It's also surprising where hives are and you can quite easily hide one away such that it's not easily noticed by neighbours - an entrance facing a high fence or wall forces them to fly way up before moving horizontally.

I have no idea how common it is in the States but poking about suggests that here in NZ there are about half a million hives. There are about 5550 total beekeeping enterprises in New Zealand, of which only 803 were commercial. Anything less that 50 hives was considered hobbyist.

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