Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

They are in fact not declining. There is no indication at all that a reliable supply of bee-driven pollination service in the US is in any way threatened. You'd be forgiven for not knowing that, though, since the story is presented in the media as if farmers relied on wild honeybees (an invasive species eradicated several decades ago by the Varroa destructor mite) rather than commercially managed bee husbandry.

View on HN

First, wild honeybees were not eradicated by Varroa. There are many papers written and researchers who have studied substantial wild honeybee populations for decades, and chronicled their decline and resurgence to pre-Varroa numbers. What has happened over the last few decades is that wild North American bees have adapted and are thriving, while 'babied' commercial bees are struggling.

Second, the number of commercial bee colonies for pollination services is not declining because beekeepers can choose to focus on making more when they need to. A reliably-consistent number of colonies can exist whether 5% die out every year or 50% (although at different cost). Having said that, what IS declining is the annual survival rate of colonies, which is linked to many factors, of which pesticides likely play a part. This is a not-so-subtle difference. Just because it doesn't immediately threaten commercial pollination doesn't mean there is no issue.

You just wrote a comment that essentially says there's no issue. Wild North American bees† are thriving. Commercial bees are "struggling". But they're not struggling in any way we can measure, since prices for bee-driven services aren't changing.

If neither commercial pollination nor wild populations are threatened, why is this a top-of-mind issue? My contention: for the same reason glyphosate is. These are cosmetic problems that are easy for us to talk about and assign blame for, without confronting the thorny systemic issues that really implicate out way of live.

† Presumably you either mean invasive feral honey bee colonies, since honey bees don't belong here, or native bee species like the Bombus bees, which aren't exploited at scale in agriculture.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6345/1393

check out this study. Science is a reputable journal. sure, it's just one study. but there are thousands more.

looks like there is ample evidence of bees being harmed by pesticides.

I don't think you heard me say that neonicotinoids don't "diminish bee health".

The information I've turned up suggests that commercial bee colonies are also rapidly dying off. https://beeinformed.org/2016/05/10/nations-beekeepers-lost-4...

Are commercial pollination services perhaps using robotic bees? Because pollination services went up by something like 1% since that article was published.

Are the bee sources still the same? Bees are often imported from other regions to meet supply.

I have no idea. Why does that matter?

If all the bees keep dying perhaps you'll eventually run out of bees to import.

The argument here being that there is a reserve supply of latent bees not used for commercial pollination, backfilling the commercial supply?

I think robot bees are a more plausible explanation.

According to the article you yourself linked to support the claim that there's no problem, that's exactly what they do -- purchase extra bees. That and split colonies (which creates weaker colonies which are more susceptible to death). And this same article admits a substantial price increase in products requiring bees for production.

How would you reconcile "substantial price increase due to bee requirements" to "sub-inflationary increases in pollination prices"? Again, you don't have to guess about this: pollination prices are tracked and published. We don't need the axiomatic method to figure this out; Google does just fine.

Regardless of that, the article does not support your argument of robot bees being more likely and demonstrates the former to be true.

Robotic bees are a joke, not a serious proposal. The reality is: these are insects, and bee husbandry provides commercial pollinators with an essentially limitless supply of them.

If you are participating in a debate and you want to argue for something, usually you post the sources for your claim instead of asking your interlocutor to find them for you. Especially when you've just shared a source that actually contradicts your claims.

Specifically, this is the passage I am referring to in, again, the article you yourself provided as evidence for your claims:

> The price of some of that extra work will get passed on to the consumer. The average retail price of honey has roughly doubled since 2006, for instance. And Kim Kaplan, a researcher with the USDA, points out that pollination fees -- the amount beekeepers charge to cart their bees around to farms and pollinate fruit and nut trees -- has approximately doubled over the same period.

> "It's not the honey bees that are in danger of going extinct," Kaplan wrote in an email, "it is the beekeepers providing pollination services because of the growing economic and management pressures. The alternative is that pollination contracts per colony have to continue to climb to make it economically sustainable for beekeepers to stay in business and provide pollination to the country’s fruit, vegetable, nut and berry crops." We have also been importing more honey from overseas lately.

Since you can literally just Google [<year> pollination price] and the first hit will contain a table, not following up on this point seems like willfulness on your part.

I am not an expert in the field or anything, but it's not necessarily the case that, because pollination services have gone up slightly, the problem is solved. It could be that they've been able to work through this problem so far but will not be able to do so indefinitely.

[Citation needed]

Happy to:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-...

That's the Washington Post noting bee colonies at a 20 year high (a timespan that includes the tail end of the original Varroa epidemic!) in late 2015.

Then, go look up pollination service prices since 2015 --- a trivial Google search! --- and compare them with inflation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com