Washington crews destroy first U.S. “murder hornet” nest
axios.com
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Furthermore: People use honey bees for honey ( duh ). But they are more useful than just that: people drive honey bee colonies around to crops in order to pollinate them. If we don't have honey bees, we do not have crops.
There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee. Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications.
What are you proposing exactly? We stand back and lose all of our biodiversity because we have to pay a few conservationists 1/5 of a mediocre SAAS CEO's salary? Give me a break.
Humanity does not stand on its own, we still need nature to sustain ourselves. "When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money."
And outside of economic and survival concerns: Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever. How could you honestly take this position? What do you find valuable? What do you find beautiful? What do you live for?
A year ago, there was a fascinating episode of "Nature" on PBS about keystone species. It's available for free online streaming here [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species
[2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-serengeti-rules-41dfru/2...
A lot of people seem to think that if you "destroy" an ecosystem it is a step toward a lifeless environment.
Here's some comments: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/333/6049/1547.6
It's not about socialism or capitalism here, scarce resources and humans need regulation
healthcare being ran by a union of worker coops, that all pay taxes into the union of unions to manage healthcare for all members (workers and consumers who are members of the union)... Don't want to be part of the union then don't and if your employer still has their own health ins. use that, or maybe they use ours anyways cause it'd be better... Either way options still exist with the best ones rising to the top like normal capitalism, just CEOs and execs wouldn't be paid as well, because their value is a lot less than they think it is.
A balanced society as you say, can only come from something that's not capitalism or communism both of which are authoritarian or oligarchical at the very least.
Ancom, I think is the best solution with the least amount of friction. I mean all it requires to get started is for people to form a union, start some union-owned businesses, put the profits back into healthcare for all members of the union. Anyone can become a member who wants to (might have a dues though), then they'd be encourage to buy from union businesses, who will in turn use that $$ to pay medical bills for all union members. If there's surplus everyone gets dividends, and workers get big bonuses.
No, they're absolutely capitalist. Workers own the means of production in no "healthy" "functioning" government in the world.
Free market propaganda often sets up a black/white dichotomy between capitalism and communism/central planning, then uses the failures of regimes like the Soviet Union to attempt to train readers to think that any deviation from capitalism will lead to similar disasters.
At risk of sounding like a prediction, we can confidently say the outcome is something awful. The ecosystem isn't built like a fault-tolerant network where one node goes out, but the network more or less still works. There is no redundancy. There are no enterprise-grade availability requirements.
This a surprisingly and pleasingly apt analogy given that DNA/RNA are indeed code being 'run' by life.
>> It'll still be running some code...
until the system is degraded to the point where it crashes into either only the smallest fragments (which take tens or hundreds of millions of years to rebuild), or complete extinction
Yet, while I lack any deep understanding why they would re-emerge, paleontology seems to show a long history of mass extinctions down to very low levels, then re-emergence of more complex forms.
One theory that I read of a few years back posited that life, and higher forms in particular, are more efficient at increasing entropy, i.e., diffusing heat, and so are systemically favored (seen nothing on it in a few years, so no idea of its current state; if anyone recognizes it and can provide a link, thanks in advance!).
As George Carlin said, we need to stop framing these issues as “saving the Earth.” The Earth will be fine. This is about saving ourselves.
Same goes for climate change. The Earth has been very warm in the past, even ice free. The Earth will be fine. The question is whether the >10 billion humans that may be on it as climate change starts to really manifest will be fine.
I like Elon’s way of putting climate change: sure we may be wrong at least a bit, but is it wise to take our best habitable planet and dump a shitload of CO2 into the atmosphere and then just see what happens because YOLO?
He certainly can't personally stop climate change, but maybe in theory he can get a step closer to building an ark.
Hope/push for the former, prepare for the latter.
Have you seen how Mars looks like? What the conditions are like? Temperature? Atmosphere? Radiation? Ecosystems (none)? Water (none)? Breathable air (none)? How could that ever be more inviting than earth?
As we have seen in this pandemic, even selling it like that isn't a recipe for success.
Working towards reducing that reliance sounds like a better investment than hoping that a fragile system keeps stable if we undo the changes we noticed we cause (a system that had multiple extinction events in the past)
We don't need to "reduce our reliance on nature". We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of. Whether it be on planet-scale or otherwise. We don't exist in a vacuum.
Houses, heating, cooling make us resilient to outside temperature and weather changes, advanced construction makes us resilient to earthquakes, etc. etc.
There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.
Technological optimists have had a poor record over the past 50+ years. Infotech is the exception rather than the rule, and even it has encountered progressively formidable headwinds.
I’m not sure why you think that plant pollination needs a new solution in the first place. We’ve been working with bees for centuries and we’ve used them as a tool. Bees are themselves an optimal method for pollination created though thousands of years of natural progress.
Colonizing Mars continues to be a pipe dream and even if/when people start living there it’s going to be full of compromises and discomfort. And we’ll still have billions of people stuck on earth.
Technology isn’t the solution to all of life’s problems.
Heating and cooling necessarily heat the exterior of the heated or cooled environment more than they do heat or cool the interior. As the temperature warms, you need to cool your interior space even more, pumping yet more heat into the surrounds. For one, all that energy has to come from somewhere. For two, hopefully you don’t drive the system beyond a point where your heating and cooling can keep up.
> There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.
There is a huge, vast, expansive, unimaginably large, ridiculously wide chasm between “working on plans to colonize Mars” and “actually colonizing Mars.” In the meantime, we’ve got ~10 billion people dependent on the existing ecosystem we’ve got here. Keeping that global ecosystem healthy enough to support those people without massive die-offs or total chaos, without the benefit of any globally organized effort to speak of, is deeply and profoundly not trivial, probably much less trivial than supporting a very small population on another planet.
Plus, even if we do manage to colonize another world without first learning how to maintain the one we have, what exactly is the end game? Hop from planet to planet, destroying any life we find or create along the way?
That's a matter of perspective. I would say they happen all the time.
FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem, they were imported from europe. They are likely important if not critical to the pollination of several cash crops, but they're not an ecosystem concern in and of themselves.
However giant asian hornets are rather indiscriminate in their hunting, in fact their main prey in japan are large insects like mantises (as well as other hornets). GAH taking root in the US would be an unmitigated disaster all around, not just for beekeeping.
Well, neither are most of the crops the Europeans started growing in America. They brought everything from apple species to wheat.
Not all of these are self-pollinating, so they had to bring bees too.
The main advantage of honeybees is that they are domesticated, and we can take them where we want. If your orchard has a healthy population of orchard bees, great, and there are ways to promote orchard bees, but the honeybees can actually be brought in on demand.
That being said there are lots of animals that can't be domesticated. Zebras are the classic example, being very similar to domesticated horses but are much more aggressive and unpredictable.
Honeybees also work well with mono-cropping because you can easily pick up and move the entire hive from massive field to massive field just in time for pollination. If you are relying on a wild bee population they'll do better when they have lots of plants in bloom across a wide spectrum of time so they have a chance to build up their population before the major blooms eg the orchard you want pollinated. Otherwise you run the risk of only have a small bee population that can't fully take advantage of (and pollinate) the suddenly massive resource glut of several square miles of orchards suddenly in bloom at once.
Interestingly, we have records of contemporary impressions of tarpans and aurochs, back when they weren't extinct. They tended to be described in terms like "absolutely untamable".
But of course they weren't.
The flip side is that European honeybees can not pollinate native crops very well. For that, the native pollinators are very efficient. Native pollinators are threatened by the feral colonies of European honeybees and their introduced diseases like nosema, varroa, mites, and foulbrood. It's like smallpox blankets all over again as infected honeybee colonies are trucked all over the country to spread pollen and disease on various introduced European cops.
https://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/plants/ornamentals/p...
For instance, if you were trying to reestablish some some native pollinator, reducing honey bee pressure might be part of that plan. Even possible a critical one. But just killing them and walking away? That probably won’t end well. It would be irresponsible to do so.
Even removing invasive species of plants involves a succession plan, so the same thing doesn’t happen again, or something worse moves into the vacuum. I know a couple people who could fill a whole workshop on what people often get wrong here (and I’ve encouraged one of them to do so, but no luck), but they would both agree that what gets done, flawed as it can be (especially in walking away too soon) is better than the status quo, or removal and neglect.
I’d imagine from what I’ve read that a significant chunk of bees are already artificially produced and distributed for crops.
That plus of course combined with a general ongoing attempt at eradication of the hornets. Or at least significant population control.
Or is agriculture simply too widespread and complicated (or ‘naturally’ dependent) for such a thing?
We could make lasers driven by ML to identify the hornets and shoot them down as they approach a hive, but that would be really expensive :)
It would be an excellent grad CSS project. Identifying the Giant Wasps with 99.9% or whatever accuracy and deploying some defensive mechanism.
The problem like you said would be(e) infinitely expensive to deploy to all of the many thousands of randomly placed hives. But maybe useful for the industrial pollinator companies, which is a big thriving industry.
Anyway, I just like these sort of clever tech solutions.
There has to be plenty of solutions to this (major) problem we haven't thought of yet.
I don't think the bees really have any input.
Odds are, insect populations would also adapt to their disappearance.
There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee
Sorry, what?
https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/native-bees-often-bette...
I haven't got it out for honey bees, but as your comment makes clear, native species are underappreciated.
> So why the global obsession with the one species that makes honey? For one, honey bees have hives, which makes them easy to keep and transfer en masse. For another, some native bees are picky about which flowers they prefer and where they live. As a result, commercial pollination is almost wholly dependant on honey bees.
> ...The goal of all this work is not to replace honey bees, but to pinpoint which native bees are effective, what they can offer and how to lure them into visiting and pollinating.
From what the article describes, the honey bee is uniquely suited for the niche we need it for, and there is no other species even remotely as well adapted -- though they're trying to figure out if any other species could be made to work in some lesser capacity.
So it doesn't seem that native species are underappreciated -- just that there are very good reasons we use the honeybee instead.
In some places I know similar species are actually grown for commercial pollination, so it'll vary from place to place for sure.
For things like apples, it's actually affordable to pay humans to do it. Which is not to say that bee's aren't better than humans in most ways, just that it doesn't come down to 'no options'.
And like other people are saying, honeybees are livestock, they aren't 'nature'.
Hand pollination of apples is already sometimes done in China.
You seem to be speaking from an unquantifiably elevated position of privilege.
What do you propose instead?
Technical audiences usually go with the "technology, right or wrong" angle (as nationalists go with "my country, right or wrong").
It's more about identity validation and peer group thinking than critical and systems thinking. Plus they're into technology because they disproportionally like, glorify, and are attracted by tech in the first place.
We are loosing biodiversity at a rate comparable to the last mass extinctions, we are loosing our "life support systems" as climate/biodiv. experts say, yet no one is concerned.
This is beyond the worst i ever expected in my worst nightmares. And this is happening now.
And no one says a world. No one even dare spending 5 minute reading the material. No one cares.
If we go extinct (with 95% of the other species first) it will be well deserved.
By the way, the science says that the dynamics are NOT in our favour: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife...
> And no one says a world. No one even dare spending
> 5 minute reading the material. No one cares.
Well, no one I know, and no one they know, has been hurt by the coronavirus. And the list of people I know includes two people from Wuhan. If we went out a third degree, we would likely start to pick up victims.
On the other hand, I do personally know someone who was injured by the response; this person responded so badly to the lockdown that they had to be committed.
It's possible that the existence of a pandemic isn't what people are denying...
Don't worry, considering how things are going, that will change this winter.
Unless you are in New Zealand.
I see this line a lot but everyday humans are doing irreparable damage to ecosystems. Taking millions of years to heal from events is not ‘fine’.
His point was that we're killing ourself. An ecosystem and a planet will continue existing, the question is whether humans will exist on it.
I think it’s similar to how we view viruses.
And the almost uncountable plants and animals that are already extinct. At least when we go the others will be able to stay.
This sentiment is too simplifying. Yes, the planet, as in a spinning celestial object with a molten core, solid surface with water, and an atmosphere will be fine, so to speak, but the vast amounts of flora and fauna will not and haven’t been. Some will make it, but I don’t define that as “fine”.
Many animal species, if they haven’t already gone extinct have been suffering deeply. Take a look at the southern resident orca population. We captured, killing many in the process, and enslaved them, all of which served to torture those enslaved and break up the matriarchal hierarchies that existed. This left new, untrained leaders in the population. Before then and since then, we have poisoned them and have completely decimated their food source. These are direct consequences of unneeded, self serving actions of humans. We also harass them sonically. This is a population that is already and has been having a “bad time”, and it’s likely the population will go extinct. The cause of all this is 100% humans. Now take this example and multiply it by the thousands if not millions of species also going extinct and having bad times. Humans and our technological development combined literally form an extinction event.
What position do you mean? Your comment is not replying to anybody.
I don't see anybody in this thread who is arguing that we should do nothing.
This is solely due to the industrialization of agriculture.
Leaving fallow portions of the field and growing native crops winds up with an assortment of pollinators--including a lot of native bees.
The problem is that they are less efficient. So, a farmer who does this will lose to a farmer who uses industrialized honeybees.
This is a standard case of privatize the profit and socialize the risk.
There is no safe harbor. We will always need nature to sustain ourselves.
We are nature, full stop. But if you include our digestive tracts, that fact is inescapable. We are a sentient bioreactors. I’m thinking we can destroy nature and keep going is suicide.
If we were to think long-term, we could stop this invasive species. Crop duster planes spray everything within at least several generations or years of insect migration. That might mean 10,000 square miles gets completely soaked in a mix of Sevin, Malathion, and neonicotinoids.
Compared to the roughly 16,300,000 square miles at risk of being irrevocably harmed by an invasive species, that local and temporary ecosystem damage would be practically nothing.
We'll argue a bit and do nothing. The wasps are here to stay. Say goodbye to bees.
We have honey bees in Japan. While I agree it will have huge implications, it’ll hardly be the last of them.
That said, I’d rather murder hornets go away everywhere.
I love having hornets on my property if their nest isn't located in a path I have to cross. They also eat wasps and you won't have any problems with them throughout the summer. They don't try to eat your cake or drink you lemonade and you can peacefully chill in your garden.
They always leave their nest after a season and it can make quite a mess. But nothing is better than having them in a remote location in your garden. It is better than any insect spray.
But you still might seriously want to get rid of them because they could indeed do a lot of damage in another ecosystem that needs to sacrifice several species until it adapts.
This whole idea is very batshit insane too.
> "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever."
I don't think that's the case. I think you're giving humanity too much credit. If humanity kills itself from overpopulation and overconsumption, the earth will do just fine without us. Even if we harm it as badly as we did with something like the Chernobyl disaster (look how it has bounced back there).
We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history and billions of years from now we may not be here, but the earth probably will be.
> We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history
That's exactly the problem. We're causing massive changes on a much shorter timescale than evolution operates on. I think it's likely the global ecosystem will struggle to adapt.
Consider climate change. Let's take it as given that climate change is an existental threat to humanity, and that it is caused by carbon dumped into the atmosphere by mankind. If this is true, then we need to leverage the full arsenal of technology available to us to solve the problem.
Nuclear power is a solution we have in-hand, today, to atmospheric carbon.
Of course, it comes with trade-offs. Nuclear waste is a big downside, but nuclear waste is a tiny annoyance compared to a runaway greenhouse effect.
And yet, environmentalists have, for sixty years, fought tooth-and-nail against nuclear power.
This brings me to the point: the track record of environmentalists, and the of green movement, shows that they do not care about the environment, nor do they care about solving real problems with real solutions for real people.
What they do seem to care about is money. Especially taxpayer money, because once you're in, the gravy never stops. Actually solving problems doesn't matter, as long as you look busy and get interviewed on MSNBC and NPR a lot.
The image of the envrionmentalist is of someone who will chain themselves to trees to protest their university building a new parking lot, with lots of pictures for Instagram and the news, but only until the semester break. Instead of organizing transportation and/or walkable housing for other students, thereby eliminating the demand for additional parking.
The opposition by-and-large cares very deeply about the environment. You'd be hard-pressed to find more environmentally-conscious folks than in the hunting and homesteading communities.
But they also believe, from observed behavior, that environmentalists are mostly interested in prolonging the problem while making themselves rich.
Pretty cool to watch actually: https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1320152207212253185
Mars, apparently.
https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discove...
Ya. Cognitive dissonance. Humankind has full agency (dominion) with an utter refusal to even acknowledge consequences, much less accept responsibility.
"Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections."
Yup.
In the Anthropocene, we are the gardeners. Laissez faire is a terrible gardening strategy.
https://www.wired.com/2014/05/will-we-still-have-fruit-if-be...
Wonder how the economics are now!
Mass extinctions in the past were over a timescale of thousands of years, so there was some time for evolutionary "computation" to adapt.
Human mass extinction is occurring on the timescale of decades.
While I’m at it, please allow me to remind everyone that there are thousands of solitary bee species in the world. They are the ones that go extinct or in real danger compared to our honey bees. There are many struggling beekeepers like me in the world, and we’re doing our best to keep our bees alive. But thousands of species are without keepers and they are dying. Please be gentle to the nature. Let them live.
(Edit: wondering how you can help, here's what I humbly suggested below in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889023)
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/05/150524-bees-...
I have been guilty of that error countless times.
An individual's actions will not solve a society's woes, but they don't need to. If they help a little bit where they are, they can be worth doing.
Furthermore, individuals trying to help does not preclude larger-scale solutions. The people attempting individual actions could even contribute to the larger-scale or policy-based solutions.
Or, given that the described standpoint suggests I have enough attention for either planting a meadow lawn or supporting 'big action', why are you wasting it telling us about this, instead of naming names of the big actors to write to our representatives about and avoid electing representatives that hold a favorable position toward them ?
I'll just add two points:
1) Individual good actions virtually never outweigh large-scale bad actions, but the world is actually worse off if individuals do not take those little positive actions. Little polluter + big polluter yields more pollution than big polluter.
2) Taking the small positive actions is actually a lot of what helps people work on the huge, difficult problems. Humans are more effective when our psychology is a unified self rather than in conflict with itself, and taking small, positive concrete steps helps us keep ourselves in alignment with our big-picture goals and ideals.
I guess both of those fit into the abstract observation that you're bifurcating - people don't have to choose between individual concrete actions and contributing to policy efforts and other high-level approaches.
By all means, if you see someone explicitly saying they choose one at the expense of the other, say something.
When they don't say that, though, don't assume that's what they're doing.
There can be many reasons. The Varroa Mite [0] is one that we have to constantly fight against, these days. The mites don't kill the entire colony, but weakens it so much that the colony can't overwinter. Or there viruses [1] that deform the bees' wings that can debilitate the colony. There are also other problems that we don't see where I live, but other beekeepers have to fight, such as the Small Hive Beetle [2].
I suspect because of the ongoing wildfires and poor air quality in this region, one of my queens stopped laying eggs mid-summer, at a time when she normally lays 1,500-2,000 eggs every day. I had to replace her. I don't know if that colony is going to survive the winter.
Some other colonies had similar problems. Yesterday a beekeeper friend told me she lost a colony and she has another one on the brink of collapsing.
Then, we also don't know who is using what type of pesticides around here. Bees can forage anywhere in the 2-3 mile radius. It's near impossible for me to know what's going on in such a wide area.
It's a constant uphill battle.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa_destructor [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformed_wing_virus [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_hive_beetle
Are things like the beetles and virus new introductions to the area, or is it just a confluence of factors that are hitting harder now?
I'd also heard (many years ago) that, while the colonies can collapse, the bees normally reproduce quickly enough that you don't see much of a net loss in colony counts year-over-year - how do you see that?
My impression is that the bee populations have been remarkably resilient year over year, but whenever I see this kind of stress-and-recovery cycle, I worry that there's a tipping point - many systems seem Fine under stress until they overwhelm their recovery mechanism and collapse catastrophically.
There is a tiny bit of information on them in german Wikipedia [0] (automatic translation [1], let me know if I can help with translation). Wikipedia says that they can be found worldwide, so maybe they will be of help.
(Please note that under _no circumstances_ this was meant as encouragement to introduce new invasive species to your area!)
Here is more information: the page of the beekeeper researching pseudoscorpions and bee interactions is at [2], [3] is about a book he wrote, called "Instruction manual for species-appropriate husbandry of bees and pseudoscorpions". A comment in [3] also suggests that under ideal circumstances, these pseudoscorpions might be able to deal with a small hive beetle.
This poster [4] states that having pseudoscorpions in hives unfortunately had no influence on varroa numbers, though.
[0] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCcherskorpion
[1] (machine translation de-en): https://www.translatetheweb.com/?from=&to=en&dl=de&ref=trb&a...
[2] (german) https://beenature-project.com/epages/6aa71639-792d-4a95-9e8c...
[3] (german) https://bienen-nachrichten.de/2019/handlungsanleitung-f%C3%B...
[4] (PDF, english) http://apicultureconference2016.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/201...
The paper is a plasterboard jointing paper and 3-5 layers are sewn together and soaked in a solution of about 40% Oxalic acid, 60% glycerine. Used like conventional mite strips they need replacing more often but seem to work really well.
Randy Oliver has been trialing other delivery methods in California.
My hives are the best they have ever been this season, with a very strong start.
The video's caption:
"Alright, here is what I want everyone to know about ‘murder hornets’. Only one nest of Asian Giant Hornets has been found in North America and it was quickly eradicated. Right now, the nation’s top entomologists are watching the situation and beekeepers like myself are not worried. If these hornets become a serious problem for honeybees, we will find a solution to keep bees safe.
If you really want something to be afraid of and if you want to know what keeps beekeepers awake at night, look closely at the bee in this video. You’ll see a dark, round speck on the side of her body. That, my friends, is something far more terrifying than these so-called ‘murder hornets’—it is a Varroa Mite. (Scroll through to see it up close.) The Varroa Mite is a parasitic mite that feeds on the fat bodies of bees and its decimating bee populations around the world.
At this point in time, Varroa Mites are a much greater threat to honeybee populations than Asian Giant Hornets and if they got the same attention in the press, maybe we would have a solution for them. Everyone now knows the term ‘murder hornet’ but the thing we should be talking about In the US is the Varroa Mite, a creature whose scientific name is literally ‘Varroa Destructor’.
Please stop the murder hornet hype and please start talking about the thing that’s killing more honeybees in the US than anything else right now—varroa mites."
"If these hornets become a serious problem for honeybees, we will find a solution to keep bees safe."
It can easy be too late. Look at what's happening in Europe. They simply can't stop the hornets.
Of course it's more dramatic to show these huge insects. They are impressive and scary. Mites are small and look insignificant. They are not dramatic. They won't generate hype. I understand the frustration as a beekeeper, but don't let yet another problem become too big to reverse the tide on. It is obviously cheaper to deal with the hornets right now, hype or no hype.
Don't let murder hornets become the bee's new Coronavirus equivalent. It sounds like they're already dealing with plenty of pandemic-like issues as it is.
To quote George W Bush, who actually took pandemics seriously, "A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire. If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it."
So this, but with murder hornets.
How?
Or May be just look at what other Asian countries have done (outside of China) and look at what they did. It’s exactly everything the US did not do
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/sin...
This seems contradictory to me as a beek. 5/16 holes as a mouse guard should also keep huge insects out of the hive. It also should be easy to create pheromone traps if it is true that the hornet's seek out the scent of other dead hornets.
On a side note, I see mites as a genetics issue. I would rather see commercial outfits using selection rather than treating with chemicals and shipping packages with weak genetics all over the US. Spearding weak genes is kind of the opposite of Darwin...
Drone entry/exit and blockages would be an issue after a period presumably.
I’m currently using some nice American made excluders and they are really nice. They are made of wire and are quite quite rigid.
My method has got pretty cheap - oxalic acid is about as cheap as it gets for treatments.
I can't help but think of when we only had one covid case and people said not to worry.
> Right now the nation's top entomologists are watching the situation and beekeepers like myself are not worried.
... and ...
> It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.
Hasn’t officially launched yet, but the early trials are promising.
(Disclosure: I have advised the company)
Edit: I don’t understand the vicious pointless downvotes over this question.
How is that an easy connection? Your argument essentially says without bees then nature as we know it falls apart catastrophically - I am incredulous you could interpret this as obvious. Species go extinct all the time and yet Earth is still doing just fine, apart from the damage humans are doing to it.
> No pollinators
Bees are not the only pollinators
> leads to decreased germination
A decrease is not the same as elimination
> which leads to less food
A decrease is not the same as elimination
> for the lower levels of the food chain and on and on
Your argument is a about knock-on effects, which certainly exist. But you seem to think if any point in the chain breaks, it leads to ecological collapse. Why do you assume nature is so fragile? I am not a biologist and maybe bees are special or there is something I do not understand, but I certainly don't think it's an obvious conclusion.
You might want to investigate about the sparrows in china, quick version; a campaign to exterminate the sparrows to increase grain production ended up with famines.
In Europe it is..in fact it was the main-theme 3 years ago. And not just bees but insects overall...the honeybee was just the friendly looking ambassador for that message.
One small data point, but too many and too few are both bad. https://www.airborne.co.nz/pages/bee-keeping-statistics-new-...
You can learn about the wild bees in your region and understand what natural resources they thrive on. Some of them are so specialized that they can easily be threatened by the loss of habitat. Some of the bee "houses" can become great activities for children. For example kids can build Mason Bee houses and watch them attract bees.
Supporting local beekeepers and bee-friendly farmers.
By trying to keep an immaculate lawn or mosquito-free areas, most of us sacrifice the local insect population including various bees that are affected by those pesticides.
By spreading awareness, but also starting your own hive is a great hobby and it's quite affordable if you have the time. You don't even have to have them in your garden or balcony. You can speak to local farmers, and they can be happy to host your hive on their property. That's how I started.
I have a bit of garden but in the middle of a residential district of a city. Do I have any chance to attract bees or is
> starting your own hive
the only way?
If I had a bigger yard I would host a couple hives of my own, I love just sitting out in the flowers in the warmer weather and watching them forage.
I have no issues with neighbours and have somewhere between 3 and 6 hives depending on how you count. This is in a backyard of a suburban section. Preemptive honeystrikes may have helped - I get 150-250kgs of honey that it’s no issue giving it away and that seems to generate good will.
> the only way?
Not sure if I understand. I've also heard of schemes where you can sponsor a hive, but I've never tried it.
sorry I meant a continuation of your quote as part of of the question there: ie. "is starting your own hive the own only way?"
I've started to plant bee friendly flowers, but they haven't grown much. I'll continue again in spring.
The scope of North America's invasive species problem is enormous. For many folks in urban areas, it's possible that you might go your whole day only encountering one native bird species (American Crow), but a whole host of invasive species (Rock Pigeon, House Sparrows, European Starlings).
History shows that early, active intervention can pay enormous dividends. For example, Alberta remains the only area in North America without non-native rats due to a major interventions: https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta.asp...
Washington State department of agriculture’s budget is public information; they spend about a quarter of a billion dollars a year on all their programs. I can’t imagine this particular operation is making much of a dent in that overall spend. According to the captions of those photographs, they have entomologists and pest control specialists on staff already. Salaries are also public. Sven Spichinger, shown in one of those pictures, Managing Entomologist, is on $87,000 a year - whether he’s hunting for murder hornets or not, presumably. There are three different levels of ‘Pest Biologist’ job in the department. It kind of looks like this is a project that is taking up the time of a few people who they already had on staff, to deal with exactly this kind of problem.
Does all government spending make you nauseous, or only when it’s visibly helping?
Also you could make a case that large houses with nice kitchens also have environmental costs to build and maintain, and living in small apartments with communal kitchens or restaurants nearby is better.
Most people end up leaving a lot on the table when eating out, and 100% of that food ends up in the trash / wasted.
If you want to save the environment, then you should reconsider your whole diet. Reduce meat intake and make smaller meals with more environmentally conscious ingredients(likely more expensive).
Regarding leftovers, plenty of people put restaurant leftovers in a container and take them home to eat later. The people who don't would likely waste food at home too.
This effort to destroy one hornet's nest probably had direct result of bringing someone a little closer towards having asthma and indirectly, through supply chain effects, costing a few dozen insect colonies, animals, and plants their lives somewhere else in the world.
Now that you mention it, it does make me a bit nauseated.
When I read the article I thought there are likely other nests nearby. Perhaps they should use some of the forestry budget to do a controlled burn in the area. It'll reduce severity of future fires and get any of any hornets nearby ;-)
If there's evidence of multiple other hives in the area, a controlled burn may get some of them, but the scope of the fire necessary could also be massive.
I'm not saying the option shouldn't be part of our arsenal. And if this is an area prone to wild-fires, then as you said it could assist there as well. However, I'm not sure it's a good option at this time, especially considering the side effects on other local indigenous species.
I'm not against government spending. I think there are plenty of problems that market forces alone cannot solve. I think the government should provide a solid safety net for its citizens. That is precisely why I lament the resources required for this. They are absolutely necessary, and at the same time it means there are fewer resources to go to other absolutely necessary needs.
I guess we could wish that the hornets never arrived here, but the life of a government is solving thousands of problems like these. If not the hornets, it would be something else. The uplifting moment is that this was a successful containment. Money well-spent :)
https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/657947826782505650/
I have no idea how accurate it is, of course.
https://www.vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/rats-10...
https://vividmaps.com/global-rat-distribution-map/
Vividmaps.com is a great site.
Hemelin, Germany on the other hand only found a temporary solution to the problem when the anonymous Pied Piper visited the area. Perhaps he was unaware that some rats can swim up to a mile and simply drove the local rat population to the surrounding area. Regardless, the example clearly illustrates that music-based solutions to the problem are, at best, temporary.
I'm not suggesting it's bad or wrong to try, only whether there's evidence that the odds favor doing so.
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=invasive%20species%20erad...
[1] https://entomologytoday.org/2019/03/08/invasive-species-succ...
Perhaps little hope for widespread eradication, but important areas can be cleaned up.
For these murder hornets, if we make a big up front investment in eradicating them now, there’s hope that we can prevent them from establishing themselves and becoming another perpetual battle.
well that's a little dramatic
Partially fill a shop vac with soapy water, stick the nozzle as close to the nest entrance as possible, then turn on the vacuum and hear the wasps get sucked into the machine as they try to enter or exit the nest. It takes a few hours, and potentially a couple of separate sessions to mop up any stragglers.
No fancy beekeeper suit necessary, and, best of all, no need to spread nasty poisons.
Seems like you'd just have a huge pile of mostly-alive wasps in your shop-vac.
I once blew a few hours to anxiously watching youtube videos of people destroying nasty wasp/hornet infestations. (I'm still not sure why. Probably some mix of morbid fascination and aggression fantasy.)
The soapy-water-shopvac trick appeared in a lot of those videos. (Less commonly: thermite, or quad-propeller drones.)
Soapy water is actually a powerful insecticide against many arthropods:
https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/insects/insect-c...
We used a mix of vinegar, soap, and water in a spray bottle to rid our patio of earwigs this year and it seemed to work incredibly well. The insecticides we were spraying them with before trying the soap did absolutely nothing but cost $7 a can.
Does that perhaps depend on the species of wasp, or maybe the reach of the wand?
IIRC, there was one youtube video where the little bastards went straight for the dude's face during shop-vac'ing. He could smell the venom they were trying to spray in his eyes.
When one of the wasps (or hornets?) went straight for his GoPro sensor, its face filled my large monitor and I nearly had a heart attack.
What? have you seen size of that hornet? I am wearing space-suite if available.
My impression is that if you put a vacuum cleaner next to the entrance you may, if you're lucky, catch nearly all the wasps that leave the nest, but the queen never leaves the nest, and the eggs and larvae don't leave the nest, and I think there may also be some workers that stay in the nest looking after the larvae, so things will be quieter after you've finished vacuuming, but the colony will probably regenerate itself in a week or so.
With Vespex you don’t go looking for nests, you let the colony poison itself.
Because it is protein based and not sugar based, it’s not attractive to as many species. The downside is that the wasps only take it at a specific time of year - when they are consuming protein.
Professionals wear PPE because if you incur a low-probability risk every time you do X, and you do X often enough (because it's your profession), X will happen to you.
For example, if you have a 99% chance of nothing going wrong, and you do that thing 500 times, it's essentially guaranteed to happen (0.99^500 = 0.0066).
The stinging insect removal guys will be stung if they are in the profession for decades without PPE.
What? That seems crazy (and cool) to be able to create a tracking device light enough for a hornet to fly and still have enough battery to transmit even a periodic chirp.
This one is 3x11mm and weighs 0.15g;
https://atstrack.com/tracking-products/transmitters/product-...
It says it's light activated. So likely they've put a tiny light sensor in it that the microcontroller polls occasionally during the lowest power mode. That might be a tiny solar panel too. But using that to electrically drive an electronic power switch is tricky if you don't have the budget for a custom ASIC; if you don't have that budget, you'll add a decent amount of weight in a device that tiny.
Honestly, I'm not at all surprised that they've chosen to accept a short shelf life instead. It's pretty remarkable that they can squeeze that much functionality into a 11mm long by 3.5mm diameter cylinder.
All of this would add weight and size, and those trackers are really small and really lightweight. Judging by the photos, the battery is just hard wired to the circuit, and the whole thing is encapsulated with a thin layer of epoxy for waterproofing. That's by far the cheapest, easiest, and most reliable way to build something as lightweight as possible.
I wonder why its not just two interconnecting cylinders (using a tiny gasket) that you push together with thumb/finger when you want to activate/power the device.
Given that there would have been some serious engineering to think through the design there must have been trade-offs that I'm not considering though.
30,000 bees killed by just 30 hornets in an hour or so. The bees just have no defence against them at all.
Brutal.
Worth noting that one nest can create hundreds of new queens that will hibernate the winter and establish a nest in the spring. Not all will survive, but with minimal competition, and significant feeding opportunities from a mostly untapped ecosystem, many will. Destroying one nest to stop exponential growth is a great investment, especially early on.
Note: I'm not an expert in this area, I'm mostly parroting stuff I read in other articles.
But those are species that don't have centralized nests.. This might be easier if you can trap them and trace them back to their homes..
No, they probably think that it is likely that, if that is not the case, it is likely to still be small enough that the progress can be significantly slowed by that means until a more complete solution is found.
Given that magnitude matters a lot and that it's a major threat to bee populations and through them much of the agriculture of the country, stalling tactics are a lot better than nothing.
It looks like in 2019 Vancouver island (which is huge) had a colony get eradicated, but otherwise haven't seen much else reported.
What's interesting is the way that honey bees defend against them. A bunch of bees surround each hornet, then they intensify the flapping of their wings, which then generates enough heat to kill the hornet. In other words, the hornets are cooked alive.
European honeybees, which are used in most of the world, have no such defense mechanism and would indeed be helplessly slaughtered by these hornets.
I’d definitely advocate watching some YouTube footage about these creatures, they’re fascinating.
A fuckup led to the release of several of swarms of african bees which went on to crossbreed with local european honeybees, so africanised honeybees were not actually a human creation.
The result turned out to mostly take from their african ancestry: highly defensive, fast reproduction, readily swarming (or even absconding), way less picky about their nesting sites, … leading to high invasiveness.
AFAIK africanised honeybees are no worse than their african ancestors (though I'm not sure they're any better).
When I first heard about the hornet defense I wondered how on Earth the bees could've come up with that. But if they already clumped up for warmth it's a lot more scrutable.
The honeybees don’t just swarm the hornets, they will actually retreat into the hive and allow the hornets to enter, then trap them inside while they roast them to death. All of this works because the honeybees can vibrate themselves to a temperature just warmer than the hornets can tolerate, which is also just less than the bees can tolerate. Just one or two degrees celsius of tolerance is the difference.
Hopefully no Asian giant hornets ever evolve a slightly higher temperature tolerance!
A similar story for the scotch broom. And the english ivy, which is killing the trees.
All of these are everywhere and very difficult to kill.
2020: Surgical masks are a bit much to expect people to wear during a pandemic, Ebola has been circulating in Congo since 2014, and we'll need airtight space suits for a murder hornet outbreak.
Truly, the 90s were a simpler time.
Basically, since the 90s we've put a much much higher value on human life. I expect mask usage to extend far beyond covid and handshaking to cease being a cultural greeting.
COVID-19 has become more infectious over the course of the pandemic, with a strain that results in higher viral loads becoming predominant: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32697968/
It's hard to compare across countries. But mask-wearing Japan and South Korea have higher rates of flu and pneumonia deaths than the US/Canada/Europe: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/influenza...
As surgical masks are much less than 100% effective even in ideal conditions, let alone actual wear, it wouldn't be surprising if more usage of them would just be an evolutionary pressure for flu to have higher viral output. Quite similar to how widespread use of less than 100% effective anti-bacterial agents just results in bacteria evolving resistance, reducing the usefulness of those agents for the most vulnerable part of the population who need them most.
Possibly confounded by disparate population densities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
Bangladesh also has a slightly lower flu/pneumonia death rate than Japan, even though it has 3x the density (though Bangladesh has a somewhat lower life expectancy (72) than Japan (84); Belgium, Netherlands, and Israel are all fairly close (80+) to Japan).
The world is significantly colder this year. I can't be the only one that feels it.
I find adults smiling to be gaudy and disconcerting, ever since I was a child. My wife included, although I like most of her so it's ok. Children don't bother me though, as it seems sincere.
I think they are just sting-proof suits.
Whatever happened with that? I haven’t heard about them in years.
Interestingly, that video suggests that some beekeepers actually prefer the aggressive, "africanized", bees as they can be more productive than less aggressive bees in the right situation. But they're a public health hazard, so most beekeepers choose to euthanize more aggressive hives to deliberately breed calmer, safer, bees.
This video also suggests that the high level of aggression wasn't optimal in at least some areas, so it's being evolved out and the bees are becoming less aggressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psBomn2cPNw
I wander why they don’t just requeen?
Also, in the case of that video, IIRC having the still aggressive workers in the locations available to that beekeeper wouldn't be desirable, even if later generations were calmer.
The workers only start laying eggs if the hive goes without a queen for several weeks, and either way the eggs they lay are unfertilized and therefore cannot be raised into new queens. So requeening it is certain to work in that regard.
However, unless you euthanize whole hive, the aggressive drones will continue to live for a while and can mate with queens in neighbouring hives and spread the aggressive genes that way. So there is an advantage to euthanizing the whole hive instead of requeening it.
The drones in a hive are not all raised there, they move about hives, so killing the hive won’t get them all.
Hives that have got a laying worker are also very hard to requeen and it usually isn’t possible. One way is to shake all the bees out some distance away then hope the laying worker doesn’t make it back to the hive (she can’t fly). However those hives are hard to fix, as they usually reject the new queen.
There is a lot of differences in beekeeping region to region and country to country, so whatever I have seen and done may be very different to other places.
Yes, removing the genes is needed, but that can be done by killing the old queen, waiting a day then putting in a caged queen of known good genes. There is no need to kill the hive that I am aware of.
Requeening to correct temperament is part of beekeeping and killing the hive seems extreme. It is also wasteful of the equipment and comb because depending on the method used it won’t be able to be salvaged.
Killing hives is generally done by pouring petrol in the top then sealing the hive up, and is seen as one of the more humane methods. However I’ve only known this being done for American Foul Brood, not for temperament.
The improved temperament sometimes happens almost instantly, but is generally over a about a month as the workers die off. The total lifespan of a worker is only about 6 weeks in midsummer.
I keep bees, but in New Zealand an aggressive colony is a lesser beast than an africanised monster. I hope I’m missing something (eg what is africanised bees reject new queens, but I can’t find anything suggesting this is the case).
Interesting. Why do they use red lamps?
Did you know that the province of Alberta has no rats?
Literally. No. Rats.
It takes a serious, concerted and systematic effort but it can be done. [1]
Much like we're still not doing a very good job at COVID (i.e. still applying crude measures because it's all we can do right now whereas we could be taking cues from Taiwan etc.), we can 'get good' at these things with good leadership.
[1] https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta.asp...
His whole channel is also excellent.
They brought this on themselves.
(I'm a beekeeper)
Nature? You realize this almost certainly happened because of international travel/trade, right?
You mean hornets? Of course I know, but we can still adapt our consumption mode, honeybees are for what? honey mostly. We can also reduce planes travel, that wouldn't hurt as well
No, I mean this specific species of hornet suddenly appearing thousands of kilometers away. That wasn't nature, that was mankind's intervention.
Getting rid of them is hardly us 'dictating' things, it's restoring the natural order.
that sounds weird, of course human influence massively things, but you can't just decide on how to restore the "natural" state like this, it may be even worse by trying to do something brutally.
The good honeybees vs the bad hornets or wasps. It's much more complex. There are articles about how wild bees do a better job at pollination https://www.google.com/search?q=wild+bees+vs+honey+bees+poll..., wasps similarly play a huge role, for example with fruit trees (figs is the best example)
And, you know, pollinating all of the plants we use for food.
They're a major pollinator. Sure, there are others, but why would we risk adding more catastrophe when we've already wiped out such a huge number of insects?
All children eventually become stronger than their parents, and most parents reap what they sow, and are treated a combination of how they treated their parents and their children.
In this case, our ancestors is all the other DNA-based life on earth, and our children are silicon machines.
Now, think about how we are treating the animals and also the machines (yelling at, cursing out, smashing, being very impatient with, expecting perfection)
The picture is downright scary.