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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem.

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.

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Honey bees are naturalized here. They are part of the ecosystem, for better or worse. Insect populations have adapted around them. Taking them away now would be a disruption, especially if it were not planned out.

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.

Purely from an economic and argicuktural perspective, is there a way for us to simply raise honey bees in more of a ‘bubble’ that is somehow protected from the giant wasps?

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?

Hives are already a protective bubble, if the bees could make it more secure, they would.

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 :)

That's actually a very clever idea. I like that.

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.

> if the bees could make it more secure, they would

I don't think the bees really have any input.

I'm not a beekeeper, and sure, the modern hives are also optimized for productivity and easy access(bees are forced to produce more honey than they would naturally produce) -- but hives entrances have certain dimensions taken from nature so the bees can cool the hive -- you cannot make the entrances smaller or the hive will overheat.

> Insect populations have adapted around them.

Odds are, insect populations would also adapt to their disappearance.

Of course. But not necessarily in a way you'd like.

>FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem

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.

It's worth noting there are wild pollinators, some more efficient than others. Orchard bees are like 200x more efficient than honeybees on an individual basis when pollinating apple trees, for instance.

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.

Is it not possible to domesticate other bee species? Surely a x200 increase in efficiency would be a major reason to domesticate orchard bees, right?

Orchard bees are domesticated and used as pollinators. They're solitary bees, which I'm guessing prevents usage for mass pollination of crops.

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.

Yeah -- individual orchard bees are significantly more efficient, but an individual honeybee hive crams in tens of thousands of bees; you make it up on scale.

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.

> 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.

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.

It is possible and was tried (with honey bees) in 1956, then they escaped: https://www.clemson.edu/extension/beekeepers/fact-sheets-pub...

I suspect this is moving around the issue at hand here because it's likely the murder hornets will target orchard bees as well. They just aren't conveniently located in giant boxes by the hundreds.

The main advantage of European honeybees is that they can pollinate introduced European crops efficiently, and native pollinators can'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.

As an example, passion fruit has to be pollinated by hand (with swabs or special gloves) even in most of its natural range (South America) because only certain species of Uruçu bees can be pollinate it, and they have become rare

Wikipedia mentions carpenter bees are quite capable. Which probably explains how my neighbor's gets pollinated. I know it's certainly not by hand.

I've found wild passion fruit growing on my farm in East Texas. It had plenty of fruit growing on it.

Passion fruit isn't native to the US. Are you sure it was indeed passion fruit?

This page from the University of Florida disagrees.

https://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/plants/ornamentals/p...

I did some more research and I see that there is a Passiflora species (P. incarnata) that grows in Texas, but that isn't what is generally referred to as passion fruit. P. edulis would be what the above commenter is referring to.

The purple passion fruit commonly grown in New Zealand (not native) doesn't need manual pollination. Not sure what does it, though there are many introduced honey bees and bumblebees alongside some native pollinators like butterflies.

I'm sorry, but could you provide a source on this? I know for a fact I grew up eating wild passion fruit from our property in the Ozarks.

Large scale agriculture was not part of native US ecosystem either.

I’m replying to a paragraph about ecosystems here not agriculture.

The honeybees have largely displaced many native bee species. It's not just agriculture that will suffer if honeybees disappear.

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