Bringing back California’s wild bees | Hacker News Reader

Bringing back California’s wild bees

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119 pointschapulin33 comments

Here’s a simple way to help out (if you are in California) Type your address in here:

To get a list of plants that are native to your microclimate (based on 100+ years of surveys). You can filter based on shade, fire safety, bee and bird attractors, deer proof, whether they need to be watered, pruned, etc.

Then, buy some of those plants at a nearby participating nursery (which you can also find on that site).

One of the absolute best websites out there for getting native plants. I use it every single time I go to the nursery.

Equally amazing resource:

https://www.calflora.org/

The previous house I had in a new development I had left the native plants in the yard alone. It was a meadow, with a wide variety of plants in it, including lots of wildflowers. It was mowed high twice a year to keep the fire risk down.

It was beautiful. And didn't need any watering.

It was the only lot in the development that didn't landscape with golf course grass.

When it came time to sell the house, it sold almost immediately, and this was during the 2008 housing collapse.

I did love that yard. I've been trying to do that with my current yard, with some success. The biggest problem is the invasive plants keep trying to turn it into a monoscape (himalayan blackberries, scotts broom, nettles). In the warmer season, there's a constant buzz of bees emanating from it.

It's sad that most people are worried about saving invasive honey bee populations while ignoring the many wild bee species that are on the verge of extinction

Blame media campaigns about the issue. I keep bees and most people I speak to about it seem to think it’s a noble defense of our insect population. I get to tell them how they should be worried about native bees and other pollinators including wasps and flies.

I don't think blame is the best approach. The general public/media takes time to catch up with "current" science. First pollinator awareness, then, oh, there is more than just honeybees polinating Almonds, rinse, repeat, then at some point, oh, there should be thousands of species in my back yard.

Regardless, I fear that until we put serious laws into regulating both pesticides and fertilizers (taxonomists anecdotally noticed diverity declines with the advent of fertilizers, think killing water quality, over 50 years ago), we're going to be fighting an uphill, if not impossible battle in this area.

We're on track to lose all our pollinating insects within a century with a steady 2% decline year over year (conservative estimate). It's true that European honeybees can displace native populations when nectar sources are tight so efforts to plant native plants can help both bee populations. I don't think we should vilify the European honey bee, but rather address the root problems affecting both native and non-native pollinators alike: over use of pesticides, lack of nectar sources, new disease vectors, etc

It is not popular, but wasps are actually equally important to pollination as are bees. There are thousands of species of wasps declining at an unprecedented rate. Outside of farmers, us dept of agriculture and universities dedicated to this research, it’s barely even acknowledged because of the bad rep the wasps get.

It’s not common knowledge that they’re invasive.

But I do find it interesting how we pick and choose which invasive species to villainize.

I have no problem villianizing murder hornets.

What about wild ponies?

they don't sting so they're fine. Also in North America horses lived here 10kya before going extinct so at least here they're resuming an ecological role that was once occupied by their ancestors

Also x2, horses originated in North America! They came to eurasia over the bering land bridge!

So the horses that were released (and have thrived!) in north america are originally north american horses. It's part of why they do so well-- they can eat all of the native brush here. Whereas if a cow gets loose in n. america it's gonna poison itself.

https://awionline.org/content/wild-horses-native-north-ameri...

https://returntofreedom.org/new-research-proves-yet-again-th...

True, but the way their populations are managed now isn’t ecologically sustainable.

That is to say, their natural predators are either not present, not present in large enough numbers, or forbidden by law to hunt them.[0]

[0] https://priceonomics.com/when-americans-ate-horse-meat/

10 thousands of years is enough to change the ecosystems. Also, the predators that kept them in check are gone.

The Mustangs are an invasive species in the west and their population growth is devastating the local flora. "60 Minutes" ran an episode about it recently.

But we extincted bison. Don’t we need a grazing species in these areas?

> But we extincted bison.

I believe the word you are looking for is extirpated. They didn't go extinct, they just aren't there anymore.

> Don’t we need a grazing species in these areas?

Suppose that depends on your idea of what those areas should be doing.

You could say the previously bison populated areas have been replaced with their bovine cousins or the alfalfa to feed them.

It's like villianizing sharks, and we know well how important they are

Agreed for villianizing mosquitoes though

The ones that were introduced by humans in massive quantities, we can add cats and dogs to the list of invasive spacies, and human itself

No it isn't. Think of the average driver during rush hour. Now be happy that person gives a fuck about bees at all.

>These human forces are transforming complex ecosystems into something more akin to biological strip malls

>Time and again, the van passed housing developments, national banks, cattle fields, golf courses, strip malls.

>powerful global forces also turn the world's biodiversity into a metaphorical McDonald’s

Sigh... I'm a nerd who's already written about how golf courses can be utilized to help prevent the extinction of the Migratory Monarch Butterfly:

https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/golf-for-non-golfers-g...

This mindless blaming of development, as such, is a common refrain from cliche californian 'environmentalists' many of whom have done so much more harm than good in the last 50 years by blocking urbanization. California has so much sprawl it's absurd. We need to be honest about how blocking urban development, but allowing suburbia to stretch from San Diego to Palm Desert to SLO with everything in between is the source of these issues.

I have advocated for some time that golf courses have the exact potential to be a refuge for native urban pollinators exactly because they are large urban green spaces with extremely low humans/sqft. We need courses to step up and prioritize native vegetation off the fairways and work with local universities to set up apiaries. Many, many golf courses don't use any pesticides. The use of pesticides is just vanity for creating course conditions that are surreal and unnecessary.

The problem is that we're turning everything suburban in California. Repeal Prop 13. Stop the land hoarding along the coast, and start disincentivizing suburbia.

There is no solution to there are too many humans. All the solutions I heard from 'enviornmentalists' here are basically that other people shouldn't exist. We need a way for people to live in tight urban environments, yes, with national banks, cattle fields, golf courses, strip malls, and mcdonalds, but leaving more of the country side to stay wild.

i agree with everything you're saying except "there's too many humans". there's plenty of space for all the people, if we could only live a bit more densely.

Isn't that exactly what the person above said?

"We need a way for people to live in tight urban environments, yes, with national banks, cattle fields, golf courses, strip malls, and mcdonalds, but leaving more of the country side to stay wild. "

Personally I would disagree though. You can have humans and wild nature in coexistence (up to a certain point).

I don't know about the US, but here in germany there is a strong trend to abandon the concept of sterile lawns and have more wild in between. I really like it, even though it is just a start.

The bigger threat to wildlife are monocultures. I rather have more diverse fields with less or no pesticides and less yield, than the ecological deserts of conventional agriculture.

"And honeybees, which easily become feral, may contribute to the decline of their wild compatriots. “There seems to be a lot of evidence that they share their viruses and parasites,” says Ponisio, adding that honeybees also can compete for food with wild bees. "

This is kind of the interesting part to me. Beekeepers seemingly will argue the opposite about this.

They're wrong.

Many beekeepers order their bees online and have them shipped live from bee factory farms. The bees are shipped live to them via the mail, where many get crushed to death and become sick. Factory farms are the biggest customers of antibiotics, because you cannot kill 750 billion animals a year without many becoming sick from being in close proximity. Bees are no different, but they do not receive any antibiotics.

https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/beekeepers...

The results suggest “viruses in managed honeybees are spilling over to wild bumblebee populations and that flowers are an important route,” according to Alison Brody, a professor in the University of Vermont’s department of Biology.

I wish it were possible grow a hive of native bees the way that we grow honeybees. I've put in local pollinating plants, set up bee hotels etc, but this only seem to attract commercial honeybees and not the natives.

There's a non old world honeybee the Maya kept. They still do. Not closely related to old world honeybees. But it produces a fraction of the honey.

https://www.thoughtco.com/ancient-maya-beekeeping-169364

Farmed bees carry diseases due to being factory farmed. They spread diseases to flowers and wild bees get sick and then die. That's why wild bees will continue to perish in areas where beekeepers exist.

> INDIGENOUS PEOPLE were shaping the natural world even before white people arrived in what would become California. But European colonizers brought a new and disruptive chapter to that story...

What is it with statements like this? They seem to imply that there was no war, no slavery, no genocide, etc before the Europeans arrived. The story of humans is one disruption and atrocity after the other. Pre-columbian america is no different than anywhere else in that regard.

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