As always with these kinds of headlines the answer is no.
Humans live in a symbiotic relationship with bees, we can not exist without each other.
Humans live in a symbiotic relationship with bees, we can not exist without each other.
Edited typo
Don't buy commercial honey. Buy local, small- and medium-batch honey.
If you mean that the larvae combs are removed and replaced by sugar... most probably not. The idea is having as much bees by beehive as you can breed.
If you mean that beekeepers remove "almost all" honey leaving bees to starve, this is an oversimplification. Any professional beekeeper know that will need to leave enough honey for winter. Leaving a minimum of 12-15 Kg of honey is standard and should suffice for the bees. If the beehive looks weak may not be harvested at all. Sugar is provided if needed as winter emergency feeding. The beekeeper will feed the bees in autumn also to assure that the fall born bees are as strong as fatty as possible.
GP almost certainly meant that beekeepers take all the honey then they feed the bees sugar-water. That actually is true of some (many?) beekeepers.
In any case some species are key species and have more impact on ecosystems than other.
Colonies do abscond, absolutely, and there's lots of feral honeybee colonies out there.
The article is making the case that the answer is Yes. It goes over the reasons why the current way of Beekeeping (predominately for harvesting their honey) could be bad for bees and explains methods that the 'natural beekeepers' are using to make their pollination role more sustainable.
From the article:
> Most beekeepers’ colonies are much larger than those which occur in the wild, and rival colonies might be separated by only a few yards, rather than by half a mile. Much of the bees’ honey, which is supposed to get them through the winter, is taken before they have a chance to eat it. A queen bee goes on a spree of mating flights early in her life, and then lays the fertilized eggs until her death. In apiaries, queens often have their wings clipped, to interrupt swarming (a colony’s natural form of reproduction), and are routinely inspected, and replaced by newcomers, sometimes imported from the other side of the world. Propolis—a wonderful, sticky substance that bees make from tree resin and that has antibacterial qualities—is typically scraped out of hives by beekeepers because it is annoying and hard to get off their hands.
> Natural beekeepers leave their bees alone. They seldom treat for disease—allowing the weaker colonies to fail—and they raise the survivors in conditions that are as close as possible to tree cavities. They fill their hives with swarms that come in on the wing, rather than those which come from dealers who trade on the Internet.
Depending on how you view it that bit is actually wrong. You are specifically NOT ALLOWED to ship bees between e.g. Europe and North America. I think you can send sperm and maybe eggs (not sure if that's possible).
Germplasm (which I think is used to artificially inseminate queens) does seem less restricted:
https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/planthealth/import...
This is nonsense. Beekeepers like to do "splits" (simulated swarming) because it increases the number of hives they have (and if they have too many, they can sell them), and mated queens don't and can't fly far unless the colony prepares her for swarming by making her lose weight for a couple of weeks before swarming.
> > and are routinely inspected, and replaced by newcomers, sometimes imported from the other side of the world.
This is true. Well, the queens themselves don't get "inspected" so much as the whole colony, because the beekeeper wants to see the queen laying lots. Re-queening is very much a thing, and quite frequent too.
> > Propolis—a wonderful, sticky substance that bees make from tree resin and that has antibacterial qualities—is typically scraped out of hives by beekeepers because it is annoying and hard to get off their hands.
I never scrape off propolis (which really is wonderful), and all beekeepers really should not scrape it off. But it's generally understood that propolis is very good. Indeed, there are beekeepers who stimulate production of propolis to harvest and sell it (you can definitely find propolis products out there), but only ignorant ones scrape it of because it's annoying.
> > Natural beekeepers leave their bees alone. They seldom treat for disease—allowing the weaker colonies to fail—and they raise the survivors in conditions that are as close as possible to tree cavities. They fill their hives with swarms that come in on the wing, rather than those which come from dealers who trade on the Internet.
True! Except that catching swarms is no guarantee that those are not "from dealers who trade on the Internet" (oh noes, not the Iinnnternet! and dealers!!). I've bought queens "on the Internet", though not from dealers but from beekeepers who do queen rearing. The problem with those queens is that they're often not very good, possibly because the larvae used for the grafts was too old, or because they didn't get enough chances to mate, or because of in-breeding.
50 years from now, people will label the Zeistgeist as a resurgence of old Victorianism, with different (in direction, not in kind) racial and sexual taboos and an extra dollop of hairshirt environmentalism.
on edit: fixed grammar
How do you explain wild feral cattle thriving in the Kimberley, Arnhem Land, etc. then?
https://news.csu.edu.au/feature/are-feral-cattle-the-brumbie...
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/offtrack/the-banteng-...
The way we raise cattle is extremely efficient. Not least in terms of space.
Born and raised on a cattle station with multiple STEM degrees and decades mapping the world (large scale geophysical land and ocean survey) behind me ..
I don't think you appreciate how laughably condescending you come across.
Points being:
* I understand the total number of cattle under direct human management,
* I know that cattle can survive just fine without human management .. even in urban environments (ever seen free range unowned cattle in India?),
* I've already linked to what feral cattle look like and the damage they do.