More honey bees dying, even as antibiotic use halves | Hacker News Reader

More honey bees dying, even as antibiotic use halves

news.uoguelph.ca

229 pointspseudolus159 comments

Saw a bee lecture recently [1].

Honeybees aren’t native to North America [2]. The native pollinators, such as bumblebees, are outcompeted by honeybee hives [3]. Those honeybees then selectively pollinate certain plants, reducing biodiversity further [4].

Honeybees, however, unlike local pollinators, can be industrially distributed to industrial agriculture. So they get a lobby. Meanwhile, well-meaning folks put a honey beehive in their backyard and inadvertently wipe out the local bumblebee and butterfly populations.

[1] https://uwnps.org/event/6-26-25/

[2] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/are-honey-bees-native-north-americ...

[3] https://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/em-9524-impact-bee...

[4] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002...

It's true but honey bees are still extremely economically important. And very useful because their hives are large and portable.

The billionaire Resinick pomegranate/pistachoi/almond oligarchs put quite a bit of effort into native bees which seemed quite successful but they shut it down I think about 5 years ago. I can't find the article now. Gen X+ might remember them as owners of the 'Franklin Mint' hawkers of knickknacks you either are or soon will be throwing into a dumpster.

They are BTW also largest renters of honeybee hives in the US.

Right, it's interesting from a technical perspective, but it's a story about battery-farmed livestock, not about North American ecology. My guess is they'll figure out how to keep growing more bees. The prices of honey bee queens have been pretty stable for the past 15 years.

I think it is not a great analogy. As Jeremy Bentham wrote, “The question is not: can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But can they suffer?”

I have relatives that do or have raised bees (as a hobby). Can bees suffer? I don't know. I kind of think a bee can experience suffering in a small degree. I'm not going to run the experiments on that because I'm not a sociopath. Also arguably the hive is the basic unit of the honeybee organism, not the bee itself.

I do know for certain hogs can suffer. I'm a farm boy from Iowa. I've been around them from a young age and I hate everything about them. I hate the smell, I hate the way their meat tastes to me like they smell, I hate how if you are small enough and don't take care, they are mean enough to knock you down and eat you.

I'm probably one of the few people on HN who have actually experienced in person what a hog confinement facility looks and smells and sounds like. I wouldn't wish it on my worst hog enemy. It is a vision of hell, illegal to film in Iowa, and in no way comparable to how we treat bee hives.

I am for complicated reasons unusually familiar with battery hog farms. I'm not making an ethical comparison; I'm just saying: ecologically speaking, American honey bees are an industrial product, not part of our fauna.

Yeah, that was an odd turn.

Meanwhile: https://www.sciencealert.com/fish-suffer-up-to-22-minutes-of...

> And very useful because their hives are large and portable.

I have no proof of this, this is just my theory, but the "portable" might be the issue. I think industrial beekeepers in the US might be part of the problem. Yes you can technically move the bees, but should you? You're moving around disease, you might be overworking and stressing the bees. Meanwhile you have farmers create massive fields with nothing but corn, grass, wheat, whatever, leaving you with essentially green deserts from the pollinators perspectives.

Again just a theory of mine, but the reliance of "portable" bees is what's causing the problem. Other countries have beehives for rent, but they aren't moved constantly. Often they stay in the same location all year and the bees are allowed to follow their natural cycles.

Trucking around hundreds of hives always seems rather stupid.

If you pay close attention in Seattle, you'll find that bumblebees are particularly fond of making nests in the hollows of the loose boulder retaining walls that are still in fashion in the region. It's hard to catch them because they have much smaller numbers per nest and thus less traffic per minute, but they do.

I let the wildflowers grow in my lawn, and in the summer there's a constant hum from the bees. I enjoy the sound and their industriousness.

My only problem is the invasive plants which are determined to overwhelm everything.

Out of left field, but do you have any sources on developing small riparian environments to promote dragonfly populations?

I recently learned that a popular anti-mosquito trick by painters in my area is to put a fake dragonfly on their cap. Which led me to wonder where the actual buggers have gone.

They're all in my yard, and I honestly don't know why. I'm almost half a mile from the nearest wetland. I think it's tall weeds. They seem to be like cats and want to perch on high spots.

> They seem to be like cats and want to perch on high spots

I love this.

Unfortunately, so do ticks... (grass blades)

I don’t believe we have ticks in the same way that the east coast has lime disease-carrying ticks though?

So what you're saying is that honeybees just have good bee-R?

I mean, somewhat true, but probably a touch oversold? I don't think people putting in a single beehive are doing much to impact a neighborhood. Probably less than having a house cat. Which, is not nothing, but is not ecosystem changing, either.

I'm reminded of how much we were taught that monocrops were bad things in grade school. And yet, you'd be hard pressed to name a popular food that isn't grown in giant monocrop fields.

The damage is largely already done because the non-native bees are now a feral invasive species that have out competed natives, and the invasive honey bees haven't co-evolved to pollinate native plantlife

My understanding is that there are in fact very few feral honey bee colonies in the US ("if you see a honey bee in your yard, chances are someone owns it") and at some points over the last 20 years feral honey bee colonies had essentially been eradicated by the Varroa mite.

I get swarms trying to establish new colonies every summer, and I'm in a major city where most people don't have any yard space.

> probably a touch oversold? I don't think people putting in a single beehive are doing much to impact a neighborhood

Probably not, especially if they’re in an urban environment. The bees being shipped to farms, on the other hand, are ecologically destructive (as well as economically invaluable).

My takeaway is not that honeybees are evil. It’s that we need more pollinators in more stripes, and that the agricultural industry has successfully confused pollinators in general with honeybees in particular.

Industrial farming scales. And that scales better (until it breaks) with fewer variables. Aka mono crops.

Similar to many, many other things.

Mason Bees are hilarious bees native to North America that don't fly very well, so they just kinda dive-bomb flowers to get pollen. This is important because that heavy slam (well, heavy for a flower) is enough to distribute pollen into the air. These bees are fat, fuzzy, and winter over by crawling into holes and sealing themselves inside with some mud-spit.

It's VERY easy to create homes for these guys - if you've ever seen someone with a large log that has lots of little holes drilled in it, they were likely prepping a Mason Bee habitat. Ideally, they burrow into hollow, dry grass stems that broke off at some point in the fall.

I try to tell people about this bee because it's so easy to make homes for them. Just make sure to move the home every year, or it becomes too easy for predators to find them.

edit: also worth mentioning this bee is so docile, it usually only stings when it's squeezed or wet, and its sting is very light, and the hook is unbarbed. Better than honey bees in so many ways.

During the season we had a bunch of mason bee nests inside the hollow metal of our porch furniture. Supposedly, mason bees can sting, but the sting is barely perceptible.

I've got a ton of mason bee tubes. They are awesome.

To use a silicon valley analogy, nobody has figured out how to scale out mason bees. Not to the > 200sq miles of pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds owned by the Resnicks. The Resnicks funded some in-house research and apparently considred it a failure.

It's probably possible. Might not even be hard once you know the trick, but it's certainly not a slam-dunk.

Supposedly, it only takes 250 mason bees to do the same pollination as 10,000 honeybees. I think there are people working on scaling this. The honey business is secondary to the pollination money, so having pollination done without having to truck around large hives, could be a big deal.

You have now convinced me to be the biggest supporter of mason bees now, thank you.

Welcome to the rabbi-- er, bee hole

I’m urging for someone to write «welcome to the rab-bee hole», and now someone did!

I wonder what it would be like to have a giant Mason Bee hotel in a riparian buffer strip alongside a plot. One problem would be as you point out that predators could find them easily. Another might be that pollinating one crop doesn't do enough for a mason bee all season long.

It looks like some folks use them for berries though: https://backyardbeekeeping.iamcountryside.com/plants-pollina...

We have some of those in our wild crazy yard. I gotta build me some homes for them because you're right they are so cute.

I thought you meant "Giant mason bee" which is not native in north america, is an endangered species and whose jaws might not appeal to the uninitiated.

Wow, that is one large bee.

Looking into these guys, I find it pretty funny that one of the only "sightings" of this bug were a couple of specimens for sale on ebay.

Not to be confused with mining or carpenter bees that also like logs. My mom's yard has some carpenter bees that live in the ground. They are as big as bumble bees but more black and a male drone hovers around in a certain area above the females and will dive bomb other male carpenter bees. The male bees will follow you around if you go into their area but they never stung anyone.

I have a line of big orange flowers lining the border of my front lawn. Sometimes ill just sit in the mulch and watch a dozen kinds of bees I’ve never seen before happily moving amongst them. Green bees and all sorts. Never a lot of any species just a wild variety

Here is a video tutorial on hosting Mason Bees - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQhg82f-OPI

You can start out simple, but you might need to be more involved if you want to prevent the spread of parasites since they are more easily spread when all the mason bee larvae are in one place.

Just to go off of this, carpenter bees are closely related to mason bees and are another kind of solitary (non-hive bee). I think carpenter bees are the greatest and I can't stop thinking about carpenter bees. They are a bee, which is cool, but also a lone wolf, also cool. In my wooden house I have several carpenter bee nests. My neighbor Mr. Grubb hates all my carpenter bees because he says all the holes they are making in his walls will make his house collapse, but he doesn't see it, he doesn't see carpenter bee magic. 10/10 please consider adopting some carpenter bees!!

I'm not familiar with American carpenter bees, but I have made it my mission to feed the European ones. They are extremely fond of clary sage and from what I have read online [0] this is true for all Xylocopa on the American continent too, so please consider planting some.

[0] https://www.fountainofplants.com/post/clary-sage-salvia-scla...

Edit: yet another typo I give up!!

This is so interesting. A while back I took an online course about native bee species in Brazil. We have more than 700 different species of stingless bees.

There's a few interesting common species whose response to being threatened are worth mentioning. The jataí (small, wasp-like bees) run away to hide when threatened; the arapuás (small, completely black bees) try to bite you. The mandaçaias have a similar behavior to the jataís.

And one thing I learned as well is that we have a native bee species called "lemon bee", which they are predatory bees that invade hives and release a substance that smells like lemon (hence the name), which intoxicates bees in their hive. The attacked bees either leave their home or die, to which the lemon bees just invade their colonies and steal all the food. They literally make a gas chamber inside the hive.

I am fascinated by the amount of bee diversity we have in Brazil. If anyone's interested to check them out, search for "melipona".

I love native bees, I've been trying to find ways to incorporate native bee facts into my tech talks. The "Insect Crisis" book was a nice overview of issues like overuse of honeybees, plus others. Highly recommend planting native pollinator-friendly plants in garden if you want to meet adorable, hilarious, beautiful native bees!

My current fav is the Fine Striped Sweat Bee, where the females are 100% turquoise. Dazzling! https://bsky.app/profile/pamelafox.bsky.social/post/3lv3eycl...

To me, one of the most fascinating facts about pollinators in general is their interconnectedness, which spirals off into a myriad of everyday touch points for most people.

One fact a friend shared recently was that magnolia trees pre-date many modern pollinators.

>> At the time of their evolution, many common pollinators we think of today, such as bees, butterflies, and moths had not evolved yet. As a result, magnolias developed flowers for pollination by beetles and flies, which were the primary insect pollinators 100 million years ago. https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/garden-scoop/2018-05-05...

Yes thank you, we're supporting the wrong bees!

> we're supporting the wrong bees

Our farms don’t work with bumblebees. Honeybees are fine. The problem is thinking we only need honeybees. We need more bees of all kinds. And in some cases, yes, that may mean fewer honeybees.

the non-native honeybees used in commercial farming are responsible for the diminishing numbers of native honeybees that co-evolved to pollinate native plant life

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81967-1

we've been screwing up the global ecosystem for hundreds of years at this point with farming techniques spread by european colonization

"The native pollinators, such as bumblebees, are outcompeted by honeybee hives"

... in urban environments, and it' still debatable. Your #2 source provides additional details.

There are a lot of other dubious claims here that the sources seemed to contradict each other.

Something you didn't bring up is that people raising honeybee can benefit other pollinators due to changes in human behavior such as planting beneficial plants and refraining from pesticide use.

People can plant beneficial plants without introducing invasive competitors.

They can, but they don't. You missed the point. Awareness through exposure to beekeeping can change human behavior in a beneficial way. If you read some of the previously linked articles, you will see that it is still debateable if the competitors are actually causing any real problems for native bees. If the problems are debatable and on a low scale, then it's possible the benefits are a net positive.

> can, but they don't

Do we have evidence backyard beekeeping promotes these behaviours better than directly messaging folks to plant pollinator-friendly gardens? (Genuine question.)

I don't know of any studies looking at this specifically, but there are numerous groups and programs that use honeybees as an outreach tool for environmental education. There are studies about the effectiveness of experiential learning vs classroom only learning. One indicator that this is working is the fact that most people in general think about honeybees when you say the bees or pollinators are dying. The steps of reducing pesticide use and planting pollinator friendly yards is universally beneficial.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/how-bee-...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8569223/

> in urban environments, and it' still debatable

In all environments.

The source argues this competition is fine in urban environments because we’ve already displaced the native pollinators there.

Please read your #2 source. That one says competition is fine in rural areas because carrying capacity is still sufficient. This might be different than your #3 source, hence the comment about contradictory sources.

> read your #2 source. That one says competition is fine in rural areas because carrying capacity is still sufficient

Do you mean No. 3, the Oregon State University article?

No. 2, the USGS article, explicitly says "honey bees are also significant competitors of native bees and should not be introduced in conservation areas, parks, or areas where you want to foster the conservation of native plants and native bees."

(As for the Oregan State University article, the word rural never appears. It's focussed on urban areas, where honeybees have a smaller foraging radius and native bees are largely extinct. The carrying capacity argument only applies "during periods of abundant pollen and nectar.")

Yes,my prior comment reversed numbers 2 and 3.

"Only half of the studies pointed to a negative impact of competition, and most of the negative impacts were studies where wild bees changed their visitation rate on certain flowers. It has yet to be demonstrated how competition may result in a long-term change in the composition of bee species in an environment."

You wouldn't find the term rural because they use the term wildlands.

The studies used in the Oregon article are not all urban focused and included studies investigating increased competition in varying habitat, finding "As the California study demonstrated, increased competition may cause bee species to switch their foraging patterns, resulting in little impact on their overall reproductive success."

And yes, any conservation area will not promote the inclusion of non-native species regardless of their impact. Just becuase they are competitors doesn't show that they have negative impacts.

> wouldn’t find the term rural because they use the term wildlands

These are different environments. National parks are wildlands. Farms are rural. A lot more of America is rural than wildland.

"A lot more of America is rural than wildland."

Rural is a larger identifier which encompasses wildlands. It also depends on what you classify as wildland. According to the dictionary it's uncultivated land. If we were to measure uncultivated and undeveloped rural land, how would that compare to the cultivated and developed rural land? If 17% of US land is cultivated and less than 10% is urban, do you really think that the majority of the US or even the majority of the rural area are not wildlands? Either way, it makes no difference to the argument. Some of the sources in your links even look at various crop lands. It just seems at this point you're grasping at irrelevant and unsupported straws.

Convincing hipsters to switch their urban hives to more obscure bees actually seems achievable.

If you were ever wondering why (us) vegans don't eat honey: this is one of many reasons.

Modern beekeeping practices are a kind of factory-farming. Tim Rowe developed a method of beekeeping that takes advantage of evolution to improve the vitality of bees. It is described succinctly in his book, The Rose Hive Method. [1]

I, unfortunately, developed a severe bee-sting allergy, and can no longer put these ideas into practice. I anticipate that commercial beekeeping cannot sustain its current practices.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18279124-the-rose-hive-m...

a deck for those beek's that are interested https://projectloveforbees.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/...

Looking through this, beekeeping is a strange and interesting world that I know so little about. Cool!

I'm from shitty part of Europe and I never saw a beehive that looked different than those in the presentation. I looked up 'American beehive' and they look roughly the same. So isn't this already the used standard?

The Langstroth hive employs frame boxes of differing sizes. It makes a distinction between brood boxes and honey supers. This is a bit easier on the beekeeper. They can put a metal grate in the hive, and trap the queen in the brood chamber. Then, any frames built above the brood chamber are guaranteed to have only honey.

In the wild, bees build their nest somewhat like an onion, with the brood in the center, and the honey accessible on the outside rings. The Rose hive method allows the queen to lay the brood in a more natural way. The slide deck is a good summary but there is more in the book.

You would probably enjoy reading the history of the Langstroth hive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langstroth_hive#Hive_body_and_...

As always: if those ideas are so good, why aren't they used?

If existing practices are somehow radically worse, I would expect the first entity to adopt better practices to obtain a significant advantage - and the competition to copy them eventually.

I'm incredibly skeptical of any "everyone is doing X completely wrong and you should listen to ME and BUY MY BOOK instead".

I have no idea how you could actually be confused about this.

- I can sell 100 units of product for $2. I feel good I am ethical and responsible.

- I can sell 300 units of product for $1. Everyone buys from me and I make more money, but I poison the land.

Capitalism does not account for externalities. Because businesses never have to pay the cost of poisoning water supplies or destroying ecosystems until he societal bell tolls - and because "if I don't, they will and I will go out of business" - unsustainable and unethical practices are the norm in late stage capitalism.

I mean, for real? Are you confused why mine operators encouraged taking more material at the expensive of structural integrity? Are you confused why gas barons don't like paying the cost to cap NG wells? Are you confused why big agri uses petrochemical fertilizers to grow subsidized ethanol and HFCS?

Where's the externality here?

Isn't "vitality of bees" that this method claims to improve actually supposed to be desirable to beekeepers themselves?

Modern, mass-scale beekeeping isn't about the vitality of bees, it's about getting the most honey out now.

The externalities are the introduction of non-native species en-masse to ecosystems that dominate the cultural niche and affect the entire balance of things.

It's the introduction of diseases and pests, which then prompted the use of antibiotics and pesticides. Then those waned in efficiency, creating even stronger pests and diseases. And that further amplifies the destruction to local ecosystem balance, where the native species lack even a defense for the base variants.

Beekeepers can't use native species, most of them don't make the economically viable hives. Those that minimize the damage they do or use sustainable practices will have reduced output for their forethought. This reduced output means higher prices, which means less customers. And their bees are still getting the diseases!

If they can survive or convince regulators, the long-run will benefit them. But, shocking no one, the bad actors now have all the money from the short-term gains and can now lobby governments or buy the small operations.

Capitalism will happily bake in externalities if anyone makes them.

‘Late stage capitalism’ right now is way less ugly than ‘any stage USSR’, for any sane comparison.

Regulations are not capitalist, definitionally free markets do not account for externalities. Only when an externality has such an effect that it affects market behavior, but then it stops being an externality. Again, definitionaly.

Full capitalism and full communism are not the only options. Not sure why you even brought that up, as I never claimed communism is better? I said capitalism is flawed.

lol. I think you’re thinking Anarchism, not Capitalism.

Capitalism is ‘capital makes the rules’, not ‘there are no rules’.

The problem is you are talking about orthogonal concepts, ie. economic policy and social policy. See the Political Compass: https://www.politicalcompass.org/

Not really, no, since all these mentioned political philosophies have explicit market elements.

Or do you think it’s possible to have a socialist or communist gov’t AND capitalism or free market at the same time?

Because those quite literally are incompatible as part of the definition.

Same as a heavily regulated economy or state ownership of production in Anarchism.

> unsustainable and unethical practices are the norm in late stage capitalism. thats just people. the economic system is about money, "ethics" are a social thing. you can have a utopia with or without capitalism.

Well you need some kind of incentive to not put "ethical" business out of business due to a race to the bottom.

yeah, essentially death or chastisement, capital punishment or arrest. its all weve ever had, and ever will have.

After one season of bee keeping I concluded the same thing. Its horrifying how poorly bees are treated in this industry to control parasites (forced exposure to acidic gas) I sold my hives and will probably never buy honey again, much in the same way I avoid factory farmed meat.

This article seems like fantasy fiction: 'We thought antibiotics were to blame, but actually, it's NO2.' (next 5G?) while it's widely recognized for the last ten years that the primary culprit is neonicotinoids: very potent and pervasive chemicals that accumulate in the biotope, killing all insects indiscriminately, contrary to the misleading claims made by the agro-industry.

Varroa mites are widely considered a greater cause of bee population decline than neonicotinoids.

And neonicotinoids are directly thought to increase susceptibility to Varroa mites

well whos giving them the neonicotinoids? just get them to stop

So why the distraction?

> it's widely recognized for the last ten years that the primary culprit is neonicotinoids

What would be your best source to back that ?

(I'm not trolling - we've been having a vivid debates about that exact topic for the past few weeks in France, and one common counter-point is that the decrease in bee population is multifactorial, as opposed to having any "primary" culprit. So any source welcome :) )

Neonicotinoids kill all insects. They are extremely good at this. Noone contests this. CCD ("Colony Collapse Disorder") started as neonicotinoids usage raised, and so did the "windshield phenomemom" that all rural residents above 50 can tell you about.

If there were no parasite, no pathogen, and no predator, then bees would not be as much affected by pesticides for sure. But parasites and pathogens existed before, while habitat loss and monoculture farming don't explain what happens in relatively preserved areas.

All pesticides have an impact on insect populations obviously. I agree one should not focus on only one class of them, and work on an actual reduction of their usage and compensate farmers for profitability loss due to changes in pest management strategies.

You don't need to comment this. I know It won't be done and we're all screwed.

I wish the industry and governments spent an equal amount on battling the decline of wild bees. When they say "save the bees", it's not honeybees they mean. Honeybees are cattle.

I'm not saying anyone is doing 'enough' but neonicotinoid bans in EU are perhaps the most effective and 'costly' thing done so far. In Not that costs borne by poisoners

The EU neonicotinoid ban seems potentially very useful but do we have data that it actually was effective?

I mean, even if it wasn't effective for the bees - it certainly helped human health with regards to breast cancer and neurological damage in children [0]. If you scroll to the bottom of the article, you'll find links to the studies that are source to this claim.

[0] https://www.pan-europe.info/blog/acetamiprid-brain-toxic-neo...

Edit: typo

Neonicotinoid are just analogs of nicotine but with less affinity for mammals aka less toxic(higher LDL). If you’re worried about the effects of nicotine(eg: cancer,ADHD in kids), don’t eat anything from the nightshade family like eggplants, potatoes, peppers or tomatoes. There’s more nicotine in your mashed potatoes than neonicotinoid residue on your vegetables.

I couldn't find any source to confirm that acetamiprid is naturally in nightshade. If you know of any for this specific compound, would you please link them?

Beside the point you were making, but is there an established link between nicotine consumption and cancer, without smoking? What do you mean by "effects of nicotine - ADHD in kids"?

he means vaping makes kids less compliant and listen less to what hes saying

I may miss something but the linked studies say that neonicotinoids are bad (which I 100% believe), but don't actually say anything about the effectiveness of the bans.

E.g. it is possible EU agriculture replaced these pesticides with different ones which are just as bad, or with larger amounts of different ones.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have banned these substances, I'd just like to know if we have data showing this was actually useful.

North American native bees tend not to form giant eusocial colonies and are less vulnerable to pathogens; their biggest threat (after habitat loss, of course) may in fact be honey bees.

Yeah, it really gets me irritated when people seem to think that honey bee colonies are something to be celebrated from an ecological perspective.

This seems like it would be the obvious outcome? If bee keepers have been keeping bees healthy by giving them antibiotics, then stopping the antibiotics would lead to them being less healthy? Especially since the previous antibiotic use would have killed off the healthy bacteria.

Yes, of course. The pretence of ignorance in the article is hilarious.

I read something recently that colony collapse disorder was due to viruses transmitted by varroa mites and/or pesticides

https://www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news/research-news/2025...

Yes, and the mites (Varroa Destructor) found in the collapsed colonies were resistant to miticides.

While widespread antibiotic use is bad for bees it's nothing compared to what the viruses transmitted by the mites do to them.

Agreed. I mentioned this as a reason why antibiotics are not a solution. Antibiotics do not treat viruses.

Seems like they may not have realized that the fact that antibiotic use was associated with hive death could be because antibiotics are likely given primarily to unhealthy hives.

I know I’m not the only one alarmed by the fact that we used to have to clean bug splats off our windshields weekly during the summer and now don’t. The downstream and parallel effects must be massive.

Aren’t modern windshield coatings awesome?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon

The reduction in windshield bug splats has more to do with the decline in insect populations.

EDIT: I originally said 75% decline over 30 years. Those are the results for studies in parts of Germany. We don't have solid data on global loss in insect populations.

There's a degree to which aerodynamics play a role in the number of splats but the numbers are also definitely way down.

We switched from a sedan with a very sloped windshield, to an SUV with a suprisingly upright windshield (one of the cartoonishly offroad mall crawlers). I've never had to scrape bugs off my windshield in my life before we bought the SUV but we go through a lot more windshield wiper fluid now than we did a couple months ago despite keeping the same driving patterns.

Some of that design is about keeping pedestrians from going head-first through your windshield if you hit them. With the SUV the top of the hood is above the center of mass of the hypothetical pedestrian, whereas the sedan is below, and so they have to encourage the flying human to slide over the roof instead of go teeth first into your back seat.

That it helps with bugs is more of a happy coincidence.

The worse case with the sedan, of going teeth first through the windshield and into the back seat, sounds a lot better than the SUV alternative for pedestrians!

I know you're not making a comment either way regarding pedestrian safety with sedans/SUVs in your post, but there's something that caught my attention about the graphic description for the sedan, with just a hint hanging there that the SUV would be worse.

Full disclosure: I'm biased against SUVs. Something about the sheer size seems wasteful. They also make more sense to be common in some places than others, and I haven't lived anywhere recently that I think they make sense.

People do not go "teeth first through the windshield into the back seat" when hit by a sedan. They go up the hood and up the windshield.

Euro-NCAP crash standards are specifically designed to "help" this by means of hoods which crumple and/or shift position in such a case.

That is infinitely preferable to hitting the flat face of most American and Japanese SUVs and specially pickup trucks, which are designd primarily to look "aggressive" and "angry" because that's what pickup truck buyers want.

There are old vehicle designs were the grill causes the pedestrian to rotate 90° into the windshield. Your assertion of how collisions work is predicated on changes to hood and front design that already account for pedestrian collision physics. But you’re implying this has always been the case and it has not.

This is, for instance, a big part of why the Mini Cooper is no longer mini. They had to lift the hood profile to reduce angular momentum.

Also why the forward raked grill designs of the seventies are gone never to return. Those suck pedestrians under the car, which is almost always fatal.

Anecdotally I also feel like I’ve notice a decline in windshield splat. But wouldn’t we notice severe bird population declines as well?

But we do notice severe bird population decline:

https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/agricultural-intensification-dr...

https://trends.ebird.org/ that's exactly what we do (and have been since we started poisoning with pesticides etc)

It’s also possible some insects have learned to avoid certain corridors at certain altitude to avoid getting splattered.

Animals do adapt behavior to avoid new threats. Now, admittedly it’s just conjecture but I would not rule it out nor am I saying it would account for all windshield spat decline.

I still get a large amount of bugs on the front of my car, makes me wish I had applied PPF.

I saw lightning bugs and dragon flies for the first time in a long time this year. Our county banned pesticides for residential and recreation areas.

I left a lot of the leaves on my lawn this year and only thinned out the spots where they were thick enough to kill the grass.

Huge increase in lightning bugs this summer.

I reseeded my lawn with clover and saw a huge increase in all kinds of lightening bugs, bees, etc. Alos rabbits which surprised me (I'm in the middle of a dense urban area... there is a park nearby, though)

Nice! I forgot to mention that I also added microclover the the mix last fall. The bees love the little clover flowers.

lawn grass massively harms the environment, as do topiaries

This is actually due to evolution. Insect populations have evolved generation by generation such that the ones who avoid flying over roadways survive more often, and in time we end up with less bugs getting killed. Because the lifecycle of insects is very short, this can happen easily over the course of decades, enough to witness in one human lifetime.

Seems hard to believe but I want to believe

While this claim is plausible, it’s (admittedly pleasing) conjecture until you provide evidence.

I saw it myself, we did high speed off-roading and smashed a ton of bugs. But on the highway? Little to no bugs.

That doesn't prove anything. Disturbing burrowing bugs or bugs in grass and bushes with rumbling and lights is easily enough to account for a vast difference alone...Then consider the environment was more wild with more habitat space for bugs compared to a road...

I think it casts a reasonable doubt on the simple theory that wide spread use of pesticide somehow killed off enough bugs that we no longer have them hitting our windshields. If bug populations were dwindling you wouldn’t encounter them in the wild this way.

It’s more likely I think that most successful reproduction for the past century has increasingly been done by bugs who avoid flying over roads. There could be many reasons why they do this. Perhaps some sense the vast asphalt plain and prefer to stay in greener areas. Temperatures above roads in full sun are much hotter than above grass. Turbulence encountered by cars may encourage some bugs to seek calmer airspaces.

It’s not so simple as “pesticides”.

I really don't think it does. Especially since it'd be an entirely different set of bugs. You'd be hitting crickets and other bugs you wouldn't find on a road.

Bugs… that prefer to… fly above roads!?

You really dont understand bugs and their behavior at all do you? Bugs that live in fields dont live by the roadside.

So just to be clear: your theory (which has absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support it, and is entirely your personal anecdotes of which there's no causal relationship established whatsoever) refutes both broad evidence of how much damage pesticides do to outside of the target species (and to humans, and birds) but also refutes extensive scientific evidence that we are living through a time of massive ecological die-offs of species?

Let me guess, you live in rural America?

I would bet they don't live rurally or havent been alive very long. Anyone rural alive over the last 30 years shouldve noticed a decline everywhere around them....would also expect them to notice bugs are different by the road to in the fields to by the ponds, and that different times of year, weather etc, changes which bugs are out and how many are out...its harder to notice these things in suburbs or cities.

That's a neat possibility. Do you have any sources to share that go into more detail?

I'd be willing to bet this has more to do with more aerodynamic designs of cars than less bugs in general.

I believe the same decrease is visible when driving older (less aerodynamic) cars, but I don’t have any studies on hand

...or just ask a bus driver, van driver, euro truck driver, etc.

They've all seen the decline too.

Yep, that observation is discussed frequently in the book "Insect Crisis". Highly recommend!

This one is weird to me because lots of people claim that they don't get as many windshield bug splats as they used to, and I haven't noticed a difference. I kind of wonder if there's some form of mass misremembering a la the "mandela effect where people have splatted (heh) one or two memorable instances of a bug-covered windshield across their entire childhood's memory range.

Yes, I know there are some "studies" about this, but I find their sampling size and methods basically inconsequential.

Bacterial issues aren't that much of a concern for beekeepers. It can be used to treat European Foulbrood, but the only other issue is American Fouldbrood and that isn't treatable.

There are some interesting things being done in the biome research. Even stuff like bacteria related to mosquito dunks.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01476...

From "Scientists identify culprit behind biggest-ever U.S. honey bee die-off" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44434497 :

> "Viruses and vectors tied to honey bee colony losses" (2025) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.28.656706v1....

ScholarlyArticle: "Impacts of antibiotic use, air pollution and climate on managed honeybees in Canada" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-025-01603-y :

> Abstract: [...] Notably, this decrease was inversely associated with rising overwintering mortality rates, suggesting that withdrawal of antibiotics in the absence of effective alternatives may negatively impact colony health. Furthermore, multivariate analysis accounting for environmental confounders (based on 119,244 data points collected from 234 unique locations across Canada) identified nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a common air pollutant from diesel exhaust, as a strong predictor of mortality. This finding warrants urgent attention given that NO2 can degrade floral odours, rendering them undetectable to honeybees during foraging flights.

I always thought it was fascinating that Africanized honey bees ("killer bees") are the dominant honey bee in many regions of Central and South America for honey production.

They are in Texas and some other southern states too, and spreading. As I understand it they are prolific honey producers but extremely aggressive at protecting their hives

what is it with racist stereotypes and the south

Yeah, cuz it's a pesticide problem not an antibiotic problem...

Perhaps we should instead avoid antibeeotics?

Buy and support organic! Not sure if they don’t use pesticide but just naturally grown stuff would be nice.

Pesticides

A problem that’s been plaguing every nation in the world and been studied by the world’s top scientists for 20+ years now.

Nope, all a waste of time. We should’ve just asked “more_corn”.

Not even mentioned in the article, which is strange because they're definitely a culprit. Which by the way, the ever expanding culture war is starting to seep into that space. There are neonicotinoids banned in Ontario, Québec but not Alberta (of course) and people getting around them by shipping inter provincially because the bans are "woke bullshit".

I think at this point we should admit that the culture war bullshit is the thing that most of the population is responding to, unfortunately. So now we have to wonder…

Are pesticides turning the bees depressed and non-virile? Woke pesticides are stealing your manliness?

A lot of Research into colony collapse is funded by agrotech.

> There are neonicotinoids banned in Ontario, Québec but not Alberta (of course)

You say that like its purely due to AB gov's conservative bullshit. That may play a part, but it probably also has to do with how important canola is to ab economy (obviously still not a valid excuse, but maybe a better explanation)

> You say that like its purely due to AB gov's conservative bullshit.

What suggests "conservative government bullshit"? The NDP held power in Alberta when these regulations were coming into force elsewhere. That is about as far away from conservatism as it gets in Canada.

"Of course" no doubt refers to the fact that Health Canada found the culprit to be dust-off from pneumatic planters. Whereas the crops in Alberta are almost exclusively seeded with drills, which are quite different in design to a planter and don't exhibit the same dusting characteristics. In other words, they never had the same problem Ontario and Quebec had. — Not to mention that Health Canada had already updated regulations to require technical changes to planters to minimize/eliminate dust-off, so for what little planter use might be found in Alberta, Health Canada was already on top of it, leaving little reason for the province to step in.

Calling it a ban in Ontario and Quebec is what is misleading. Farmers had to become licensed to use them, but they were never banned. It was mostly theatre.

> because the bans are "woke bullshit".

I assume you have a source to demonstrate that people actually use and express this reasoning?

Either my cmd+f is broken, or the study linked doesn't even mention that word.

Radiofrequency radiation

Am I the only one who was surprised and kind of mystified by this sentence?

"You’d assume the lessening of antibiotics might be associated with improved health outcomes, especially since antibiotics are so overused."

It sounds more like something coming from Robert Kennedy, or one of those cranks who refuse to take antibiotics to treat strep throat, than from a mainstream researcher. Like, OF COURSE populations treated with antibiotics are going to do better in the period of a study like this. Under what plausible theory could you expect otherwise?

That's not to say that antiobiotics are an unmitigated good! I get that they have weird and complex downstream ramifications. It's just that those aren't the ramifications you'd expect to be able to measure from a study like this.

Ugh no. There is a difference between treating a diagnosed condition with antibiotics and just regularly giving all livestock consistent doses as a preventative.

Drugs aren't just "take it and everything will be improved regardless of the situation". Better to think of them as carefully used poison, good but only when used wisely.

The 1950s vibe of sterilizing everything needs to be done.

Livestock aren't given low level antibiotics as a prophylactic. They're given as an alternative to growth hormones. Antibiotic consumption gives you bigger cows.

That's the ugliest part of this whole thing. We aren't trying to keep animals safe, we are trying to keep the cost of hamburgers down even if it means people dying of incurable infections in hospitals.

>Livestock aren't given low level antibiotics as a prophylactic.

Yes they are. Sub-theraputic doses are used to increase weight gain, higher doses are also used as a prophylactic.

its the con of the working class. even in the richest country on the planet, most people have to consume sub-par-everything. from the food to the housing to the consumables, its all shit quality, on the cheap, on the dirty.

This is the success of the species, people highlight problems are not the ability to eat enough or even the choice of what's available to eat, but the environmental impact of food production. Truly a "first world problem".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com