A new survey says America's honeybee hives just staggered through the second highest death rate on record, with beekeepers losing nearly half of their managed colonies. But using costly measures to create new colonies, beekeepers are somehow keeping afloat. Thursday’s University of Maryland and Auburn University survey says that even though 48% of colonies were lost in the year that ended April 1, the number of United States honeybee colonies remained relatively stable. Honeybees are crucial to the food supply, pollinating more than 100 of the crops we eat, including nuts, vegetables and fruits. Scientists blame parasites, pesticides, starvation and climate change for large die-offs.
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Just would like to note that honeybees are not native to the US, we have tons of native pollinators
Still sucks though
My impression is the problem is primarily pesticide use is too ubiquitous. Help normalize pesticide free environments and you help bees.
In the case of bees, Neonicotinoids are a particular problem.
Edit: Another article
Another data point to fight against the deluge of “but it is not 150% established and shouldn’t we also look at <distraction>” “science” peddled by the pesticide industry:
Cuba has zero problems with its bees. Literally zero. They gave up on pesticides first out of necessity (fall of the USSR), then leaned into it, pesticides are generally outlawed and only see very rare use on state-run rice fields, a tiny fraction of their total agriculture.
The result is a very healthy bee population and flourishing honey exports. All of it passes EU organic certification with flying colours and tropical honey tastes real good so it’s not cheap stuff, either. Expect at least 30 Euro/kg as opposed to domestic rapeseed honey at 10 Euro/kg, or forest honey (
generally the most expensive German stuff) at 16. EDIT: Actually the most expensive I could find was heather honey, 21 Euros. Never had it nor seen it in a supermarket.One concrete thing to do is to work with your governing body to promote diverse crop rotations. Ask them to end subsidies for single-crop farms, especially crops that don’t serve as a food source for bees or have been made toxic by pesticides (frequently found on massive corn farming operations).
We really do need to just straight-up ban pesticides, antibiotics, and synthetic fertilizers in agriculture.
If there was a way for legislate that all farms needed to be mixed use, I’d go for immediately.
Yeah, I’m aware of the Haber-Bosch process.
I’d honestly have to do the math, but I suspect we’d be able to get rid of synthetic fertilizers if we actually wanted to. Afterall, what do you think happens to the nitrogen after we eat it? We pee and poop it out, for the most part. Yes, there are losses to the air when you till the soil, but a proper farm that focuses on soil health has ways to deal with that problem.
Right now we use the system we have because it’s cheap and easy to do so on an individual level. Growers want to simplify their workflow; they don’t want to actually manage the health of the land they work. It’s too much effort.
Plus, there’s a bunch of government policy that encourages bad farming practices and discourages good ones. Corn subsidies, banning the use of treated sewage for fertilizer, blatant blind-eye enforcement of labor laws, price-dropping policy instead of price-stabilizing policy, etc.
It’s not that we would starve, not in a properly structured system, anyway. It’s that food would become more expensive and some of us would transition to careers in agriculture. The pay would become seductive when the farms become desperate for labor. A farm that actually takes care of the land and the animals is absolutely more labor-intensive, and that’s why very few modern farms do it.
Edit: I should also say that the plants and animals we have today are not the same as the ones we had when the Haber process was invented. We wouldn’t be going back to the yields of the early 1900s. Even if we did everything exactly the same as they did back then, we’d still get better returns and have a more robust food delivery system. Hell, they didn’t even have refrigeration back then.
Don’t have kids…
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It’s understandable that that’s a sensitive issue for you, but the advice honestly is pretty accurate
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I personally disagree with the sentiment that going child-free is the solution to ecological catastrophe. Any individual’s decision to have children, or not, hardly compares to the systemic issues within agriculture and natural resource management which are causing it.
Well, the original comment in this thread which upset you came from your own instance. From where I’m sitting, that comment has been pretty much the only not-really-nice interaction you’ve had all day on here. Don’t really see where this strawman is coming from.