Losing bees would suck so bad. Lots of plants co evolved, requiring pollinators. Orchids are the weirdest, with special moths unique to them [1]. But so much stuff depends on bees. A whole bunch of kinds of fruit trees, different kinds of beans, even celery.
Hand pollination is possible, of course, but that seems like such a pita. Perhaps it's possible to automate.
We have a perfectly good, self optimizing system that constantly moves to optimality. If we could just lighten up a little, not push quite so hard, or even just do localized trials of intensive use pesticides and fertilizers, we could find a balance of what the system can support.
Either go slow and look for local optimizations that are then distributed widely, or engineer immunity, or both.
Ugh. I guess if it was easy, it wouldn't be a problem.
You must be kidding. I can't think of many things that would less possible to do by hand.
We have 10 acres which is mostly in manuka (i.e. manuka honey), spaced a metre apart from each other. When I stand next to any one of those trees and watch the bees flitting hither and thither doing their thing, I am just amazed by nature.
I can't believe the idea that humanity depend on bees.
Sure, no more bees would be a very, very bad news. But humans are a pretty hardy specie. First, we are omnivores. Second, we have conquered the whole planet and live in huge numbers. And third, we are really smart.
Besides cosmic scale events, I don't think of many scenarios that could damage humanity beyond recovery.
As far as i know, no, humanity won't disappear when bees would do (even though I have seen people claiming it). Sure, some plants might solely depend on bees for pollination, but there are also plants which don't and there are also other pollinators. See https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/30495/do-bees-p... for example:
The authors of the FAO analysis concluded that the proportion of global food production
attributable to animal pollination ranges from 5% in industrialized nations to 8% in the developing world.
That being said: it is pretty hard to predict waht would happen suppose there were no bees at all. I doubt it would be nice though.
Pesticides are not enough to explain all the harm to bees. Fungus and parasites can destroy colonies too. We have to consider how to live without as many bees as we have now, because we don't know how to save all the bees.
The right thing to do is it wait until all the conclusive evidence is in. It is anti-science to not think about the corporate bottom line.
It _may_ not be caused by the pesticide, changing or stopping the use of the pesticide could not be necessary and then we would have accidentally saved the world while having less profit.
Naturally Harvested vanilla currently can go for $600 dollars a pop. Although the plant was originally from Mexico, 80% of the worlds' natural vanilla is now harvested in Madagascar.
It is highly unlikely any of you have tasted "all natural" vanilla as 99% of food products in the super market utilize an artificial version of the same critical flavor compound found in the plant: vanillin.
Vanilla plantations do not have the capacity to satisfy the worlds' demand with or without insect pollination.
I can't say as I've paid much attention and I'm sure the majority of ice cream is made from artificial vanilla, but:
Vanilla beans appear to be about $6-7 each retail and $4-5 wholesale according to these random websites, despite there apparently being a bean shortage currently:
I also sincerely doubt that it's "highly unlikely" that most people have tasted real vanilla in their lifetimes. We are in total agreement here because I never said "lifetime" I meant highly unlikely that people have tasted real vanilla in the vanilla product that they buy from the super market. I thought the 99% statistic made that clear... Apologies for not being more detailed, but please don't put words in my mouth, I never said "lifetime."
Also thanks for specifying the price of individual beans. If you calculate the price per pound you will see that it fluctuates,.. last I heard they were $600 per pound. Just to let you know, when people go shopping for vanilla beans, most people don't buy one bean at a time, they buy it by weight because each bean can have a different weight, FYI.
It's not even an edge case. Almost all of the worlds' vanilla flavor is synthesized artificially.
The best example of hand pollination is China where the entire bee population is basically decimated. Almost all of Chinas' farms ALREADY use hand pollination.
They were actually better at it than the bees from memory.
Wage costs I'm sure would be an issue. Sounds like a crazy idea, but can't we just stop using pesticides that have provably been shown to harm a critical part of our food chain? I don't particularly care if Bayer loses profit, or if I have to pay a more realistic price for fruit and veg.
Another weird and fascinating co-evolution of plants ant their pollinators is the genus Ficus (e.g. edible fig plants). The tiny wasps that pollinate the fruit actually die inside it, while a new generation is hatched, mates, then the males burrow a tunnel out of the fig and die, why females continue the cycle.
While true in terms of how they initially evolved, in terms of how they are cultivated, figs don't necessarily require pollination by wasps (or at all). Parthenocarpy, the bearing of fruit without pollination, was probably first cultivated in fig trees thousands of years ago, and is still common today. Some fig cultivars do require pollination to bear fruit, but many don't.
What happens when birds try to eat the fake bees? What happens when they break? Do we just leave them there? What would their batteries made of? Any dangerous material Lithum is not something you want on your water supply
There's no science that says any part of the Earth-human system "constantly moves to optimality". Like, literally any part. It's an out-of-control rollercoaster that we may or may not be able to steward to our liking. "optimality" is a human construct.
I agree, and would extend that to the earth system in general. The universe does not care for good, bad, optimal, or suboptimal; the universe simply is.
Evolution does not necessarily move towards optimal systems, by any definition. It may find local optima, but the process has no guarantees it's moving towards a global optimum.
Those foods are pollinated by livestock bees, not wild bees. In a livestock setting, bee colony pressures are manageable, and are an economic concern, not an existential environmental concern.
A bit but nowhere near as much. Native bees have many advantages. They have vastly more genetic diversity and there are several species. Farmers don't transport them around the country and around the world spreading disease and parasites much faster. And their hives aren't often messed up by humans. And they are better adapted to this environment.
Honeybees are suffering from multiple problems including outbreaks of disease and parasites. Even without pesticide they would be doing bad.
Anecdotally bumble bees are a very common sight here. And I'm surrounded by fields that are sprayed often.
Well, sort of. Bumblebees are probably as susceptible as honeybees, but native bees will preferentially eat from native plants. If most farmers aren't spraying many native plants, the exposure will be less.
Not really; my source is a lecture at a beekeeping meetup (where the lecturers range from top academics to 'a little bit crazy'). I believe the study in question was trying to assess how honeybees, an invasive species, impacted native bee populations; the study found little impact, and attributed it to the preferential feeding. (The replanting of large swaths of America with invasive plant species, such as wheat, presumably does have an impact on native bee populations.)
I'd also note that many native bees also have a much shorter lifecycle - they will be active for a very brief time at a very specific time of the year, when their target plants are flowering, and then they lay their eggs, which will remain dormant / develop slowly for nearly the full year, to hatch again at the appropriate time. This means that you can successfully avoid killing them by timing your pesticide application to avoid flowering plants. Honeybees, on the other hand, are active year round (though confined to their hives in the winter).
A larger threat mentioned in the talk to native bees was actually global warming. Many native bees operate in narrow bands of latitude, only going so far north and south. With the increases in average temperature, we're seeing the southern border of many native bee species move north ... but for whatever reason, not the northern border. I'm not sure why that would be (maybe there are plant species they depend on which spread too slowly?), but it creates a worrisome picture of their habitat being squeezed out of existence.
Nobody said anything about honey - just bees. The only fine we should be talking about is the fine for what these people have already done. There would obviously be and has been a massive deleterious effect from the loss of so many pollinators. Monsanto's shareholders and other like minded criminals should fined out of existence as a warning to others who would seek to destroy our world for profit. Show absolutely no mercy and go after even private holdings for good measure. Change the law if needs be and act retrospectively. The world must act in concert against the cynical and greedy polluters be they corporations, individuals or states.
I'd define as "native" anything that was around before the Europeans showed up. Corn, potatoes, many kinds of beans, tomatoes. Those were all domesticated, and I don't know how you'd count them as a percentage.
Don't forget too meat - much if the meat we eat depends upon pollenated foodstuffs - if we were to raise cattle, sheep and chickens only on grasses and local foods we'd likely have far lower heads of animals per farm and higher costs (which I'd argue for many would be a good thing, but for those who can't afford it, it would be devastating)
Well, I wasn't claiming there was, but not quite sure what to infer from your comment.
I mean, I know (from recent reading) that there's a fairly intensive operation to maintain hives exclusively for almond farming. Are you saying these are not affected by CCD, neonics, or whatever?
CCD manifests itself as greater overwintering losses to colonies. Bee farmers have lots of colonies. They can split colonies and buy new queens. It's not like Dutch Elm disease; it doesn't kill all the bees.
The use of a corporation like Monsanto...control.
Food used to be food. Now, it's patented ingredients. Control of food, along with control of health care, currency, education, war, religion, entertainment, water, the media...
Instead of gradual, spontaneous unifying of the world's Nations, it is being hastened, directed by unseen hands. "GMO is the way to go."
Illegal to collect rain water in some U.S. States. Fiat money and centralized banks. Control. Banks too big to fail. The countries with which we are at war do not yet have central banks. Dropping population to a more manageable number.
Hand pollination is possible, of course, but that seems like such a pita. Perhaps it's possible to automate.
We have a perfectly good, self optimizing system that constantly moves to optimality. If we could just lighten up a little, not push quite so hard, or even just do localized trials of intensive use pesticides and fertilizers, we could find a balance of what the system can support.
Either go slow and look for local optimizations that are then distributed widely, or engineer immunity, or both.
Ugh. I guess if it was easy, it wouldn't be a problem.