Former beekeeper here. At first glance, this sounds like a useful supplement for bees. It might be great. But my immediate reaction is that it sounds a bit "Clockwork Orange"-y ... in the same...
Exemplary
Former beekeeper here.
At first glance, this sounds like a useful supplement for bees. It might be great. But my immediate reaction is that it sounds a bit "Clockwork Orange"-y ... in the same sense that people are better off eating healthy food, than taking vitamin supplements to make up for a bad diet.
Which might not be that bad in isolation, but modern beekeeping has been one step after another of "artificial almost-as-good replacement of what they actually need", for decades.
For commercial beekeepers these days, honey production is an after-thought. Only something like 25% of their income comes from honey and honey products. The vast majority of income comes from pollination services, which involves packing up hundreds and thousands of hives onto semis and moving them across the country, several times each season.
The almond crop in California is the beekeepers' "gold rush" ... for the past 20 years, there have literally not been enough bees on the entire continent of North America available to pollinate the almond crop. Every year, they try to find new ways to get even more bees down there, importing them from around the world (and quite likely, spreading new-and-improved diseases and parasites in the process).
And that one month of pollinating almond trees often accounts for more than 50% of the money earned by most beekeepers for the entire year.
Then, they spend the rest of the year moving the hives around to other important pollination crops. The only other one I know of, off the top of my head, is the cranberry pollination in Wisconsin; that's another big one, but I know there are many others.
I guess most people know about the problems with pesticides and lack of natural forage and colony collapse disorder and such-like, but I don't think most people realize the kind of "life" bees live. They're just not meant to spend 48-72 hours locked up in a semi, tooling down the highway ... then spend a couple of weeks in one climate/ecosystem ... then a month in a completely different region ... then a third ... all over the continent.
Even without all of the added stresses of pesticides and etc, just the regular day-to-day life of domesticated honeybees these days is just ridiculously unnatural.
That sounds super sad for bees. They're not tiny machines, they're living critters with a family and love of balls and sunshine and outdoors. Dumb question but why pay so much money to ship in...
Exemplary
That sounds super sad for bees. They're not tiny machines, they're living critters with a family and love of balls and sunshine and outdoors.
Dumb question but why pay so much money to ship in bees instead of just raising enough bees per orchard?
I was about to start beekeeping when everything went sideways with the COVID-19 lockdowns, did a bunch of homework, attended the local beekeeping society meetings in an agricultural region... The...
I was about to start beekeeping when everything went sideways with the COVID-19 lockdowns, did a bunch of homework, attended the local beekeeping society meetings in an agricultural region...
The answer to your question that I got is something like this:
In undeveloped forests and meadows, something is blooming almost all the time from first thaw to first snow. Trees (yes, most trees are pollen- and nectar-producers, including conifers), bulbs, shrubs, grasses - the flowering cycles overlap with one another and there's a steady food supply until the bees go mostly dormant with cold.
In agricultural monocrops, you may have miles on end devoted to a single species that all blooms at once. Given at most a couple weeks of flowers for commercial fruit trees, the bees would starve if they're not moved to another location and crop with blooms.
It's really not desirable for ecosystems or sustainable agriculture that everything but a single crop species is exterminated. It's made a huge dent in insect and bird populations, destroys soil, encourages plant pathogens, and generally makes the world a bleaker place. It's not surprising that honeybees are having a harder time locating the nutrients they need.
I've got friends heavily into biodynamic farming. There's some woo, but the basic principles of maintaining wild strips or intentionally bee-friendly plantings between crop rows, minimal tilling, encouraging a healthy soil biome, keeping bees (not too many) locally, etc. are really paying off for them. The ones who keep bees still have some colony loss. There's always someone (farmers or homeowners) in the vicinity using neonicotinoid-treated seeds or pesticide sprays. But they're not seeing 50+% colony loss, either.
Everything leading up to the rockets in Interstellar is a pretty decent look at what the American midwest is gonna look like in less than 50 years.... A barren wasteland that can just barely grow...
Everything leading up to the rockets in Interstellar is a pretty decent look at what the American midwest is gonna look like in less than 50 years....
A barren wasteland that can just barely grow corn, for now.
This is how we treat most animals because capitalism. They’re just resources at our disposal and either they’re profitable or they aren’t. They’re not allowed to just exist and do their own thing....
That sounds super sad for bees. They're not tiny machines, they're living critters with a family and love of balls and sunshine and outdoors.
This is how we treat most animals because capitalism. They’re just resources at our disposal and either they’re profitable or they aren’t. They’re not allowed to just exist and do their own thing.
Even pets, the breeding industry is nightmare fuel just like farming meat or milk or eggs is.
Curious as to why you think it's related to the economic system. Like, if we lived in a socialist country, people would continue to need to grow crops, and the most efficient least labor intensive...
Curious as to why you think it's related to the economic system.
Like, if we lived in a socialist country, people would continue to need to grow crops, and the most efficient least labor intensive way to pollinate them would still be to do that beehive shuffle.
Its done that way right now because it's more profitable, but that's just a translation for "least labor intensive" in a market economy.
How would a different system of governance/economy change that?
I’m not saying that’s a better option. As soon as something becomes a resource with a cost associated to it, it’s a race to the bottom to reduce that cost at the expense of anything else. Call it...
I’m not saying that’s a better option.
As soon as something becomes a resource with a cost associated to it, it’s a race to the bottom to reduce that cost at the expense of anything else. Call it capitalism, socialism, communism, whatever you want the result it the same.
I challenge the idea that anything exists to be exploited for our own gain. We behave like we’re the only species that matter, everything else is there to either serve us (and thus be exploited to collapse) or hinder us (and thus must be eliminated).
I think capitalism is one of the most vicious incarnations of an economic system that incentivizes exploitation and suffering (across all species, including humans), but it’s not the only one.
Out of interest, what system would you prefer? And how would you mitigate against the risk of being outproduced and then overtaken by an adjacent capitalist/equivalent system?
Out of interest, what system would you prefer? And how would you mitigate against the risk of being outproduced and then overtaken by an adjacent capitalist/equivalent system?
I wish I had a clever answer but I don’t know what system would be a sound replacement. I think putting limits on capitalism and greed would help, encouraging people to think differently about...
I wish I had a clever answer but I don’t know what system would be a sound replacement.
I think putting limits on capitalism and greed would help, encouraging people to think differently about consumption and needs would help, pricing externalities better would help, reconsidering our culture of “I consume therefore I am” would help. But I’m far from smart and knowledgeable enough to tell you which system would embody these things perfectly.
I try to fight these things at my level, limit or avoid giving money to companies and entities I feel are building a world and pushing values I think are harmful but there is only so much I can do at my level.
It sounds to me like you're knowledgeable enough. Those are great solutions, and even a somewhat stripped down version of state constrained capitalism works great in a lot of places. Even the more...
I think putting limits on capitalism and greed would help, encouraging people to think differently about consumption and needs would help, pricing externalities better would help, reconsidering our culture of “I consume therefore I am” would help. But I’m far from smart and knowledgeable enough to tell you which system would embody these things perfectly.
It sounds to me like you're knowledgeable enough. Those are great solutions, and even a somewhat stripped down version of state constrained capitalism works great in a lot of places. Even the more minimal version of regulated capitalism that is currently being dismantled in the US worked a lot better than the alternative (no regulation) for decades.
We don't need an alternative to capitalism, we just need a strong enough state to temper the worst of its excesses.
Thank you. Something I forgot to add is that I also think employees should have a stake in their employer by law. Employees should get a part of the profits generated by their work beyond their...
Thank you.
Something I forgot to add is that I also think employees should have a stake in their employer by law. Employees should get a part of the profits generated by their work beyond their salary that is often only a ridiculous fraction of these profits, and employees should have a voice into how the company is run.
I’ve always resented being an employee because it felt exploitative even though I was always in comfortable white collar jobs (well except when I was younger). But I see it from others who work their asses off to enrich an employer and only get peanuts (and 50h weeks) in return.
Employers should get a bigger share of the venture since they’re taking more risk on, but employees should also get some beyond their salaries because they’re giving up a significant chunk of their health and lives (over a lifetime) for barely enough to exist in return.
That's why I'm thinking these days of trying to develop an economic system framework that actually takes ecology into account AND provides for human needs. Capitalism produces so much waste due to...
That's why I'm thinking these days of trying to develop an economic system framework that actually takes ecology into account AND provides for human needs. Capitalism produces so much waste due to artificial scarcity anyway, and I'm sure communism has its own problems tied up in ideology: it certainly has historical baggage that makes it difficult to discuss with most people.
You might want to give Doughnut Economics a look. Kate Raworth's book and the Doughnut Economics Action Lab website are very much worth reading. Though there are legitimate economic criticisms,...
You might want to give Doughnut Economics a look. Kate Raworth's book and the Doughnut Economics Action Lab website are very much worth reading.
Though there are legitimate economic criticisms, the theory is the framework you're seeking.
I admire your audacity. Please go for it and share your work. You might succeed or you might influence someone who will succeed. It's impossible to predict paradigm shifts but they have some...
I admire your audacity. Please go for it and share your work. You might succeed or you might influence someone who will succeed.
It's impossible to predict paradigm shifts but they have some things in common as historical events. The history of different ways of thinking about human interaction and experience is fascinating.
I'm going to make the controversial argument that many Westerner care too much about animals. They're not people, yet dogs, cats, and cattle often arouse more intense sympathy. Some creatures like...
I'm going to make the controversial argument that many Westerner care too much about animals. They're not people, yet dogs, cats, and cattle often arouse more intense sympathy.
Some creatures like mollusks are hardly sentient. Why should they receive so much moral weight and attention?
How can you tell they’re not sentient? Not so long ago we used to think babies didn’t feel pain/were barely sentient. Wouldn’t it be safer to err on the side of caution, assume they are, and treat...
How can you tell they’re not sentient? Not so long ago we used to think babies didn’t feel pain/were barely sentient.
Wouldn’t it be safer to err on the side of caution, assume they are, and treat them as such? Worst that could happen is that we were wrong and treated another living thing well.
Bees are domesticated livestock, same as chickens and cows. And broadly speaking, we treat them about as well, at least at a commercial scale. Keeping bees organically, w/o using any chemicals, is...
Bees are domesticated livestock, same as chickens and cows. And broadly speaking, we treat them about as well, at least at a commercial scale.
Keeping bees organically, w/o using any chemicals, is extremely difficult in this day; I tried and failed, though I did limit the amount of chemicals I used.
It is worth noting that there is no such thing as organic honey. There might be legal definitions that allow producers to put that label on the honey, but it's not meaningful. Bees go where they want to, harvest pollen and nectar wherever they find it, and it is impossible to assure that they only bring back "organic" ingredients.
But keeping the bees organically, that is possible, and it is worth looking for beekeepers that are trying to do that, because it generally means "happy bees".
This is incidentally part of the ongoing bee crisis. Domesticated bees are getting all the 'help,' to the detriment of the native bees that help pollinate everything else. If we don't want all...
This is incidentally part of the ongoing bee crisis.
Domesticated bees are getting all the 'help,' to the detriment of the native bees that help pollinate everything else.
If we don't want all bees to go extinct, we really need to reconsider our interactions with the environment wholesale. Stop tearing down forests, paving meadows, and poisoning land.
Yields will lower. Small price to pay to stop a scorched-earth approach to farming.
Nutshell version, this is the answer. The broader version would look at not just how expensive it is, but also, how difficult it is. Keeping your own hives is extremely challenging, requiring a...
Nutshell version, this is the answer.
The broader version would look at not just how expensive it is, but also, how difficult it is. Keeping your own hives is extremely challenging, requiring a lot of specialized equipment, knowledge, experience, and a significant time investment. And even with all that, bees die ... a lot.
Easier to just rent professional beekeeper services.
Yeah I'm a little concerned that over-dependence on something like this might have some dire effects for the bees still being good pollinators. Still, if it's used in the right way like an...
Yeah I'm a little concerned that over-dependence on something like this might have some dire effects for the bees still being good pollinators. Still, if it's used in the right way like an additive to the attractants already being applied on crop blossoms it could be helpful in getting the colonies the nutrients they need to fully self-sustain.
This bee supplement could be pretty huge if there's no adverse affects. I'm still really curious what specific wildflowers offer the highest amount of missing sterols the bees need though.
This bee supplement could be pretty huge if there's no adverse affects. I'm still really curious what specific wildflowers offer the highest amount of missing sterols the bees need though.
Former beekeeper here.
At first glance, this sounds like a useful supplement for bees. It might be great. But my immediate reaction is that it sounds a bit "Clockwork Orange"-y ... in the same sense that people are better off eating healthy food, than taking vitamin supplements to make up for a bad diet.
Which might not be that bad in isolation, but modern beekeeping has been one step after another of "artificial almost-as-good replacement of what they actually need", for decades.
For commercial beekeepers these days, honey production is an after-thought. Only something like 25% of their income comes from honey and honey products. The vast majority of income comes from pollination services, which involves packing up hundreds and thousands of hives onto semis and moving them across the country, several times each season.
The almond crop in California is the beekeepers' "gold rush" ... for the past 20 years, there have literally not been enough bees on the entire continent of North America available to pollinate the almond crop. Every year, they try to find new ways to get even more bees down there, importing them from around the world (and quite likely, spreading new-and-improved diseases and parasites in the process).
And that one month of pollinating almond trees often accounts for more than 50% of the money earned by most beekeepers for the entire year.
Then, they spend the rest of the year moving the hives around to other important pollination crops. The only other one I know of, off the top of my head, is the cranberry pollination in Wisconsin; that's another big one, but I know there are many others.
I guess most people know about the problems with pesticides and lack of natural forage and colony collapse disorder and such-like, but I don't think most people realize the kind of "life" bees live. They're just not meant to spend 48-72 hours locked up in a semi, tooling down the highway ... then spend a couple of weeks in one climate/ecosystem ... then a month in a completely different region ... then a third ... all over the continent.
Even without all of the added stresses of pesticides and etc, just the regular day-to-day life of domesticated honeybees these days is just ridiculously unnatural.
That sounds super sad for bees. They're not tiny machines, they're living critters with a family and love of balls and sunshine and outdoors.
Dumb question but why pay so much money to ship in bees instead of just raising enough bees per orchard?
I was about to start beekeeping when everything went sideways with the COVID-19 lockdowns, did a bunch of homework, attended the local beekeeping society meetings in an agricultural region...
The answer to your question that I got is something like this:
It's really not desirable for ecosystems or sustainable agriculture that everything but a single crop species is exterminated. It's made a huge dent in insect and bird populations, destroys soil, encourages plant pathogens, and generally makes the world a bleaker place. It's not surprising that honeybees are having a harder time locating the nutrients they need.
I've got friends heavily into biodynamic farming. There's some woo, but the basic principles of maintaining wild strips or intentionally bee-friendly plantings between crop rows, minimal tilling, encouraging a healthy soil biome, keeping bees (not too many) locally, etc. are really paying off for them. The ones who keep bees still have some colony loss. There's always someone (farmers or homeowners) in the vicinity using neonicotinoid-treated seeds or pesticide sprays. But they're not seeing 50+% colony loss, either.
Everything leading up to the rockets in Interstellar is a pretty decent look at what the American midwest is gonna look like in less than 50 years....
A barren wasteland that can just barely grow corn, for now.
This is how we treat most animals because capitalism. They’re just resources at our disposal and either they’re profitable or they aren’t. They’re not allowed to just exist and do their own thing.
Even pets, the breeding industry is nightmare fuel just like farming meat or milk or eggs is.
Curious as to why you think it's related to the economic system.
Like, if we lived in a socialist country, people would continue to need to grow crops, and the most efficient least labor intensive way to pollinate them would still be to do that beehive shuffle.
Its done that way right now because it's more profitable, but that's just a translation for "least labor intensive" in a market economy.
How would a different system of governance/economy change that?
I’m not saying that’s a better option.
As soon as something becomes a resource with a cost associated to it, it’s a race to the bottom to reduce that cost at the expense of anything else. Call it capitalism, socialism, communism, whatever you want the result it the same.
I challenge the idea that anything exists to be exploited for our own gain. We behave like we’re the only species that matter, everything else is there to either serve us (and thus be exploited to collapse) or hinder us (and thus must be eliminated).
I think capitalism is one of the most vicious incarnations of an economic system that incentivizes exploitation and suffering (across all species, including humans), but it’s not the only one.
Out of interest, what system would you prefer? And how would you mitigate against the risk of being outproduced and then overtaken by an adjacent capitalist/equivalent system?
I wish I had a clever answer but I don’t know what system would be a sound replacement.
I think putting limits on capitalism and greed would help, encouraging people to think differently about consumption and needs would help, pricing externalities better would help, reconsidering our culture of “I consume therefore I am” would help. But I’m far from smart and knowledgeable enough to tell you which system would embody these things perfectly.
I try to fight these things at my level, limit or avoid giving money to companies and entities I feel are building a world and pushing values I think are harmful but there is only so much I can do at my level.
It sounds to me like you're knowledgeable enough. Those are great solutions, and even a somewhat stripped down version of state constrained capitalism works great in a lot of places. Even the more minimal version of regulated capitalism that is currently being dismantled in the US worked a lot better than the alternative (no regulation) for decades.
We don't need an alternative to capitalism, we just need a strong enough state to temper the worst of its excesses.
Thank you.
Something I forgot to add is that I also think employees should have a stake in their employer by law. Employees should get a part of the profits generated by their work beyond their salary that is often only a ridiculous fraction of these profits, and employees should have a voice into how the company is run.
I’ve always resented being an employee because it felt exploitative even though I was always in comfortable white collar jobs (well except when I was younger). But I see it from others who work their asses off to enrich an employer and only get peanuts (and 50h weeks) in return.
Employers should get a bigger share of the venture since they’re taking more risk on, but employees should also get some beyond their salaries because they’re giving up a significant chunk of their health and lives (over a lifetime) for barely enough to exist in return.
That's why I'm thinking these days of trying to develop an economic system framework that actually takes ecology into account AND provides for human needs. Capitalism produces so much waste due to artificial scarcity anyway, and I'm sure communism has its own problems tied up in ideology: it certainly has historical baggage that makes it difficult to discuss with most people.
You might want to give Doughnut Economics a look. Kate Raworth's book and the Doughnut Economics Action Lab website are very much worth reading.
Though there are legitimate economic criticisms, the theory is the framework you're seeking.
I plan to read quite broadly to find support and inspiration to develop the framework further, absolutely. Thanks for the suggestion!
I admire your audacity. Please go for it and share your work. You might succeed or you might influence someone who will succeed.
It's impossible to predict paradigm shifts but they have some things in common as historical events. The history of different ways of thinking about human interaction and experience is fascinating.
Thanks for the encouragement! I don't expect any of my work will be applied or taken seriously in my lifetime, but that's sort of freeing in a way.
If you haven't yet, try reading Kuhn's book the structure of scientific revolution.
And best wishes for your work.
The more I think about the word "livestock", the more dystopian it feels.
Right? Lives shouldn't be stock. But then again we also have human resource.
It's all messed up.
I'm going to make the controversial argument that many Westerner care too much about animals. They're not people, yet dogs, cats, and cattle often arouse more intense sympathy.
Some creatures like mollusks are hardly sentient. Why should they receive so much moral weight and attention?
How can you tell they’re not sentient? Not so long ago we used to think babies didn’t feel pain/were barely sentient.
Wouldn’t it be safer to err on the side of caution, assume they are, and treat them as such? Worst that could happen is that we were wrong and treated another living thing well.
Bees are domesticated livestock, same as chickens and cows. And broadly speaking, we treat them about as well, at least at a commercial scale.
Keeping bees organically, w/o using any chemicals, is extremely difficult in this day; I tried and failed, though I did limit the amount of chemicals I used.
It is worth noting that there is no such thing as organic honey. There might be legal definitions that allow producers to put that label on the honey, but it's not meaningful. Bees go where they want to, harvest pollen and nectar wherever they find it, and it is impossible to assure that they only bring back "organic" ingredients.
But keeping the bees organically, that is possible, and it is worth looking for beekeepers that are trying to do that, because it generally means "happy bees".
I responded to your specific question below.
This is incidentally part of the ongoing bee crisis.
Domesticated bees are getting all the 'help,' to the detriment of the native bees that help pollinate everything else.
If we don't want all bees to go extinct, we really need to reconsider our interactions with the environment wholesale. Stop tearing down forests, paving meadows, and poisoning land.
Yields will lower. Small price to pay to stop a scorched-earth approach to farming.
It's cheaper to ship them than maintain them on site for the 11 months of the year they aren't needed for a given crop's pollination.
Capitalist efficiency at its finest.
Damn the long term consequences, we can save a buck now.
Nutshell version, this is the answer.
The broader version would look at not just how expensive it is, but also, how difficult it is. Keeping your own hives is extremely challenging, requiring a lot of specialized equipment, knowledge, experience, and a significant time investment. And even with all that, bees die ... a lot.
Easier to just rent professional beekeeper services.
Yeah I'm a little concerned that over-dependence on something like this might have some dire effects for the bees still being good pollinators. Still, if it's used in the right way like an additive to the attractants already being applied on crop blossoms it could be helpful in getting the colonies the nutrients they need to fully self-sustain.
Lol we’re migrating the bees instead of the bees migrating themselves cause we changed the climate too fast for them to adapt
This bee supplement could be pretty huge if there's no adverse affects. I'm still really curious what specific wildflowers offer the highest amount of missing sterols the bees need though.