Good News: We Saved the Bees. Bad News: We Saved the Wrong Ones. (msn.com)
- Reference: 0180751200
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/07/033225/good-news-we-saved-the-bees-bad-news-we-saved-the-wrong-ones
- Source link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/science/ecology/good-news-we-saved-the-bees-bad-news-we-saved-the-wrong-ones/ar-AA1VNCtc
> "Suppose I were to say to you, 'I'm really worried about bird decline, so I've decided to take up keeping chickens.' You'd think I was a bit of an idiot," British bee scientist Dave Goulson said in [2]a video last year. But beekeeping, he went on, is "exactly the same with one key difference, which is that honeybee-keeping can be actively harmful to wild-bee conservation." Even from healthy hives, diseases flow "out into wild pollinator populations."
Honeybees can also outcompete native bees for pollen and nectar, Milbank points out, and promote non-native plants "at the expense of the native plants on which native bees thrive."
> Bee specialist T'ai Roulston at the University of Virginia's Blandy Experimental Farm here in Boyce warned that keeping honeybees would "just contribute to the difficulties that native bees are having in the world." And the Clifton Institute's Bert Harris, my regular restoration ecology consultant in Virginia, put it bluntly: "If you want to save the bees, don't keep honeybees...."
>
> Before I stir up a hornet's nest of angry beekeepers, let me be clear: The save-the-pollinator movement has, overall, been enormously beneficial over the past two decades. It helped to get millions of people interested in pollinator gardens and wildflower meadows and native plants, and turned them against insecticides. A lot of honeybee advocacy groups promote native bees, too, and many people whose environmental awakening came from the plight of honeybees are now champions of all types of conservation...
>
> But if your goal is to help pollinators, then the solution is simple: Don't keep honeybees... The bumblebees, sweat bees, mason bees, miner bees, leafcutters and other native bees, most of them solitary, ground-nesting and docile, need your help. Honeybees do not.
The article calls it "a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences that emerge when we intervene in nature, even with the best of intentions."
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/science/ecology/good-news-we-saved-the-bees-bad-news-we-saved-the-wrong-ones/ar-AA1VNCtc
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiBYBmlKSYU
Oh look (Score:2)
The 'experts' got it all wrong again.
Re: (Score:3)
At least they are trying.
Hopefully next time they will closer to the 'right' solution.
Science is all about making hypotheses and testing them. Mistakes happen all the time. It's part of good science.
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No, no the experts didn't get it wrong. The low information reactionaries got it wrong. To them there is one kind of bee and any bee is that kind of bee.
The article references non-experts who gave well intentioned bad advice and quotes experts who gave the more accurate better advice. It's been pretty well known to anybody who actually paid non-superficial attention to the issue that it was native bees that were under threat.
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> The 'experts' got it all wrong again.
To be fair, I don't ever recall this issue being about protecting native bee biodiversity. It was always presented as "without bees to pollinate, you can kiss all these food crops goodbye!" As in, the threat had always been directed towards the agricultural industry (and by extension, anyone who liked eating foods that might go off the menu if the honeybees went *poof*). There was even some grocery store that attempted to raise awareness by sharing pictures on social media of empty shelves with all the p
The trick is $$ (Score:2)
The trick is that keeping honeybees can bring in dollars. That's why honeybees were "saved". Your single hive in the back of your yard isn't a problem, the industry that transports hives all over the country is.
Of what financial value are "The bumblebees, sweat bees, mason bees, miner bees, leafcutters and other native bees"? Yeah, the same as clean water and air.
I even watched the movie to show my support (Score:2)
But Jason Statham doesn't do documentaries.
Update (Score:2)
Honeybees are critical for a large part of our agriculture. Their decline has been traced to pesticide resistant mites than carry diseases that can devastate colonies. There are no other miticides approved for use in bee hives in the US. In other words, none of this has anything to do with conservation. It is all about commercial agriculture and regulatory barriers. It should be easy enough to get an emergency approval for alternative miticides, if people can get moving and file the paperwork. Then co
Re: (Score:1)
It's amusing watching people cling desperately to the old "Climate Change" Narrative when it's been thrown under the bus because we need massive, reliable power generation to keep AI data centres running.
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What's amusing about it ? The threat of climate change hasn't changed. The severe negative impact looming in the distance is getting closer, and the AI build out is going to speed it up. What's amusing ?
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> It's amusing watching people cling desperately to the old "Climate Change" Narrative when it's been thrown under the bus because we need massive, reliable power generation to keep AI data centres running.
The AI data centers are focusing hard on being as green as they can, building out solar farms, wind farms, and nuclear power plants to provide power.
The only thing being thrown under the bus is the naïve "save power, save the planet" narrative that encouraged conservation, claiming that it would reduce global warming. It was never a plausible strategy, because power is a fundamental cost of doing business in the modern age.
Also, conserving power means discouraging investment in power production constr
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That's not universally true. For instance OpenAI is pushing for a massive new AI system in New Mexico called Project Jupiter. They plan to use natural gas for power and want a waiver from the state so they *don't* have to abide by the states requirements for clean power that applies to metered natural gas power plants.
Quoting from: [1]https://sourcenm.com/2025/12/0... [sourcenm.com]
> Each notice corresponds to a different “microgrid” natural gas generating station planned for the project. Combined, the notices s
[1] https://sourcenm.com/2025/12/02/project-jupiters-plan-relies-on-natural-gas-its-impact-on-air-quality-remains-unclear/
Re: (Score:2)
> That's not universally true. For instance OpenAI is pushing for a massive new AI system in New Mexico called Project Jupiter. They plan to use natural gas for power and want a waiver from the state so they *don't* have to abide by the states requirements for clean power that applies to metered natural gas power plants.
Let me restate that. The cloud computing companies that are doing AI (Google, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) are largely trying to do the right thing as far as I can tell. Startups like OpenAI are a free-for-all as startups are wont to be. :-D