Really?? I've nothing against evolution but there's certainly no evidence that it's recently produced any new pollinators to replace the honeybees.
(I know - you weren't really serious, but someone else might not understand that.)
Bees experiencing the Rapture; honey-lovers alarmed
- Thread starter GeoffP
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Really?? I've nothing against evolution but there's certainly no evidence that it's recently produced any new pollinators to replace the honeybees.
(I know - you weren't really serious, but someone else might not understand that.)
I think you are greatly underestimating the enormous populations of wild pollinators that exist unless they are (deliberately) pushed aside.read said:
For crops that honeybees can't handle, such as alfalfa for seed, wild pollinators have proven capable of handling large fields of American agriculture. Just look at a meadow of wildflowers -far more pollination necessary to keep that going than would be needed for a field of cucumbers.
Cucumbers are often moth pollinated, btw.
The only problem is the necessity of a change of style - the veggie growers would have to figure out some better strategy than sterilizing the neighborhood and setting out quasi-hydroponic plant sets. But that's something they need to do anyway.
I believe that you are badly mistaken on most of this. For one thing, cucumbers and other members of the Cucurbitaceae
family close their blossoms at night and the best pollination occurs between 10am and 3pm. I've never once seen any evidence that moths pollinate them. Can you supply some, please? Also, cucumbers require a minimum of about 30 trips per flower for adequate pollination. Below that, the fruits that do set are very inferior and unfit for commercial uses.
Your statements about wildflowers is also inaccurate. They require much fewer pollination trips than do vegetables and generally last for only a very short season.
Overall, it appears that what you have said is a matter of "I think" rather than being based on any facts at all. If you can present some, I'd be more than happy to read them.
Evolution doesn't require to substitute a pollinator. Extinction is also part of evolution.
And let us not forget that the bees in Africa (and another Area I forgot) are unaffected allegedly because they are immune to the fungus. What we see is not a global catastrophe but a result of modern agriculture, which is extremely vulnerable due to its mono culture emphasis.
Maybe in the next ten year will see a new job for humans: the pollinator. People are handed a brush and they move from plant to plant brushing the genitalia of the plants gently and with tender loving care in order to feed humanity.
That's a HUGE leap! The fungus thing has hardly been proven. Besides, no bee is immune to nosema.
Yeah, right. You may (or may not) realize it but that sounds a whole lot like picking cotton!!
The cucumber flowers in my garden are visited often by dayflying moths. I never actually checked to verify pollination.read said:
They are also visited by bumblebees - bumblebees as a group are more effective pollinators (for most plants) than honeybees, for several reasons. Bumblebees are very numerous where circumstances - such as industrial agriculture - have not killed them off.
No one to my knowledge has made a determined, serious attempt to learn how to manage bumblebees as pollinators. They have been, instead, essentially excluded from agricultural lands.
My statement was not about individual wildflowers, but about meadows of them. Clearly the pollination efforts necessary to service a large meadow of, say, goldenrod and milkweed; or the pollination efforts necessary to create and maintain a maple/basswood forest; or the pollination efforts necessary to handle acres of plum thickets and chokecherry groves; are more than capable of handling a few acres of well-spaced, thinly sown vegetables.read said:
And the alfalfa example demonstrates the commercial possibility.
Honeybees are not all that superlatively good at pollinating, actually. They can handle the job, with most plants, but their big advantage is the head start in domestication we have via the honey harvesters.
Blutonium Boy
Registered Member
Global warming seems to play into mites favour, in holland we lately see much more of parasetic diseases (such a bluetongue with sheep) that are caused by bugs typically belonging more to tropical climates, but softer winters allow them to migrate north.
I think you are very wrong here. Why do you assert this?
Even if you are including the wood nesting “carpenter bees,” which to the casual observer differ from bumblebee by fact their abdomen is shinny, not "fur covered" there must be 10,000 honey bees for each of your bigger bees, both of which are "solitary bees" - will not form a hive of 100,000 or more.
Yes, I think it is probably some disease spreading.
It would not be too hard to rapidly re-populate from some hive that was naturally resistant to the disease, I think. So no, I do not think we are "screwed" by this non-global problem.
Most any of the thousand of eggs a healthy queen lays each day can become a queen, given the right food (which probably includes hormones etc.). Some bee keepers know all about this, but I do not. They make their money by selling a queens and few thousand bees to people who want to start a new hive.
I bought mine from Mont. Ward.* - they are delivered by postman - in small box with wire mess walls. Queen is separated from the others, not sure why, but perhaps so they can not kill her before box arrives. (I forget the details, but there is a covered "sugar wafer" that you uncover to let the bees "meet their new queen" slowly as they eat thru the sugar.) Just tossing a queen in with some "queen-less" bees does not work - they will kill her, despite fact she could keep the hive from dying.
BTW the hive's queen does give something special to the mix that bees are constantly exchanging with each other.** If you remove the queen, nothing happens for a few hours, until the level of this substance in the "food" exchanged drops below some critical level. Then the hive frantically starts to try to make a few new queens. (build the slightly larger cell this requires move an egg into it etc.) Also when the queen is old, not producing eggs like she once did, there is a "revolt" - the workers again make a few new queens and the old one will try to kill them.
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*As I was not really trying to make money from honey and not living near my hives, I rarely saw any swarms. I did catch one “still assembling” and put it in an empty hive but that failed. They wait for their scout bees to return and report*** the various possible new homes (They are full of honey and do not want to waste any flying around looking as they must use most of it (eat it) to make the wax that will store the newly collected nectar. - it is really critical - some do not make a new hive.) Later learned that they must fly some distance when they swarm - will not accept a hive near the old one, even if it has honey comb already in it! - I suspect mother nature has built this behavior into their genes so that one forest fire does not get both hives. - my idea not sure it is true - may be some other reason. Anyway, despite my dumping the swam in a wonderful home, with wax already there, they were gone the next day.
** This is another reason why I insist that it is the hive that is alive - the individual bees are just speciallized cell of the living hive organism, which, like most living organisms, does circulate a fluid between it various cells.
***When most have reported back, the merits of each possible new home found are discussed, a decison is reached, the localtion told to all and even if more than a mile away they all fly straight to it most in one group! (Probably for same reason fish form "schools" -WWII had ship convoys, etc.)
For the fourth time: If you have oppportunity like to learn - get rewarded for doing so - keep a hive of bees.
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Bumblebees in NA come in a wide variety of proboscis and body sizes - there is a bumblebee set up for efficient handling of almost any flower. The one kind of honeybee we have domesticated is one size fits all, so most flowers are not ideally handled - and some, such as alfalfa, are not handled at all.billy said:
Bumblebees are often bigger and usually tougher, fly in colder and wetter and darker conditions, work longer hours, handle more flowers per day individually, etc.
Bumblebees are not solitary - they form hives, much smaller but correspondingly more numerous than honeybee hives.
They make honey, which tastes good, but they don't store great piles of it - they turn it into queens and drones, instead, and start new hives rather than carry over the old ones. This would be a potential advantage in pollination management - all the honey turned into bees instead of sugar for sale - but no one has figured out - or is even working on AFAIK - how to handle them domestically.
Then there are carpenter bees, various other solitary bees, moths and butterflies, flies, wasps, even beetles and ants can bearranged to do some pollinating. Some modest advances in handling solitary bees have been made by seed producers of crops, such as alfalfa, that honeybees just don't take care of well.
matthyaouw
Registered Senior Member
The pesticide imidacloprid has been suggested as a cause when France had a big problem with colony collapse disorder. I wonder if this is used in the affected areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imidacloprid_effects_on_bee_population
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imidacloprid_effects_on_bee_population
Fascinating thread, guys. I work a bit distantly from agriculture (although a lot of my friends are aggies) and so this is very interesting. So we could theoretically breed ourselves out of this pit, which is good to know. Now, at the same time, do you seem a utility in breeding and seeding bumblebees for supportive wild pollination? Is there any impression of the costs of this? I imagine they'd be negligible on a $-per-bee basis. Bumblebees, if iceaura has it right, seem to be more efficient and effective. Perhaps our pollination system suffers from the mindset of monoculture? (I think someone else alluded to this previously.)
Grantywanty
Registered Senior Member
You have just taken on a rather common and damaging roll in society - on a small scale of course, but when repeated by thousands of other people who don't really know what they are talking about, but who pretend (perhaps first to themselves) that they do know what they are talking about and present their ideas flatly, as a matter of course, a tremendous amount of damage is done.
I used to think it was important to know how conscious someone making such statements was of how little they knew. Now I think the whole conscious, unconscious issue is irrelevent. You should know you didn't know what you were talking about. You should also know that trying to paint over real problems and potential problems with nonsense is a damaging habit. For you too, not that that concerns me.
What ever the problem is, it is spreading to Brazil now. Brazil is a huge exporter of agricultural products so not taking it lightly. Today’s newspaper has article by some experts who agree bees are responsible for at least 90% of the pollination and that if lost we are in serious trouble as there is no substitute.
At least in Brazil we are not turning our corn into alcohol to make the potential food shortage worse.
At least in Brazil we are not turning our corn into alcohol to make the potential food shortage worse.
In response to the notion that people could do the pollinating, in Hawaii we hand-pollinate our Vanilla Bean orchids. Very time consuming (a few seconds per flower) but well worth it to obtain true Vanilla, which is accordingly very expensive.
Efficiency would depend on somebody figuring out how to employ them. The honeybee domesticaors are real experts, with a long tradition and much trial - with its errors - in the past.geoff said:
Their potential is attractive. But it's just potential, for any given species of bumblebee, and if I were in charge of responding to the pollination problem I would start at the other end: figure out crop by crop, coordinated through the relevant organizations how to handle pollination so that it can weather a honeybee crash.
I was posting in the spirit of retailing common knowledge and ordinary observation, not esoteric scientific findings, but I should be able to dig up some kind of research - what, in particular, seems to need support in that post ?billy t said:
edit: here's a decent starter link for bumblebees http://homepages.cae.wisc.edu/~oliphant/bees/bombus/ref.shtml
The Bernd Heinrich book (Bumblebee Economics) is not about human money economics, but about energy budgets and various ecological strategies of bumblebees - it's a good read.
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I'll have a look at your link: I recall that agriculturalists used to (still do I think) order mantises and ladybugs via mail to "seed" their crop area with nonspecific predators of aphids and other bugs. So I wonder if bumblebees might work in the same vein: nonspecific pollinators. If crops flowers were easier, of course, they might stick with those.