I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem.
Furthermore: People use honey bees for honey ( duh ). But they are more useful than just that: people drive honey bee colonies around to crops in order to pollinate them. If we don't have honey bees, we do not have crops.
There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee. Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications.
What are you proposing exactly? We stand back and lose all of our biodiversity because we have to pay a few conservationists 1/5 of a mediocre SAAS CEO's salary? Give me a break.
Humanity does not stand on its own, we still need nature to sustain ourselves. "When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money."
And outside of economic and survival concerns: Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever. How could you honestly take this position? What do you find valuable? What do you find beautiful? What do you live for?
> I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking". Saying "MEH, there are other pollinators" is lazy thinking. Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections. You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem.
FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem, they were imported from europe. They are likely important if not critical to the pollination of several cash crops, but they're not an ecosystem concern in and of themselves.
However giant asian hornets are rather indiscriminate in their hunting, in fact their main prey in japan are large insects like mantises (as well as other hornets). GAH taking root in the US would be an unmitigated disaster all around, not just for beekeeping.
Honey bees are naturalized here. They are part of the ecosystem, for better or worse. Insect populations have adapted around them. Taking them away now would be a disruption, especially if it were not planned out.
For instance, if you were trying to reestablish some some native pollinator, reducing honey bee pressure might be part of that plan. Even possible a critical one. But just killing them and walking away? That probably won’t end well. It would be irresponsible to do so.
Even removing invasive species of plants involves a succession plan, so the same thing doesn’t happen again, or something worse moves into the vacuum. I know a couple people who could fill a whole workshop on what people often get wrong here (and I’ve encouraged one of them to do so, but no luck), but they would both agree that what gets done, flawed as it can be (especially in walking away too soon) is better than the status quo, or removal and neglect.
Purely from an economic and argicuktural perspective, is there a way for us to simply raise honey bees in more of a ‘bubble’ that is somehow protected from the giant wasps?
I’d imagine from what I’ve read that a significant chunk of bees are already artificially produced and distributed for crops.
That plus of course combined with a general ongoing attempt at eradication of the hornets. Or at least significant population control.
Or is agriculture simply too widespread and complicated (or ‘naturally’ dependent) for such a thing?
It would be an excellent grad CSS project. Identifying the Giant Wasps with 99.9% or whatever accuracy and deploying some defensive mechanism.
The problem like you said would be(e) infinitely expensive to deploy to all of the many thousands of randomly placed hives. But maybe useful for the industrial pollinator companies, which is a big thriving industry.
Anyway, I just like these sort of clever tech solutions.
There has to be plenty of solutions to this (major) problem we haven't thought of yet.
I'm not a beekeeper, and sure, the modern hives are also optimized for productivity and easy access(bees are forced to produce more honey than they would naturally produce) -- but hives entrances have certain dimensions taken from nature so the bees can cool the hive -- you cannot make the entrances smaller or the hive will overheat.
It's worth noting there are wild pollinators, some more efficient than others. Orchard bees are like 200x more efficient than honeybees on an individual basis when pollinating apple trees, for instance.
The main advantage of honeybees is that they are domesticated, and we can take them where we want. If your orchard has a healthy population of orchard bees, great, and there are ways to promote orchard bees, but the honeybees can actually be brought in on demand.
The main advantage of European honeybees is that they can pollinate introduced European crops efficiently, and native pollinators can't.
The flip side is that European honeybees can not pollinate native crops very well. For that, the native pollinators are very efficient. Native pollinators are threatened by the feral colonies of European honeybees and their introduced diseases like nosema, varroa, mites, and foulbrood. It's like smallpox blankets all over again as infected honeybee colonies are trucked all over the country to spread pollen and disease on various introduced European cops.
I suspect this is moving around the issue at hand here because it's likely the murder hornets will target orchard bees as well. They just aren't conveniently located in giant boxes by the hundreds.
Orchard bees are domesticated and used as pollinators. They're solitary bees, which I'm guessing prevents usage for mass pollination of crops.
That being said there are lots of animals that can't be domesticated. Zebras are the classic example, being very similar to domesticated horses but are much more aggressive and unpredictable.
Yeah -- individual orchard bees are significantly more efficient, but an individual honeybee hive crams in tens of thousands of bees; you make it up on scale.
Honeybees also work well with mono-cropping because you can easily pick up and move the entire hive from massive field to massive field just in time for pollination. If you are relying on a wild bee population they'll do better when they have lots of plants in bloom across a wide spectrum of time so they have a chance to build up their population before the major blooms eg the orchard you want pollinated. Otherwise you run the risk of only have a small bee population that can't fully take advantage of (and pollinate) the suddenly massive resource glut of several square miles of orchards suddenly in bloom at once.
> That being said there are lots of animals that can't be domesticated. Zebras are the classic example, being very similar to domesticated horses but are much more aggressive and unpredictable.
Interestingly, we have records of contemporary impressions of tarpans and aurochs, back when they weren't extinct. They tended to be described in terms like "absolutely untamable".
As an example, passion fruit has to be pollinated by hand (with swabs or special gloves) even in most of its natural range (South America) because only certain species of Uruçu bees can be pollinate it, and they have become rare
The purple passion fruit commonly grown in New Zealand (not native) doesn't need manual pollination. Not sure what does it, though there are many introduced honey bees and bumblebees alongside some native pollinators like butterflies.
I did some more research and I see that there is a Passiflora species (P. incarnata) that grows in Texas, but that isn't what is generally referred to as passion fruit. P. edulis would be what the above commenter is referring to.
I cannot agree more. If i could upvote twice i would.
We are loosing biodiversity at a rate comparable to the last mass extinctions, we are loosing our "life support systems" as climate/biodiv. experts say, yet no one is concerned.
This is beyond the worst i ever expected in my worst nightmares. And this is happening now.
And no one says a world. No one even dare spending 5 minute reading the material. No one cares.
If we go extinct (with 95% of the other species first) it will be well deserved.
We are living in an age where people outright deny the existence of a global pandemic because they don't like the inconvenience of their favorite bars being closed or having to wear a mask. There is no document in the universe of any length that will convince them.
We're living in an age where people deny the existence of jurisdictions that have gone without arbitrary closings and they're doing just fine, if not better than many jurisdictions that have had harsh lockdowns. But no document in the universe of any length will convince them that population control is not the answer.
Harsh lockdowns are the last-ditch effort when everything is out of control. The places that didn't do them didn't need them because they had a good initial response or have very favorable demographics or culture
> We are living in an age where people outright deny the existence of a global pandemic because they don't like the inconvenience
Well, no one I know, and no one they know, has been hurt by the coronavirus. And the list of people I know includes two people from Wuhan. If we went out a third degree, we would likely start to pick up victims.
On the other hand, I do personally know someone who was injured by the response; this person responded so badly to the lockdown that they had to be committed.
It's possible that the existence of a pandemic isn't what people are denying...
If we're going with anecdotes, my SO's parents both had it with her mother spending 10 days in hospital during which they started her on dialysis, which she will need for the rest of her life.
I recommend Steffen et al, Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene (2018) [1]. You can’t read the whole thing in 5 minutes, but you can read the three figures and their captions, which say a lot, and it’s open access, peer reviewed and recent. Maybe your point is that the Earth system is too complicated to explain in 5 minutes, and that’s fair enough, but I do think the climate change policy debate would be a little more sensible if you were expected to spend at least 5 minutes reading this kind of literature before participating.
Thank you, but this is not for the layman. I have no problem recommending something that takes longer than 5 minutes to read, but it does have to be readable.
It's longer than 5 minutes, but David Attenborough's new film: A Life On Our Planet [1] presents the issues were facing from unsustainable growth and offers solutions in maintaining robust biodiversity on our planet.
> You cannot predict how one HUGELY important species being destroyed will affect the rest of our ecosystem.
At risk of sounding like a prediction, we can confidently say the outcome is something awful. The ecosystem isn't built like a fault-tolerant network where one node goes out, but the network more or less still works. There is no redundancy. There are no enterprise-grade availability requirements.
It is very fault tolerant over evolutionary and geologic time scales. The question is what the very short term effects might be and how it may impact us.
As George Carlin said, we need to stop framing these issues as “saving the Earth.” The Earth will be fine. This is about saving ourselves.
Same goes for climate change. The Earth has been very warm in the past, even ice free. The Earth will be fine. The question is whether the >10 billion humans that may be on it as climate change starts to really manifest will be fine.
Bingo, this is exactly what I was going to say. The Earth sure is fault-tolerant, we just might not enjoy what PIDs get the kill signal to repair the system.
Homo Sapiens would almost surely survive as a species. Humans are like cockroaches. It might be horribly nasty though, and definitely not something we should invite.
I like Elon’s way of putting climate change: sure we may be wrong at least a bit, but is it wise to take our best habitable planet and dump a shitload of CO2 into the atmosphere and then just see what happens because YOLO?
If that's Elon's position then he must have a huge load of cognitive dissonance if he still thinks prioritizing colonization of Mars is a worthwile contribution.
I disagree. If we bring earth into a state where Mars looks like the better alternative, then we deserve to go extinct.
Have you seen how Mars looks like? What the conditions are like? Temperature? Atmosphere? Radiation? Ecosystems (none)? Water (none)? Breathable air (none)? How could that ever be more inviting than earth?
I've always thought of "saving the earth" as referring to the millions of intelligent and sensitive non-human lifeforms that we are currently obliterating. But I agree, the earth will continue to have life regardless of what humans do, it just won't include anything we currently know and cherish at the rate we're going.
I for my part also care about the thousands of species that are going extinct because of our behavior. I don't care tht much about the human species. It's our fault, we deserve to suffer. But the polar bear does not.
I agree. But to have an even small glimmer of hope of changing people's behavior, you need to sell the idea to them like successful companies do. Tell them how THEY're going to benefit.
As we have seen in this pandemic, even selling it like that isn't a recipe for success.
I just hate when people refer to that specific part of his standup as anti-environmentalist. I think he didn't meant it like people are quoting him to approve destroying nature. The planet will be fine (c), sure, this stone rock will be fine. Humans won't be, animals won't be, plants won't be. We probably won't be able to exterminate all living things on Earth, and some plankton and bacteria will evolve into something new again. But again, current snapshot of "nature", the one we are all living in will be lost if it continued to be destroyed.
It's not fault-tolerant in any way we'd like. It's like a computer that'll just keep on trucking; even if it's overwritten all its memory with garbage, it'll still be running some code.
until the system is degraded to the point where it crashes into either only the smallest fragments (which take tens or hundreds of millions of years to rebuild), or complete extinction
There's no particular reason that small fragments should rebuild. Multicellular organisms (beyond biofilms) were kind of a quirk of nature in the first place. (Not that I think all multicellular organisms are likely to die off – but if they did, why would they re-emerge?)
Yet, while I lack any deep understanding why they would re-emerge, paleontology seems to show a long history of mass extinctions down to very low levels, then re-emergence of more complex forms.
One theory that I read of a few years back posited that life, and higher forms in particular, are more efficient at increasing entropy, i.e., diffusing heat, and so are systemically favored (seen nothing on it in a few years, so no idea of its current state; if anyone recognizes it and can provide a link, thanks in advance!).
The human race is like Netflix's Chaos Monkey but applied to the global ecosystem instead of AWS. And our configuration file is decentralized and hard to enforce.
Fault tolerance is a concept relative to a desired functional behavior. Relative to "everything should stay as-is", nature is not fault tolerant at all. But relative to "_something_ will keep existing and evolving" it is very fault tolerant. But that may not be the way we'd like.
>I always find the anti-environmentalist position that pops up on HN interesting. For a technical audience, they are amazingly unaware of "Systems Thinking".
Technical audiences usually go with the "technology, right or wrong" angle (as nationalists go with "my country, right or wrong").
It's more about identity validation and peer group thinking than critical and systems thinking. Plus they're into technology because they disproportionally like, glorify, and are attracted by tech in the first place.
Oh, absolutely. The more genetic engineering and radiation the better. With a bit of machine learning you've got a pitch deck for murder hornet removal as a service.
What is this strawman that you are attacking even proposing? Since you’re not replying to anyone or even quoting it seems like a vague bogeyman that hates nature?
Yep, genetic diversity is a resource. It's painstakingly written natural code that solves various biological problems. We're just now getting to the point where we can start to understand this massive legacy codebase that creates the biosphere, and it's like we're just deleting huge swathes of it without analyzing it because we want more space to store cat jpgs or something stupid like that. So goddamned shortsighted.
Reminds me of an old adage I heard in high school: If you take the frogs out of the environment, you don't have the same environment minus frogs, you have an entirely new ecosystem.
The sad thing with this "keystone species" concept is that people see it as "oh but this weird insect that's about to go extinct in south-east asia is not a keystone species, so whatever."
In the short term it's reducing the diversity of the ecosystem, yes. And the effect of that tends to pull in quite a bunch of effects that contribute to that effect even more. Only in the long run will there be more diversity again. But by that time we'll all sit in Musk Kingdom on Mars with oxygen masks and radiation suits and legends of ancestors who used to know what a summer breeze at a lake felt like, cause we succeeded to colonize another planet and that was totally worth it!!!11
What does this have to do with an invasive species? Do you assume that we allow Murder Hornets to spread and displace multiple native species? I'm confused about the intent of your post.
Remember, a lot of people on this forum hate their own biological heritage and want to "upload their memories" into silicon super-computing chips and seek to escape the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The biological world and interdependence are repugnant to them. They are wannabee versions of Skynet essentially.
I think those bees learned how to fight them, which is
probably untrue for the rest of the bee population elsewhere. There might also be birds that eat them.
I love having hornets on my property if their nest isn't located in a path I have to cross. They also eat wasps and you won't have any problems with them throughout the summer. They don't try to eat your cake or drink you lemonade and you can peacefully chill in your garden.
They always leave their nest after a season and it can make quite a mess. But nothing is better than having them in a remote location in your garden. It is better than any insect spray.
But you still might seriously want to get rid of them because they could indeed do a lot of damage in another ecosystem that needs to sacrifice several species until it adapts.
I completely agree with what you're saying here, but I'm going to just discuss one thing that you said:
> "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever."
I don't think that's the case. I think you're giving humanity too much credit. If humanity kills itself from overpopulation and overconsumption, the earth will do just fine without us. Even if we harm it as badly as we did with something like the Chernobyl disaster (look how it has bounced back there).
We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history and billions of years from now we may not be here, but the earth probably will be.
I think this statement makes a point opposite what you intended:
> We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history
That's exactly the problem. We're causing massive changes on a much shorter timescale than evolution operates on. I think it's likely the global ecosystem will struggle to adapt.
In general, I find people, probably due to the sheer difference in timescale that is beyond palpable understanding, to appreciate that our collective environmental impact precludes other species the evolutionary time to adapt to our impact and to fill gaps in "species web" to fill all the extinctions that are occurring.
Mass extinctions in the past were over a timescale of thousands of years, so there was some time for evolutionary "computation" to adapt.
Human mass extinction is occurring on the timescale of decades.
Just to add on this, pollinators cannot replace each others. Some plants can only be pollinated by specific species, like red clover and bumblebees in the uk.
This is in no way a rebuttal to your points, but merely out of interest: how does pollination by honey bee work in countries where the hornets are endemic?
I'd recommend this book, it explains a few interactions between species of animals / insects / plants and shows how everything is more of less connected in ways we can't imagine
Nature is full of pollinators. The reason we need to carry around bees to pollinate crops is because we have dedicated vast areas to monocultures where no insect diversity can be established. They become diversity deserts. So a known and tried solution: mixed crops, crop rotation, and insect oasis. We keep paying in environmental health so our food is cheaper and easier to produce. That needs to end.
Calorie crops mostly self pollinate or similar (wheat, corn, soy, etc). Bees don't matter there.
For things like apples, it's actually affordable to pay humans to do it. Which is not to say that bee's aren't better than humans in most ways, just that it doesn't come down to 'no options'.
And like other people are saying, honeybees are livestock, they aren't 'nature'.
It's clear you are mixing up vanilla and most every kind of fruit tree. One is a high-value, low-volume speciality crop, the other is the exact opposite. Pollinating a cherry orchard! Dude, you go first!
Ya. Cognitive dissonance. Humankind has full agency (dominion) with an utter refusal to even acknowledge consequences, much less accept responsibility.
"Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections."
Yup.
In the Anthropocene, we are the gardeners. Laissez faire is a terrible gardening strategy.
There is no safe harbor. We will always need nature to sustain ourselves.
We are nature, full stop. But if you include our digestive tracts, that fact is inescapable. We are a sentient bioreactors. I’m thinking we can destroy nature and keep going is suicide.
> And outside of economic and survival concerns: Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever. How could you honestly take this position? What do you find valuable? What do you find beautiful? What do you live for?
I generally agree, but could you further define what Nature means to you? especially when you say "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever."
The problem is that people think environmentalism is about preserving the environment. The planet's gonna be fine, it's humans who are gonna have a bad time.
> The planet's gonna be fine, it's humans who are gonna have a bad time.
This sentiment is too simplifying. Yes, the planet, as in a spinning celestial object with a molten core, solid surface with water, and an atmosphere will be fine, so to speak, but the vast amounts of flora and fauna will not and haven’t been. Some will make it, but I don’t define that as “fine”.
Many animal species, if they haven’t already gone extinct have been suffering deeply. Take a look at the southern resident orca population. We captured, killing many in the process, and enslaved them, all of which served to torture those enslaved and break up the matriarchal hierarchies that existed. This left new, untrained leaders in the population. Before then and since then, we have poisoned them and have completely decimated their food source. These are direct consequences of unneeded, self serving actions of humans. We also harass them sonically. This is a population that is already and has been having a “bad time”, and it’s likely the population will go extinct. The cause of all this is 100% humans. Now take this example and multiply it by the thousands if not millions of species also going extinct and having bad times. Humans and our technological development combined literally form an extinction event.
But what is "heal"? There's no such thing as the "right" or "fine" ecosystem. In 100 years, I'm nearly 100% certain that this planet will still exist and something will live on it.
His point was that we're killing ourself. An ecosystem and a planet will continue existing, the question is whether humans will exist on it.
I think an appropriate definition of the right ecosystem is the one that would be here without the vast narcissism of humans. Yes, humans are animals, but we have broken out of the natural balance of things and relished in that fact by destroying everything in our wake in the name of so-called progress.
I agree, but when dealing with a narcissist, the only way to make progress may be to play to their narcissism. If that's what it takes, sure, let's do it and pretend that we need to live sustainable livestyles to save humanity.
Bee careful when talking about wiping out invasive species. Honeybees aren't native to north america. Nor are the majority of crops that they pollinate. "Invasive", by government definition, means not just foreign but also economically dangerous. Conversely, screwworm is native but we chose to wipe that species from north american because it was economically dangerous. I haven't heard anyone talk of allowing it back.
The article you cite doesn't seem to really agree with you:
> So why the global obsession with the one species that makes honey? For one, honey bees have hives, which makes them easy to keep and transfer en masse. For another, some native bees are picky about which flowers they prefer and where they live. As a result, commercial pollination is almost wholly dependant on honey bees.
> ...The goal of all this work is not to replace honey bees, but to pinpoint which native bees are effective, what they can offer and how to lure them into visiting and pollinating.
From what the article describes, the honey bee is uniquely suited for the niche we need it for, and there is no other species even remotely as well adapted -- though they're trying to figure out if any other species could be made to work in some lesser capacity.
So it doesn't seem that native species are underappreciated -- just that there are very good reasons we use the honeybee instead.
I know where I live most native pollinators are very selective and, as a result, in very small numbers since their habitat doesn’t resemble what it did even 100 years ago. They’re a drop in the bucket compared to what we require... And even if we made enormous efforts to boost their populations, I think they’d largely only pollinate fruit trees.
Good question. I should have specified that I was saying that in the context of conventional crops. From what I've read, they don't pollinate many conventional crops but they are drawn to fruit trees. Otherwise mostly native plants which humans don't cultivate for food.
In some places I know similar species are actually grown for commercial pollination, so it'll vary from place to place for sure.
Capitalism doesn't know how to account for things that have no dollar signs attached. The only answer to anything in capitalism is: let's create a market for that. When you elevate capitalism to an ideology (which is what is happening for many people) instead of an economic tool that you need to use when necessary, then you lose focus of the real world outside markets.
Why you assume that non-capitalism is the same as communism? Capitalist ideology and communism are extremes, in my opinion there is a healthy balance between them.
I agree with this viewpoint. A more non-statist communism (re: unions and local area orgs that manage 90% of all needs), worker coops, less power for D.C. more for states and local municipalities.
healthcare being ran by a union of worker coops, that all pay taxes into the union of unions to manage healthcare for all members (workers and consumers who are members of the union)... Don't want to be part of the union then don't and if your employer still has their own health ins. use that, or maybe they use ours anyways cause it'd be better... Either way options still exist with the best ones rising to the top like normal capitalism, just CEOs and execs wouldn't be paid as well, because their value is a lot less than they think it is.
Exactly. Extremes of capitalism and communism are bound to lead to conflict and destruction because there is no way to convince everyone of something. But a well balanced society should be able to combine market based solutions with community based solutions where it makes sense.
yeah, I'm also a bit anti-authoritarian, so I feel smaller community initiatives shares power more, with less of it concentrated in power brokers who's only goal is money and power, and thus gives a little boost to more people willing to work for it as volunteers, or coop members, or part of the local community efforts.
A balanced society as you say, can only come from something that's not capitalism or communism both of which are authoritarian or oligarchical at the very least.
Ancom, I think is the best solution with the least amount of friction. I mean all it requires to get started is for people to form a union, start some union-owned businesses, put the profits back into healthcare for all members of the union. Anyone can become a member who wants to (might have a dues though), then they'd be encourage to buy from union businesses, who will in turn use that $$ to pay medical bills for all union members. If there's surplus everyone gets dividends, and workers get big bonuses.
> Why you assume that non-capitalism is the same as communism?
Free market propaganda often sets up a black/white dichotomy between capitalism and communism/central planning, then uses the failures of regimes like the Soviet Union to attempt to train readers to think that any deviation from capitalism will lead to similar disasters.
Because communist apologetics usually come from people who are communits, not people who think there is a healthy balance. Which is already in law. The US, just like every other healthy functioning country in the world, is socialist. They just suck at it horrendously in certain fields. The capitalist ideal is talked about, but mostly because of the innovation aspect, not the worker exploitation aspect. In fact, and especially these days, manual labor is so expensive, people are getting into DIY just to avoid it.
Not really, these days this position is more frequent in people who want a healthy balance and see policies purely motivated by free-market ideology. For example, it is very clear that the Trump administration is shock full of free-market ideologues, in issues ranging from health care to education and the environment.
It's useful to note that system's thinking is such an outdated model of looking at the world. Basically modeling the world as a fancy mechanism, with mechanistic explanations about every aspects of the world. Very reductionist about organisms, nature, societies, etc.
Well, one of the reasons is that a lot of systems theory was basically trying to apply notions, concepts and mathematical analysis from physics, firm management, and game theory to contexts where they just didn't apply: ideal rationality of agents, information flow diagrams, and even notions like equilibria. The notion of equilibrium in ecosystems, for example, came from the physics of gases in vacuum chambers, neither organisms or populations of organisms exhibit such tendencies. There are many more examples of why mechanistic explanations simply don't work for many phenomena in the philosophy of science. Weiner, Simon, and others were just trying to use the maths they knew to solve some bigger more complex problems and in the process ended up stretching the metaphor of the system a bit too far.
I think its a good start to learn about chaotic systems instead. For most systems, minute parameter changes can have dramatic effects on the predictability of the system
> There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee. Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications.
This is solely due to the industrialization of agriculture.
Leaving fallow portions of the field and growing native crops winds up with an assortment of pollinators--including a lot of native bees.
The problem is that they are less efficient. So, a farmer who does this will lose to a farmer who uses industrialized honeybees.
This is a standard case of privatize the profit and socialize the risk.
> Humanity does not stand on its own, we still need nature to sustain ourselves.
Working towards reducing that reliance sounds like a better investment than hoping that a fragile system keeps stable if we undo the changes we noticed we cause (a system that had multiple extinction events in the past)
Extinction events don't happen that often. Meanwhile the massive changes we've made to our environment (in a relatively small time frame) are having a serious impact on our ability to survive on this planet.
We don't need to "reduce our reliance on nature". We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of. Whether it be on planet-scale or otherwise. We don't exist in a vacuum.
Individual extinctions and extinction events are usual considered as different things. The former is commonplace, the latter rare and results in massive shifts.
> We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of.
Houses, heating, cooling make us resilient to outside temperature and weather changes, advanced construction makes us resilient to earthquakes, etc. etc.
There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.
None of those things protect you from an extinction event.
I’m not sure why you think that plant pollination needs a new solution in the first place. We’ve been working with bees for centuries and we’ve used them as a tool. Bees are themselves an optimal method for pollination created though thousands of years of natural progress.
Colonizing Mars continues to be a pipe dream and even if/when people start living there it’s going to be full of compromises and discomfort. And we’ll still have billions of people stuck on earth.
Technology isn’t the solution to all of life’s problems.
Closed system biospheres on Earth have proved impossible to date. Mars is vastly less tractable.
Technological optimists have had a poor record over the past 50+ years. Infotech is the exception rather than the rule, and even it has encountered progressively formidable headwinds.
> Houses, heating, cooling make us resilient to outside temperature and weather changes
Heating and cooling necessarily heat the exterior of the heated or cooled environment more than they do heat or cool the interior. As the temperature warms, you need to cool your interior space even more, pumping yet more heat into the surrounds. For one, all that energy has to come from somewhere. For two, hopefully you don’t drive the system beyond a point where your heating and cooling can keep up.
> There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.
There is a huge, vast, expansive, unimaginably large, ridiculously wide chasm between “working on plans to colonize Mars” and “actually colonizing Mars.” In the meantime, we’ve got ~10 billion people dependent on the existing ecosystem we’ve got here. Keeping that global ecosystem healthy enough to support those people without massive die-offs or total chaos, without the benefit of any globally organized effort to speak of, is deeply and profoundly not trivial, probably much less trivial than supporting a very small population on another planet.
Plus, even if we do manage to colonize another world without first learning how to maintain the one we have, what exactly is the end game? Hop from planet to planet, destroying any life we find or create along the way?
Yeah, I'm looking forward to living in a world made out of dust deserts and domed cities - but we managed to keep the 9-to-5 bullshit jobs and the stock market alive! Awesome!
Short-sighted "environmentalist" thinking will let this invasive species take over all of North America and South America. We aren't willing to sacrifice, even temporarily, the local insects. You have to be willing to do that if you expect to stop this invasive species, because you can not possibly find all the nests fast enough.
If we were to think long-term, we could stop this invasive species. Crop duster planes spray everything within at least several generations or years of insect migration. That might mean 10,000 square miles gets completely soaked in a mix of Sevin, Malathion, and neonicotinoids.
Compared to the roughly 16,300,000 square miles at risk of being irrevocably harmed by an invasive species, that local and temporary ecosystem damage would be practically nothing.
We'll argue a bit and do nothing. The wasps are here to stay. Say goodbye to bees.
I'll try and explain the "anti-environmentalist" position as best I can.
Consider climate change. Let's take it as given that climate change is an existental threat to humanity, and that it is caused by carbon dumped into the atmosphere by mankind. If this is true, then we need to leverage the full arsenal of technology available to us to solve the problem.
Nuclear power is a solution we have in-hand, today, to atmospheric carbon.
Of course, it comes with trade-offs. Nuclear waste is a big downside, but nuclear waste is a tiny annoyance compared to a runaway greenhouse effect.
And yet, environmentalists have, for sixty years, fought tooth-and-nail against nuclear power.
This brings me to the point: the track record of environmentalists, and the of green movement, shows that they do not care about the environment, nor do they care about solving real problems with real solutions for real people.
What they do seem to care about is money. Especially taxpayer money, because once you're in, the gravy never stops. Actually solving problems doesn't matter, as long as you look busy and get interviewed on MSNBC and NPR a lot.
The image of the envrionmentalist is of someone who will chain themselves to trees to protest their university building a new parking lot, with lots of pictures for Instagram and the news, but only until the semester break. Instead of organizing transportation and/or walkable housing for other students, thereby eliminating the demand for additional parking.
The opposition by-and-large cares very deeply about the environment. You'd be hard-pressed to find more environmentally-conscious folks than in the hunting and homesteading communities.
But they also believe, from observed behavior, that environmentalists are mostly interested in prolonging the problem while making themselves rich.
I’m a beekeeper and every passing year it becomes harder to keep my colonies alive. I’m really glad that we’re taking this threat seriously, because we don’t need one more problem on our list of things that kill our bees.
While I’m at it, please allow me to remind everyone that there are thousands of solitary bee species in the world. They are the ones that go extinct or in real danger compared to our honey bees. There are many struggling beekeepers like me in the world, and we’re doing our best to keep our bees alive. But thousands of species are without keepers and they are dying. Please be gentle to the nature. Let them live.
I've read a number of articles describing the stressors on bee colonies, but I'm interested in your take - what do you see as the primary factors affecting your colonies?
I live in place where winters are harsh. Colonies need to be well-prepared to successfully overwinter. They are amazingly robust when they are healthy, but anything that affects this preparation can easily be deadly over a period of time.
There can be many reasons. The Varroa Mite [0] is one that we have to constantly fight against, these days. The mites don't kill the entire colony, but weakens it so much that the colony can't overwinter. Or there viruses [1] that deform the bees' wings that can debilitate the colony. There are also other problems that we don't see where I live, but other beekeepers have to fight, such as the Small Hive Beetle [2].
I suspect because of the ongoing wildfires and poor air quality in this region, one of my queens stopped laying eggs mid-summer, at a time when she normally lays 1,500-2,000 eggs every day. I had to replace her. I don't know if that colony is going to survive the winter.
Some other colonies had similar problems. Yesterday a beekeeper friend told me she lost a colony and she has another one on the brink of collapsing.
Then, we also don't know who is using what type of pesticides around here. Bees can forage anywhere in the 2-3 mile radius. It's near impossible for me to know what's going on in such a wide area.
I don't know much about bees but I just recently started following an Instagram account (@texasbeeworks) that earlier this year posted a video[1] of a bee with a Varroa Mite.
The video's caption:
"Alright, here is what I want everyone to know about ‘murder hornets’. Only one nest of Asian Giant Hornets has been found in North America and it was quickly eradicated. Right now, the nation’s top entomologists are watching the situation and beekeepers like myself are not worried. If these hornets become a serious problem for honeybees, we will find a solution to keep bees safe.
If you really want something to be afraid of and if you want to know what keeps beekeepers awake at night, look closely at the bee in this video. You’ll see a dark, round speck on the side of her body. That, my friends, is something far more terrifying than these so-called ‘murder hornets’—it is a Varroa Mite. (Scroll through to see it up close.) The Varroa Mite is a parasitic mite that feeds on the fat bodies of bees and its decimating bee populations around the world.
At this point in time, Varroa Mites are a much greater threat to honeybee populations than Asian Giant Hornets and if they got the same attention in the press, maybe we would have a solution for them. Everyone now knows the term ‘murder hornet’ but the thing we should be talking about In the US is the Varroa Mite, a creature whose scientific name is literally ‘Varroa Destructor’.
Please stop the murder hornet hype and please start talking about the thing that’s killing more honeybees in the US than anything else right now—varroa mites."
Varroa is and has been my #1 problem for a while. I hate it. But I can't agree with this statement:
"If these hornets become a serious problem for honeybees, we will find a solution to keep bees safe."
It can easy be too late. Look at what's happening in Europe. They simply can't stop the hornets.
Of course it's more dramatic to show these huge insects. They are impressive and scary. Mites are small and look insignificant. They are not dramatic. They won't generate hype. I understand the frustration as a beekeeper, but don't let yet another problem become too big to reverse the tide on. It is obviously cheaper to deal with the hornets right now, hype or no hype.
Just like the US could have treated Coronavirus seriously early on and helped keep numbers down, but chose to do nothing and now it's everywhere and doing far more damage to the economy.
Don't let murder hornets become the bee's new Coronavirus equivalent. It sounds like they're already dealing with plenty of pandemic-like issues as it is.
To quote George W Bush, who actually took pandemics seriously, "A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire. If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it."
There’s been many weeks where epidemiologist were sounding the alarms but the CDC had basically zero tests available. The whole world was getting infected and the US was flying blind
Or May be just look at what other Asian countries have done (outside of China) and look at what they did. It’s exactly everything the US did not do
We can't find a way to stop them + huge insects = unsolved problem
This seems contradictory to me as a beek. 5/16 holes as a mouse guard should also keep huge insects out of the hive. It also should be easy to create pheromone traps if it is true that the hornet's seek out the scent of other dead hornets.
On a side note, I see mites as a genetics issue. I would rather see commercial outfits using selection rather than treating with chemicals and shipping packages with weak genetics all over the US. Spearding weak genes is kind of the opposite of Darwin...
Yeah, I don't use pollen traps, propolis traps, nor queen excludes. I'm not sure how they would effect drones. I know drones can fit through 3/8 inch. I'm not sure what size the hornets can fit through. If they are the same size as cicada killers, I would guess 3/8 is too small for them.
Drones can’t fit through my excluders.
Every so often I put a frame
from the brood boxes above the excluder. Old frames or ones with lots of drone cells. I have to check back in a few days to let the drones out or they die and block the excluder. Workers try to pull them though and jam them in the holes.
I’m currently using some nice American made excluders and they are really nice. They are made of wire and are quite quite rigid.
> Only one nest of Asian Giant Hornets has been found in North America and it was quickly eradicated. Right now, the nation’s top entomologists are watching the situation and beekeepers like myself are not worried.
I can't help but think of when we only had one covid case and people said not to worry.
Have you heard that certain pseudoscorpions might be of help against varroa mites? They seem to hunt them and would need to live in the beekeeping box as I understand.
There is a tiny bit of information on them in german Wikipedia [0] (automatic translation [1], let me know if I can help with translation). Wikipedia says that they can be found worldwide, so maybe they will be of help.
(Please note that under _no circumstances_ this was meant as encouragement to introduce new invasive species to your area!)
Here is more information: the page of the beekeeper researching pseudoscorpions and bee interactions is at [2], [3] is about a book he wrote, called "Instruction manual for species-appropriate husbandry of bees and pseudoscorpions". A comment in [3] also suggests that under ideal circumstances, these pseudoscorpions might be able to deal with a small hive beetle.
This poster [4] states that having pseudoscorpions in hives unfortunately had no influence on varroa numbers, though.
New Zealander here - a lot of people are using Oxalic acid and glycerine on paper strips and are getting great results here - me included.
The paper is a plasterboard jointing paper and 3-5 layers are sewn together and soaked in a solution of about 40% Oxalic acid, 60% glycerine. Used like conventional mite strips they need replacing more often but seem to work really well.
Randy Oliver has been trialing other delivery methods in California.
My hives are the best they have ever been this season, with a very strong start.
Are things like the beetles and virus new introductions to the area, or is it just a confluence of factors that are hitting harder now?
I'd also heard (many years ago) that, while the colonies can collapse, the bees normally reproduce quickly enough that you don't see much of a net loss in colony counts year-over-year - how do you see that?
My impression is that the bee populations have been remarkably resilient year over year, but whenever I see this kind of stress-and-recovery cycle, I worry that there's a tipping point - many systems seem Fine under stress until they overwhelm their recovery mechanism and collapse catastrophically.
Not the OP, but here in New Zealand the issues are greatly exacerbated by hive overstocking, migrant beekeepers (eg a truck brings in 100 hives one day, and the additional extras in those hives are spread to local hives), poor beekeeping, American Foul Brood and a low sale price for honey.
This is an example of typical modern thinking that believes we can solve problems such as global warming and bee extinction by doing individual actions. This is completely nonsense. Either we do this as a public policy or there is no solution.
Your comment is an example of typical programmer thinking that says "only a perfect solution is worth releasing".
I have been guilty of that error countless times.
An individual's actions will not solve a society's woes, but they don't need to. If they help a little bit where they are, they can be worth doing.
Furthermore, individuals trying to help does not preclude larger-scale solutions. The people attempting individual actions could even contribute to the larger-scale or policy-based solutions.
I am not advocating for a "perfect solution or nothing". I advocate for solutions based on public policy, even if they're partial. But I object to individual solutions, because they're no solution at all. It doesn't matter how many people do little actions, if there are a few big actors (say multinational corporations) exploiting and polluting the environment, the result is worse than zero! It is just like taking as aspirin to "help cure" a cancer that is destroying the body. And in fact focusing on doing these little things is a net negative, because it distracts from the big actions that need to be taken to fix an urgent problem.
This worldview discounts the political awareness that such actions can foster. Someone who replaced their crabgrass lawn with native meadow has a daily embodiment of their value system. When such a person hears about murder hornets, is this person somehow less likely to contact his/her representatives about the issue than the person who kept a typical lawn, in your assessment ? That's the only way I can see this as a net negative, rather than neutral or trivially positive.
Or, given that the described standpoint suggests I have enough attention for either planting a meadow lawn or supporting 'big action', why are you wasting it telling us about this, instead of naming names of the big actors to write to our representatives about and avoid electing representatives that hold a favorable position toward them ?
1) Individual good actions virtually never outweigh large-scale bad actions, but the world is actually worse off if individuals do not take those little positive actions. Little polluter + big polluter yields more pollution than big polluter.
2) Taking the small positive actions is actually a lot of what helps people work on the huge, difficult problems. Humans are more effective when our psychology is a unified self rather than in conflict with itself, and taking small, positive concrete steps helps us keep ourselves in alignment with our big-picture goals and ideals.
I guess both of those fit into the abstract observation that you're bifurcating - people don't have to choose between individual concrete actions and contributing to policy efforts and other high-level approaches.
By all means, if you see someone explicitly saying they choose one at the expense of the other, say something.
When they don't say that, though, don't assume that's what they're doing.
Native solitary bees are going extinct and in danger largely because of being outcompeted by invasive European honeybees. They're not the only invasive hymenopteran established in the Nearctic, but thanks to human effort they are by far the most prolific.
If you have access to gardens, you can plant bee-friendly flowering plants according to your region's climate.
You can learn about the wild bees in your region and understand what natural resources they thrive on. Some of them are so specialized that they can easily be threatened by the loss of habitat. Some of the bee "houses" can become great activities for children. For example kids can build Mason Bee houses and watch them attract bees.
Supporting local beekeepers and bee-friendly farmers.
By trying to keep an immaculate lawn or mosquito-free areas, most of us sacrifice the local insect population including various bees that are affected by those pesticides.
By spreading awareness, but also starting your own hive is a great hobby and it's quite affordable if you have the time. You don't even have to have them in your garden or balcony. You can speak to local farmers, and they can be happy to host your hive on their property. That's how I started.
I have a good amount of bee-friendly flowers that are visited daily in the spring and summer by our local bee populations, it is very much “build it and they will come”.
If I had a bigger yard I would host a couple hives of my own, I love just sitting out in the flowers in the warmer weather and watching them forage.
Bumble bees may be an option? Smaller hives, less issues with neighbours and great to watch.
I have no issues with neighbours and have somewhere between 3 and 6 hives depending on how you count. This is in a backyard of a suburban section. Preemptive honeystrikes may have helped - I get 150-250kgs of honey that it’s no issue giving it away and that seems to generate good will.
Not a beekeeper but it’s pretty easy to connect the dots from bee extinction to ecological collapse. No pollinators leads to decreased germination which leads to less food for the lower levels of the food chain and on and on
> Not a beekeeper but it’s pretty easy to connect the dots from bee extinction to ecological collapse.
How is that an easy connection? Your argument essentially says without bees then nature as we know it falls apart catastrophically - I am incredulous you could interpret this as obvious. Species go extinct all the time and yet Earth is still doing just fine, apart from the damage humans are doing to it.
> No pollinators
Bees are not the only pollinators
> leads to decreased germination
A decrease is not the same as elimination
> which leads to less food
A decrease is not the same as elimination
> for the lower levels of the food chain and on and on
Your argument is a about knock-on effects, which certainly exist. But you seem to think if any point in the chain breaks, it leads to ecological collapse. Why do you assume nature is so fragile? I am not a biologist and maybe bees are special or there is something I do not understand, but I certainly don't think it's an obvious conclusion.
Nature might endure what we throw at it, we might not. When people say that humans are ruining the planet, maybe a few people are actually worried about the rock, but most of us are worried about having an ecosystem compatible with our civilization.
You might want to investigate about the sparrows in china, quick version; a campaign to exterminate the sparrows to increase grain production ended up with famines.
You're making a leap from "collapse" to "elimination". Searching for "GDP collapse", the first result I get is referring to a global 4.3% predicted collapse for 2020. People seem to be taking that pretty hard.
I'm pretty sure honey bees are relatively safe as long as there are beekeepers. As I noted above, there are thousands of solitary and/or wild bee species that are in real danger. They pollinate an important part of the plants. Their loss would probably trigger chain reactions that we should avoid.
Is that a real risk? I thought it was pretty straightforward to breed more of them. For now. The colony collapse problem is real, but I haven't heard any serious discussion of honeybees going extinct.
> but I haven't heard any serious discussion of honeybees going extinct.
In Europe it is..in fact it was the main-theme 3 years ago. And not just bees but insects overall...the honeybee was just the friendly looking ambassador for that message.
Peoples with brushes on trees and bushes...and for everything that doesn't make money and is dependent on bees will go extinct too (flowers, trees etc..). And now back to school.
It makes me a little nauseous to think about all the resources going to tracking down these insects, but this is truly an area where an ounce of prevention is worth many pounds of cure.
The scope of North America's invasive species problem is enormous. For many folks in urban areas, it's possible that you might go your whole day only encountering one native bird species (American Crow), but a whole host of invasive species (Rock Pigeon, House Sparrows, European Starlings).
‘All the resources’ make you nauseous? Seems like a weird reaction.
Washington State department of agriculture’s budget is public information; they spend about a quarter of a billion dollars a year on all their programs. I can’t imagine this particular operation is making much of a dent in that overall spend. According to the captions of those photographs, they have entomologists and pest control specialists on staff already. Salaries are also public. Sven Spichinger, shown in one of those pictures, Managing Entomologist, is on $87,000 a year - whether he’s hunting for murder hornets or not, presumably. There are three different levels of ‘Pest Biologist’ job in the department. It kind of looks like this is a project that is taking up the time of a few people who they already had on staff, to deal with exactly this kind of problem.
Does all government spending make you nauseous, or only when it’s visibly helping?
Please omit personal swipes from your HN posts. You sparked a flamewar with that last bit, and your comment would have been just fine without it. The first bit too. The middle of the sandwich was good.
>> I can’t imagine this particular operation is making much of a dent in that overall spend.
When I read the article I thought there are likely other nests nearby. Perhaps they should use some of the forestry budget to do a controlled burn in the area. It'll reduce severity of future fires and get any of any hornets nearby ;-)
It's thought that these came south from Canada. That's a fairly significant distance. They can fly miles in a single day [0] and specimens in Washington have been found 50 miles apart.
If there's evidence of multiple other hives in the area, a controlled burn may get some of them, but the scope of the fire necessary could also be massive.
I'm not saying the option shouldn't be part of our arsenal. And if this is an area prone to wild-fires, then as you said it could assist there as well. However, I'm not sure it's a good option at this time, especially considering the side effects on other local indigenous species.
People are living, shitting, and dying en masse on the streets of LA who need food and basic sanitation but you really can't even imagine a non malicious interpretation of someone saying paying for teams of bubble suited wasp chasers seems like potentially a misallocation of resources?
Or do you just generally like to bully anyone who challenges any form of government spending by attacking strawmen?
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
You... You do realize they're trying to rid these wasps because they're an existential threat to our bee population, right? You realize that losing our bees would cost farmers billions of collective dollars and raise the price of food for everyone, right?
> People are living, shitting, and dying en masse on the streets of LA who need food and basic sanitation but you really can't even imagine a non malicious interpretation of someone saying paying for teams of bubble suited wasp chasers seems like potentially a misallocation of resources?
Are you suggesting the government of the State of Washington is responsible for providing food and basic sanitation in Los Angeles?
Not GP, but this seems like being upset by the environmental damage resulting from your city fire department driving diesel firetrucks in relative and absolute scale and scope.
I'm actually somewhat upset about this in my city. The fire department is driving these gigantic fire engines with ladders and everything to every medical emergency, when just a small van would be totally fine.
Chesterton’s Fence: I grew up close to the Chief of our town’s Fire Dept. He explained that they sent the second piece of large equipment primarily because of the re-dispatch problem.
If they get a second call which would require the engine, they didn’t want to risk having the fire personnel on scene in the little rescue truck and away from the engine, delaying response to the fire. (For the same reason, they wore the full turnout gear to support medical calls.)
They could leave one guy in the station to drive the engine to the fire and drive the rest of the crew in the small van to the fire, where they then man the engine.
There is probably more to it, but at least the way you describe it doesn't sound convincing.
Also I should add the in the previous cities I lived in they of course didn't do that. They just used small vans for medical emergencies. Originally when I moved here i thought it was burning a lot more when I saw all those engines on the street all the time, but it wasn't that.
My suspicion is that it's related to justifying having so much of the big equipment.
But if the big engines are overused too much they likely break down much faster too, driving a vicious circle of needing more and more of them, creating bigger budgets, more power for the fire chief etc.etc.
What equipment with what personnel is dispatched is incredibly complicated. You would be shocked. And most fire districts/departments regularly tweak their "response plans."
I am all ears for how we could solve homelessness in LA by defunding the Washington State Department of Agriculture’s entomology program.
Maybe you’re right, though - the progressive militarization of state pest control departments during the global war on terror is probably one of the principal ways in which inequality is perpetuated in this country.
If you're cooking anything with meat or imported produce, you're still damaging the environment, regardless of where it's cooked. Also your leftovers need to be put into something(often plastic) and stored in a refrigerated or frozen environment(electric/carbon costs), then reheated(electric/carbon cost). If you get tired of eating the same thing after 3 days and the rest rots away in your fridge, you've just created a ton of waste, or if you think to yourself you're going to spend 3 hours doing weekly meal-prep, but then flake out and don't do it, you just wasted everything. Some people are just terrible chefs or do not have the energy for it after working 50 - 60 hours in the week.
Also you could make a case that large houses with nice kitchens also have environmental costs to build and maintain, and living in small apartments with communal kitchens or restaurants nearby is better.
You make some thought provoking points, but there are a lot of "ifs" there. So, even a chance that some savings might be achieved by cooking staple foods at home once in a while seems worth considering.
Most people end up leaving a lot on the table when eating out, and 100% of that food ends up in the trash / wasted.
If you want to save money then cooking bulk foods at home might make sense, people just need to make sure they're really calculating the costs properly. If you want a balanced diet and varied menu, then it can be expensive and labor intensive.
If you want to save the environment, then you should reconsider your whole diet. Reduce meat intake and make smaller meals with more environmentally conscious ingredients(likely more expensive).
Regarding leftovers, plenty of people put restaurant leftovers in a container and take them home to eat later. The people who don't would likely waste food at home too.
The department may very well need more significant resources to continue this fight, as will surrounding states if Washington isn't effective in fighting this.
I'm not against government spending. I think there are plenty of problems that market forces alone cannot solve. I think the government should provide a solid safety net for its citizens. That is precisely why I lament the resources required for this. They are absolutely necessary, and at the same time it means there are fewer resources to go to other absolutely necessary needs.
I don't see what there is to lament. If this is necessary spending (it seems it is) and there is other necessary spending, then it seems we must pay for both of those things.
I guess we could wish that the hornets never arrived here, but the life of a government is solving thousands of problems like these. If not the hornets, it would be something else. The uplifting moment is that this was a successful containment. Money well-spent :)
Yes, we should do both things, and the hornet issue is essential spending. But resources are limited, and there are plenty of people don't consider safety-net spending essential. That's my lament, that between hornets and people, few will dispute the necessity of dealing with the first, while plenty will the second.
Every effort we make today involves producing lots of plastic, burning diesel, and other ways which wreck both human and animal habitats.
This effort to destroy one hornet's nest probably had direct result of bringing someone a little closer towards having asthma and indirectly, through supply chain effects, costing a few dozen insect colonies, animals, and plants their lives somewhere else in the world.
Now that you mention it, it does make me a bit nauseated.
Antarctica is clearly doing something right, I'd suggest we emulate them. A a well-funded coalition of wildlife experts should be deployed to determine what special conditions have conspired to produce such a resistant ecological niche.
Hemelin, Germany on the other hand only found a temporary solution to the problem when the anonymous Pied Piper visited the area. Perhaps he was unaware that some rats can swim up to a mile and simply drove the local rat population to the surrounding area. Regardless, the example clearly illustrates that music-based solutions to the problem are, at best, temporary.
There's a big difference though: It's well known that the rat population in Reykjavik are transitory tourists, often visiting purely for the spectacular volcano tours in the area.
Is there any evidence of such attempts to neuter Mother Nature actually working? Unless, global trade ceases, can this effort be maintained and successful over the long haul?
I'm not suggesting it's bad or wrong to try, only whether there's evidence that the odds favor doing so.
There are some success stories, like the European Grapevine Moth in CA [1]. The key seems to be aggressive action when the threat is still in it’s infancy and contained. Given that murder hornets weren’t reported in the US until this year, I’m hopeful. For something like the invasive ice plant already covering the West Coast there seems little hope.
Agreed! I’ve read about certain coastal areas that have been purged of invasive species. But there’s a constant upkeep cost to keep the invaders from just moving in again a couple years later.
For these murder hornets, if we make a big up front investment in eradicating them now, there’s hope that we can prevent them from establishing themselves and becoming another perpetual battle.
I've never had to deal with a murder hornet infestation, but I can approve of their 'vacuum' method for clearing yellowjacket nests in high-traffic areas.
Partially fill a shop vac with soapy water, stick the nozzle as close to the nest entrance as possible, then turn on the vacuum and hear the wasps get sucked into the machine as they try to enter or exit the nest. It takes a few hours, and potentially a couple of separate sessions to mop up any stragglers.
No fancy beekeeper suit necessary, and, best of all, no need to spread nasty poisons.
Does that perhaps depend on the species of wasp, or maybe the reach of the wand?
IIRC, there was one youtube video where the little bastards went straight for the dude's face during shop-vac'ing. He could smell the venom they were trying to spray in his eyes.
When one of the wasps (or hornets?) went straight for his GoPro sensor, its face filled my large monitor and I nearly had a heart attack.
I'm no expert, but I've read a bit about Vespula vulgaris (the most common sort of wasp in the UK) and tackled a few nests in the past.
My impression is that if you put a vacuum cleaner next to the entrance you may, if you're lucky, catch nearly all the wasps that leave the nest, but the queen never leaves the nest, and the eggs and larvae don't leave the nest, and I think there may also be some workers that stay in the nest looking after the larvae, so things will be quieter after you've finished vacuuming, but the colony will probably regenerate itself in a week or so.
Vespex is used here in New Zealand and has been a game changer. Wasps are the greatest pest in New Zealand if you measure pests in “kgs per hectare”.
With Vespex you don’t go looking for nests, you let the colony poison itself.
Because it is protein based and not sugar based, it’s not attractive to as many species. The downside is that the wasps only take it at a specific time of year - when they are consuming protein.
Might be tricky if the nest is in a garage or something (and not easy to cut down and move), but otherwise that could probably be solved by burning it.
For those wondering about the soapy water, it effectively suffocates the hornets because soap allows the water to penetrate and clog the spiracles which prevents them from breathing.
Soapy water is actually a powerful insecticide against many arthropods:
It does seem to work on insects resilient to other poisons for sure.
We used a mix of vinegar, soap, and water in a spray bottle to rid our patio of earwigs this year and it seemed to work incredibly well. The insecticides we were spraying them with before trying the soap did absolutely nothing but cost $7 a can.
I have a mid-grade phobia of stinging insects and arachnids.
I once blew a few hours to anxiously watching youtube videos of people destroying nasty wasp/hornet infestations. (I'm still not sure why. Probably some mix of morbid fascination and aggression fantasy.)
The soapy-water-shopvac trick appeared in a lot of those videos. (Less commonly: thermite, or quad-propeller drones.)
Same w/ "bees," but not arachnids. Also blew a few hours watching nest extermination videos. I generally wish the best (within reason) for our non-human beings, but it was very cathartic.
The method is fine but I'd probably still wear a suit while setting such a thing up ... at least a jacket, gloves, full pants tucked into thick socks, and mosquito net.
Professionals wear PPE because if you incur a low-probability risk every time you do X, and you do X often enough (because it's your profession), X will happen to you.
For example, if you have a 99% chance of nothing going wrong, and you do that thing 500 times, it's essentially guaranteed to happen (0.99^500 = 0.0066).
The stinging insect removal guys will be stung if they are in the profession for decades without PPE.
Most insects are very prone to dying of dehydration if their exoskeleton is pierced - it's how diatomaceous earth works. My best guess with how vacuums kill insects is small nicks to the exoskeleton from flying debris causing eventual death. I've never vacuumed up an insect or spider and seen it come out alive.
I read that they can’t see well in the dark, so I deal with them at night. It’s a bit unnerving hearing them fly around when you can’t see them, but I’ve never been stung :)
> trapping and using dental floss to tie tracking devices to the hornets
What? That seems crazy (and cool) to be able to create a tracking device light enough for a hornet to fly and still have enough battery to transmit even a periodic chirp.
A strip of plastic means you have to have a spring at that end of the battery, a hole in the device for the plastic strip, and enough structure around the battery to hold the spring and battery separately. The hole also makes waterproofing more difficult.
All of this would add weight and size, and those trackers are really small and really lightweight. Judging by the photos, the battery is just hard wired to the circuit, and the whole thing is encapsulated with a thin layer of epoxy for waterproofing. That's by far the cheapest, easiest, and most reliable way to build something as lightweight as possible.
I doubt they use a socket that would allow the battery to be isolated, it's probably directly soldered in for weight and reliability. Otherwise they could just ship the battery uninstalled and let the user plug it in when he gets it. A weight of 0.15g doesn't give a lot of room for extra components like a battery socket.
Perhaps they could put a tiny antifuse in circuit with the battery inside the IC package. Supply external "programming" current to the IC, and it would melt the antifuse and get the battery going.
The whole device is encapsulated for waterproofing so supplying any current at all to it is tricky.
It says it's light activated. So likely they've put a tiny light sensor in it that the microcontroller polls occasionally during the lowest power mode. That might be a tiny solar panel too. But using that to electrically drive an electronic power switch is tricky if you don't have the budget for a custom ASIC; if you don't have that budget, you'll add a decent amount of weight in a device that tiny.
Honestly, I'm not at all surprised that they've chosen to accept a short shelf life instead. It's pretty remarkable that they can squeeze that much functionality into a 11mm long by 3.5mm diameter cylinder.
I would think that the engineers developing then already did the cost benefit analysis and decided that shipping them activated (and tested) is the best option for their users
Or just bring one of the battery leads out of the encapsulation and cut it. Just a tiny bit of solder and you hook it back up. With the rest of the device waterproofed just one tiny exposed contact should still remain waterproof with thin gauge solid conductor wire. There's no voltage differential so it shouldn't rust moreso than just a regular blob of solder exposed to the elements.
I wonder why its not just two interconnecting cylinders (using a tiny gasket) that you push together with thumb/finger when you want to activate/power the device.
Given that there would have been some serious engineering to think through the design there must have been trade-offs that I'm not considering though.
That'd probably be a good solution if the transmitter didn't need weatherproofing. I suppose adhesive film could be placed over the gap after removing the tab, though.
According to the link above they say they use lithium batteries, probably better power/weight, but likely the whole device is potted in epoxy and there isn't any way to turn it on/off. It just runs from when the battery is welded/soldered until there isn't power left.
Those protective suits look like something from a science fiction work. It even looks like a cell shaded rendering at second glance. I guess these hornets earned their title.
Yeah I saw this too - I guess those bees must have evolved with hornets as a predator and have developed that defence. But the bees in the west haven't and so they don't have any behaviour to help them.
At this point we're super early in the spread, and as far as what I read they think this may be the only one in the US.
Worth noting that one nest can create hundreds of new queens that will hibernate the winter and establish a nest in the spring. Not all will survive, but with minimal competition, and significant feeding opportunities from a mostly untapped ecosystem, many will. Destroying one nest to stop exponential growth is a great investment, especially early on.
Note: I'm not an expert in this area, I'm mostly parroting stuff I read in other articles.
This seems like an either-or thing. Either you fully eradicate the species from the area, or they establish a foothold that is infeasible to remove nest-by-nest, and then they grow exponentially.
> So they really think the infestation is small enough that it's feasible to find and destroy all the nests by hand?
No, they probably think that it is likely that, if that is not the case, it is likely to still be small enough that the progress can be significantly slowed by that means until a more complete solution is found.
Given that magnitude matters a lot and that it's a major threat to bee populations and through them much of the agriculture of the country, stalling tactics are a lot better than nothing.
I think they might be able to.. The asian longhorn beetle seems to be in check in the US (though another pest, the emerald ash borer they've given up on controlling).
But those are species that don't have centralized nests.. This might be easier if you can trap them and trace them back to their homes..
There are a lot of large insects that bear a superficial resemblance to V. mandarinia, especially in the absence of familiarity with hymenopterans. From WSDA's map of citizen sightings, it looks like the most commonly mistaken animals are large sawflies, which are very distant relatives of wasps and hornets and actually serve a significant ecological role by parasitizing the larvae of various tree-boring beetles.
Blaine Washington is right along the Canadian border and next to many islands. The islands are sparsely inhabited and infrequently visited by humans it makes me wonder if maybe there is still a colony out there. It seems like a difficult area to do containment so glad they tracked these down.
It looks like in 2019 Vancouver island (which is huge) had a colony get eradicated, but otherwise haven't seen much else reported.
Murder hornets are a real threat to honey bee hives. A handful of hornets can take out a hive of thousands.
What's interesting is the way that honey bees defend against them. A bunch of bees surround each hornet, then they intensify the flapping of their wings, which then generates enough heat to kill the hornet. In other words, the hornets are cooked alive.
It’s worth noting that the honeybee defense mechanism you describe is unique to Asian honeybees, which evolved this defense specifically because of the native Asian giant hornet / murder hornet.
European honeybees, which are used in most of the world, have no such defense mechanism and would indeed be helplessly slaughtered by these hornets.
I’d definitely advocate watching some YouTube footage about these creatures, they’re fascinating.
Isn‘t that exactly hoe a special very aggressive breed was created? They breed two different ones, both not aggressive but with interesting capabilities and somehow they created an aggressive one?
Yes and no. A biologist (Kerr) was trying to either improve the heat-resistance of european honeybees or gentle the african bees and amplify their productivity.
A fuckup led to the release of several of swarms of african bees which went on to crossbreed with local european honeybees, so africanised honeybees were not actually a human creation.
The result turned out to mostly take from their african ancestry: highly defensive, fast reproduction, readily swarming (or even absconding), way less picky about their nesting sites, … leading to high invasiveness.
AFAIK africanised honeybees are no worse than their african ancestors (though I'm not sure they're any better).
Bees form a mass in winter and work their wing muscles to keep themselves warm, rotating bees between inside and surface so none gets too cold for too long. So they did have a base behavior from which the surround-and-cook behavior could evolve.
When I first heard about the hornet defense I wondered how on Earth the bees could've come up with that. But if they already clumped up for warmth it's a lot more scrutable.
I think that comic understates the amazingness of the adaptation.
The honeybees don’t just swarm the hornets, they will actually retreat into the hive and allow the hornets to enter, then trap them inside while they roast them to death. All of this works because the honeybees can vibrate themselves to a temperature just warmer than the hornets can tolerate, which is also just less than the bees can tolerate. Just one or two degrees celsius of tolerance is the difference.
Hopefully no Asian giant hornets ever evolve a slightly higher temperature tolerance!
In the Pacific Northwest, we have a couple other slow moving ecological train wrecks. The first is the himalayan blackberry, an invasive species that kills everything else and completely dominates where it has taken root. It grows everywhere.
A similar story for the scotch broom. And the english ivy, which is killing the trees.
All of these are everywhere and very difficult to kill.
1994: We'll need airtight space suits for an Ebola outbreak.
2020: Surgical masks are a bit much to expect people to wear during a pandemic, Ebola has been circulating in Congo since 2014, and we'll need airtight space suits for a murder hornet outbreak.
Had we all been wearing surgical masks in public since the 90s, probably well over a million lives would have been saved by now from flu deaths alone.
Basically, since the 90s we've put a much much higher value on human life. I expect mask usage to extend far beyond covid and handshaking to cease being a cultural greeting.
Who needs to take the risk of physical human contact or to see the smile of a stranger walking down the street when you can survive a few years longer depressed inside a sterile bubble.
It's an example of positive daily human interaction. Keeping minimum distance and hiding the most expressive part of the body removes a lot of that from daily life, and people do suffer from it.
The world is significantly colder this year. I can't be the only one that feels it.
> It's an example of positive daily human interaction.
I find adults smiling to be gaudy and disconcerting, ever since I was a child. My wife included, although I like most of her so it's ok. Children don't bother me though, as it seems sincere.
COVID-19 has become more infectious over the course of the pandemic, with a strain that results in higher viral loads becoming predominant: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32697968/
As surgical masks are much less than 100% effective even in ideal conditions, let alone actual wear, it wouldn't be surprising if more usage of them would just be an evolutionary pressure for flu to have higher viral output. Quite similar to how widespread use of less than 100% effective anti-bacterial agents just results in bacteria evolving resistance, reducing the usefulness of those agents for the most vulnerable part of the population who need them most.
> It's hard to compare across countries. But mask-wearing Japan and South Korea have higher rates of flu and pneumonia deaths than the US/Canada/Europe
Possibly confounded by disparate population densities.
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Israel are all slightly less dense than South Korea, and more dense than Japan. Yet all three have significantly lower flu/pneumonia death rates than either South Korea or Japan.
Bangladesh also has a slightly lower flu/pneumonia death rate than Japan, even though it has 3x the density (though Bangladesh has a somewhat lower life expectancy (72) than Japan (84); Belgium, Netherlands, and Israel are all fairly close (80+) to Japan).
Interestingly, that video suggests that some beekeepers actually prefer the aggressive, "africanized", bees as they can be more productive than less aggressive bees in the right situation. But they're a public health hazard, so most beekeepers choose to euthanize more aggressive hives to deliberately breed calmer, safer, bees.
This video also suggests that the high level of aggression wasn't optimal in at least some areas, so it's being evolved out and the bees are becoming less aggressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psBomn2cPNw
IIUC workers (or at least worker larvae) can become queens under the right conditions, so it's more likely for the undesirable genes to be removed if the entire hive is euthanized.
Also, in the case of that video, IIRC having the still aggressive workers in the locations available to that beekeeper wouldn't be desirable, even if later generations were calmer.
> it's more likely for the undesirable genes to be removed if the entire hive is euthanized.
Yes, removing the genes is needed, but that can be done by killing the old queen, waiting a day then putting in a caged queen of known good genes. There is no need to kill the hive that I am aware of.
Requeening to correct temperament is part of beekeeping and killing the hive seems extreme. It is also wasteful of the equipment and comb because depending on the method used it won’t be able to be salvaged.
Killing hives is generally done by pouring petrol in the top then sealing the hive up, and is seen as one of the more humane methods. However I’ve only known this being done for American Foul Brood, not for temperament.
The improved temperament sometimes happens almost instantly, but is generally over a about a month as the workers die off. The total lifespan of a worker is only about 6 weeks in midsummer.
I keep bees, but in New Zealand an aggressive colony is a lesser beast than an africanised monster. I hope I’m missing something (eg what is africanised bees reject new queens, but I can’t find anything suggesting this is the case).
It's not about the queens, it's about the drones (male bees).
The workers only start laying eggs if the hive goes without a queen for several weeks, and either way the eggs they lay are unfertilized and therefore cannot be raised into new queens. So requeening it is certain to work in that regard.
However, unless you euthanize whole hive, the aggressive drones will continue to live for a while and can mate with queens in neighbouring hives and spread the aggressive genes that way. So there is an advantage to euthanizing the whole hive instead of requeening it.
Requeening is ideally done with a queen that is from known good stock, not by emergency requeening.
I’ve just done it at home. It’s cheaper to raise your own, but you will get traits that are undesirable, aggression being one.
The drones in a hive are not all raised there, they move about hives, so killing the hive won’t get them all.
Hives that have got a laying worker are also very hard to requeen and it usually isn’t possible. One way is to shake all the bees out some distance away then hope the laying worker doesn’t make it back to the hive (she can’t fly). However those hives are hard to fix, as they usually reject the new queen.
There is a lot of differences in beekeeping region to region and country to country, so whatever I have seen and done may be very different to other places.
I was kayaking on the John Day river in northern central Oregon in 2017 and ran into a moderately sized swarm of these hornets crawling on the mud eating other bugs. Definitely been well over two years since they showed up in that part of Oregon.
Red light is typically used at night in order to avoid destroying the eye's rhodopsin, which helps with night vision and takes at least 30 minutes of non-exposure to blue light to fully replenish. You'll see pilots and astronomers using red flashlights for this reason.
I think hornets probably don't react to red light. I think bee researchers also use red lights in labs when extracting bees so they don't become active in the presence of light.
I wonder why they didn't use an insecticide on the nest. The exterminator I hired used a powder on the entry to our attic and the Yellowjackets carried it into the nest and it wiped out the whole thing brilliantly (and we sealed the hole). A targeted application would require very little product. With a powder, it would also kill any insects that got away, and it could trace/damage other nests if the hornet moved to another colony. It seems to me a vacuum would be less thorough, and I would think they'd want to be very thorough in this instance, maybe even to the point of doing both.
It seems most likely that they wanted to avoid killing the hornets. Perhaps to study them and find out which native Japanese population of hornets they came from in order to stem the flow of this invasive species. Could even be simply to preserve life.
The hornets had been put on ice which lowers their metabolism to a state of stupor but they recover from this as soon as their temperature goes back up. Another common technique for making stinging insects docile during handling is using smoke to calm a beehive's alertness response through inhibiting their ability to detect pheromones that signal danger.
This is a good step and we should take this seriously, it can be done.
Did you know that the province of Alberta has no rats?
Literally. No. Rats.
It takes a serious, concerted and systematic effort but it can be done. [1]
Much like we're still not doing a very good job at COVID (i.e. still applying crude measures because it's all we can do right now whereas we could be taking cues from Taiwan etc.), we can 'get good' at these things with good leadership.
Humans create a problem, try to solve it with human effort, and either prolong the problem or create a bigger one. We try to kill starlings and yet they are still here, all we've done is waste time and resources murdering them. We try to kill japanese knotweed by pulling them out of the soil or by applying herbicide and the knotweed spreads further because it thrives in a disturbed environment. Asian longhorned beetle, gyspy moths, garlic mustard, etc. Whether plant or animal, it's all the same. All wasted efforts because we're collectively unable to think on the same timescale that nature does as it works to achieve equilibrium again after the disturbance.
Invasive species can have huge effects on agriculture and other human activities. Giant murder hornets can be scary even beyond these rational concerns. The presence of a new invasive species can thus be important news as the spread of those species can effect human activities.
I know bees are fundamental but I think we should adjust ourselves along with nature, and not try to always dictate things. We can live without honey, eat fruits instead (for which wasps and hornets participate also in pollination), they even provide better nutrients
You mean hornets? Of course I know, but we can still adapt our consumption mode, honeybees are for what? honey mostly. We can also reduce planes travel, that wouldn't hurt as well
that sounds weird, of course human influence massively things, but you can't just decide on how to restore the "natural" state like this, it may be even worse by trying to do something brutally.
The good honeybees vs the bad hornets or wasps. It's much more complex. There are articles about how wild bees do a better job at pollination https://www.google.com/search?q=wild+bees+vs+honey+bees+poll..., wasps similarly play a huge role, for example with fruit trees (figs is the best example)
Ignoring the threat that these hornets pose to people, standing back and allowing our honeybee population to be wiped out would have incalculable effects across the ecosystem.
They're a major pollinator. Sure, there are others, but why would we risk adding more catastrophe when we've already wiped out such a huge number of insects?
Universal rhyme would dictate that machine intelligence is learning our behavior and one day apply it to us when it is in charge.
All children eventually become stronger than their parents, and most parents reap what they sow, and are treated a combination of how they treated their parents and their children.
In this case, our ancestors is all the other DNA-based life on earth, and our children are silicon machines.
Now, think about how we are treating the animals and also the machines (yelling at, cursing out, smashing, being very impatient with, expecting perfection)
Furthermore: People use honey bees for honey ( duh ). But they are more useful than just that: people drive honey bee colonies around to crops in order to pollinate them. If we don't have honey bees, we do not have crops.
There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee. Honey bees are uniquely industrialized and failure to eliminate the Murder Hornet threat to honey bees will have HUGE implications.
What are you proposing exactly? We stand back and lose all of our biodiversity because we have to pay a few conservationists 1/5 of a mediocre SAAS CEO's salary? Give me a break.
Humanity does not stand on its own, we still need nature to sustain ourselves. "When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money."
And outside of economic and survival concerns: Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever. How could you honestly take this position? What do you find valuable? What do you find beautiful? What do you live for?
FWIW honeybees are not part of the native US ecosystem, they were imported from europe. They are likely important if not critical to the pollination of several cash crops, but they're not an ecosystem concern in and of themselves.
However giant asian hornets are rather indiscriminate in their hunting, in fact their main prey in japan are large insects like mantises (as well as other hornets). GAH taking root in the US would be an unmitigated disaster all around, not just for beekeeping.
For instance, if you were trying to reestablish some some native pollinator, reducing honey bee pressure might be part of that plan. Even possible a critical one. But just killing them and walking away? That probably won’t end well. It would be irresponsible to do so.
Even removing invasive species of plants involves a succession plan, so the same thing doesn’t happen again, or something worse moves into the vacuum. I know a couple people who could fill a whole workshop on what people often get wrong here (and I’ve encouraged one of them to do so, but no luck), but they would both agree that what gets done, flawed as it can be (especially in walking away too soon) is better than the status quo, or removal and neglect.
Odds are, insect populations would also adapt to their disappearance.
I’d imagine from what I’ve read that a significant chunk of bees are already artificially produced and distributed for crops.
That plus of course combined with a general ongoing attempt at eradication of the hornets. Or at least significant population control.
Or is agriculture simply too widespread and complicated (or ‘naturally’ dependent) for such a thing?
We could make lasers driven by ML to identify the hornets and shoot them down as they approach a hive, but that would be really expensive :)
It would be an excellent grad CSS project. Identifying the Giant Wasps with 99.9% or whatever accuracy and deploying some defensive mechanism.
The problem like you said would be(e) infinitely expensive to deploy to all of the many thousands of randomly placed hives. But maybe useful for the industrial pollinator companies, which is a big thriving industry.
Anyway, I just like these sort of clever tech solutions.
There has to be plenty of solutions to this (major) problem we haven't thought of yet.
I don't think the bees really have any input.
Well, neither are most of the crops the Europeans started growing in America. They brought everything from apple species to wheat.
Not all of these are self-pollinating, so they had to bring bees too.
The main advantage of honeybees is that they are domesticated, and we can take them where we want. If your orchard has a healthy population of orchard bees, great, and there are ways to promote orchard bees, but the honeybees can actually be brought in on demand.
The flip side is that European honeybees can not pollinate native crops very well. For that, the native pollinators are very efficient. Native pollinators are threatened by the feral colonies of European honeybees and their introduced diseases like nosema, varroa, mites, and foulbrood. It's like smallpox blankets all over again as infected honeybee colonies are trucked all over the country to spread pollen and disease on various introduced European cops.
That being said there are lots of animals that can't be domesticated. Zebras are the classic example, being very similar to domesticated horses but are much more aggressive and unpredictable.
Honeybees also work well with mono-cropping because you can easily pick up and move the entire hive from massive field to massive field just in time for pollination. If you are relying on a wild bee population they'll do better when they have lots of plants in bloom across a wide spectrum of time so they have a chance to build up their population before the major blooms eg the orchard you want pollinated. Otherwise you run the risk of only have a small bee population that can't fully take advantage of (and pollinate) the suddenly massive resource glut of several square miles of orchards suddenly in bloom at once.
Interestingly, we have records of contemporary impressions of tarpans and aurochs, back when they weren't extinct. They tended to be described in terms like "absolutely untamable".
But of course they weren't.
https://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/plants/ornamentals/p...
We are loosing biodiversity at a rate comparable to the last mass extinctions, we are loosing our "life support systems" as climate/biodiv. experts say, yet no one is concerned.
This is beyond the worst i ever expected in my worst nightmares. And this is happening now.
And no one says a world. No one even dare spending 5 minute reading the material. No one cares.
If we go extinct (with 95% of the other species first) it will be well deserved.
By the way, the science says that the dynamics are NOT in our favour: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/08/wildlife...
Well, no one I know, and no one they know, has been hurt by the coronavirus. And the list of people I know includes two people from Wuhan. If we went out a third degree, we would likely start to pick up victims.
On the other hand, I do personally know someone who was injured by the response; this person responded so badly to the lockdown that they had to be committed.
It's possible that the existence of a pandemic isn't what people are denying...
Don't worry, considering how things are going, that will change this winter.
Unless you are in New Zealand.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252
[1] https://www.attenboroughfilm.com/
At risk of sounding like a prediction, we can confidently say the outcome is something awful. The ecosystem isn't built like a fault-tolerant network where one node goes out, but the network more or less still works. There is no redundancy. There are no enterprise-grade availability requirements.
As George Carlin said, we need to stop framing these issues as “saving the Earth.” The Earth will be fine. This is about saving ourselves.
Same goes for climate change. The Earth has been very warm in the past, even ice free. The Earth will be fine. The question is whether the >10 billion humans that may be on it as climate change starts to really manifest will be fine.
I like Elon’s way of putting climate change: sure we may be wrong at least a bit, but is it wise to take our best habitable planet and dump a shitload of CO2 into the atmosphere and then just see what happens because YOLO?
He certainly can't personally stop climate change, but maybe in theory he can get a step closer to building an ark.
Hope/push for the former, prepare for the latter.
Have you seen how Mars looks like? What the conditions are like? Temperature? Atmosphere? Radiation? Ecosystems (none)? Water (none)? Breathable air (none)? How could that ever be more inviting than earth?
As we have seen in this pandemic, even selling it like that isn't a recipe for success.
>> It'll still be running some code...
until the system is degraded to the point where it crashes into either only the smallest fragments (which take tens or hundreds of millions of years to rebuild), or complete extinction
Yet, while I lack any deep understanding why they would re-emerge, paleontology seems to show a long history of mass extinctions down to very low levels, then re-emergence of more complex forms.
One theory that I read of a few years back posited that life, and higher forms in particular, are more efficient at increasing entropy, i.e., diffusing heat, and so are systemically favored (seen nothing on it in a few years, so no idea of its current state; if anyone recognizes it and can provide a link, thanks in advance!).
This a surprisingly and pleasingly apt analogy given that DNA/RNA are indeed code being 'run' by life.
Technical audiences usually go with the "technology, right or wrong" angle (as nationalists go with "my country, right or wrong").
It's more about identity validation and peer group thinking than critical and systems thinking. Plus they're into technology because they disproportionally like, glorify, and are attracted by tech in the first place.
A year ago, there was a fascinating episode of "Nature" on PBS about keystone species. It's available for free online streaming here [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species
[2] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-serengeti-rules-41dfru/2...
A lot of people seem to think that if you "destroy" an ecosystem it is a step toward a lifeless environment.
Here's some comments: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/333/6049/1547.6
We have honey bees in Japan. While I agree it will have huge implications, it’ll hardly be the last of them.
That said, I’d rather murder hornets go away everywhere.
I love having hornets on my property if their nest isn't located in a path I have to cross. They also eat wasps and you won't have any problems with them throughout the summer. They don't try to eat your cake or drink you lemonade and you can peacefully chill in your garden.
They always leave their nest after a season and it can make quite a mess. But nothing is better than having them in a remote location in your garden. It is better than any insect spray.
But you still might seriously want to get rid of them because they could indeed do a lot of damage in another ecosystem that needs to sacrifice several species until it adapts.
> "Nature is IRREPLACEABLE. Once it is dead it is dead forever."
I don't think that's the case. I think you're giving humanity too much credit. If humanity kills itself from overpopulation and overconsumption, the earth will do just fine without us. Even if we harm it as badly as we did with something like the Chernobyl disaster (look how it has bounced back there).
We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history and billions of years from now we may not be here, but the earth probably will be.
> We've only really existed as a species for a tiny amount of time in the earths 4.5b year history
That's exactly the problem. We're causing massive changes on a much shorter timescale than evolution operates on. I think it's likely the global ecosystem will struggle to adapt.
Mass extinctions in the past were over a timescale of thousands of years, so there was some time for evolutionary "computation" to adapt.
Human mass extinction is occurring on the timescale of decades.
What position do you mean? Your comment is not replying to anybody.
I don't see anybody in this thread who is arguing that we should do nothing.
Pretty cool to watch actually: https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1320152207212253185
https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discove...
For things like apples, it's actually affordable to pay humans to do it. Which is not to say that bee's aren't better than humans in most ways, just that it doesn't come down to 'no options'.
And like other people are saying, honeybees are livestock, they aren't 'nature'.
Hand pollination of apples is already sometimes done in China.
You seem to be speaking from an unquantifiably elevated position of privilege.
https://www.wired.com/2014/05/will-we-still-have-fruit-if-be...
Wonder how the economics are now!
Ya. Cognitive dissonance. Humankind has full agency (dominion) with an utter refusal to even acknowledge consequences, much less accept responsibility.
"Our ecosystem is a vast web of interconnections."
Yup.
In the Anthropocene, we are the gardeners. Laissez faire is a terrible gardening strategy.
There is no safe harbor. We will always need nature to sustain ourselves.
We are nature, full stop. But if you include our digestive tracts, that fact is inescapable. We are a sentient bioreactors. I’m thinking we can destroy nature and keep going is suicide.
Mars, apparently.
This sentiment is too simplifying. Yes, the planet, as in a spinning celestial object with a molten core, solid surface with water, and an atmosphere will be fine, so to speak, but the vast amounts of flora and fauna will not and haven’t been. Some will make it, but I don’t define that as “fine”.
Many animal species, if they haven’t already gone extinct have been suffering deeply. Take a look at the southern resident orca population. We captured, killing many in the process, and enslaved them, all of which served to torture those enslaved and break up the matriarchal hierarchies that existed. This left new, untrained leaders in the population. Before then and since then, we have poisoned them and have completely decimated their food source. These are direct consequences of unneeded, self serving actions of humans. We also harass them sonically. This is a population that is already and has been having a “bad time”, and it’s likely the population will go extinct. The cause of all this is 100% humans. Now take this example and multiply it by the thousands if not millions of species also going extinct and having bad times. Humans and our technological development combined literally form an extinction event.
I see this line a lot but everyday humans are doing irreparable damage to ecosystems. Taking millions of years to heal from events is not ‘fine’.
His point was that we're killing ourself. An ecosystem and a planet will continue existing, the question is whether humans will exist on it.
I think it’s similar to how we view viruses.
And the almost uncountable plants and animals that are already extinct. At least when we go the others will be able to stay.
There is no mystical "other pollinator" that is going to fill the niche of the honey bee
Sorry, what?
https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/native-bees-often-bette...
I haven't got it out for honey bees, but as your comment makes clear, native species are underappreciated.
> So why the global obsession with the one species that makes honey? For one, honey bees have hives, which makes them easy to keep and transfer en masse. For another, some native bees are picky about which flowers they prefer and where they live. As a result, commercial pollination is almost wholly dependant on honey bees.
> ...The goal of all this work is not to replace honey bees, but to pinpoint which native bees are effective, what they can offer and how to lure them into visiting and pollinating.
From what the article describes, the honey bee is uniquely suited for the niche we need it for, and there is no other species even remotely as well adapted -- though they're trying to figure out if any other species could be made to work in some lesser capacity.
So it doesn't seem that native species are underappreciated -- just that there are very good reasons we use the honeybee instead.
In some places I know similar species are actually grown for commercial pollination, so it'll vary from place to place for sure.
It's not about socialism or capitalism here, scarce resources and humans need regulation
healthcare being ran by a union of worker coops, that all pay taxes into the union of unions to manage healthcare for all members (workers and consumers who are members of the union)... Don't want to be part of the union then don't and if your employer still has their own health ins. use that, or maybe they use ours anyways cause it'd be better... Either way options still exist with the best ones rising to the top like normal capitalism, just CEOs and execs wouldn't be paid as well, because their value is a lot less than they think it is.
A balanced society as you say, can only come from something that's not capitalism or communism both of which are authoritarian or oligarchical at the very least.
Ancom, I think is the best solution with the least amount of friction. I mean all it requires to get started is for people to form a union, start some union-owned businesses, put the profits back into healthcare for all members of the union. Anyone can become a member who wants to (might have a dues though), then they'd be encourage to buy from union businesses, who will in turn use that $$ to pay medical bills for all union members. If there's surplus everyone gets dividends, and workers get big bonuses.
Free market propaganda often sets up a black/white dichotomy between capitalism and communism/central planning, then uses the failures of regimes like the Soviet Union to attempt to train readers to think that any deviation from capitalism will lead to similar disasters.
No, they're absolutely capitalist. Workers own the means of production in no "healthy" "functioning" government in the world.
This whole idea is very batshit insane too.
What do you propose instead?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_njf8jwEGRo
This is solely due to the industrialization of agriculture.
Leaving fallow portions of the field and growing native crops winds up with an assortment of pollinators--including a lot of native bees.
The problem is that they are less efficient. So, a farmer who does this will lose to a farmer who uses industrialized honeybees.
This is a standard case of privatize the profit and socialize the risk.
Working towards reducing that reliance sounds like a better investment than hoping that a fragile system keeps stable if we undo the changes we noticed we cause (a system that had multiple extinction events in the past)
We don't need to "reduce our reliance on nature". We're always going to be subject to the influences of what environment we live inside of. Whether it be on planet-scale or otherwise. We don't exist in a vacuum.
That's a matter of perspective. I would say they happen all the time.
Houses, heating, cooling make us resilient to outside temperature and weather changes, advanced construction makes us resilient to earthquakes, etc. etc.
There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.
I’m not sure why you think that plant pollination needs a new solution in the first place. We’ve been working with bees for centuries and we’ve used them as a tool. Bees are themselves an optimal method for pollination created though thousands of years of natural progress.
Colonizing Mars continues to be a pipe dream and even if/when people start living there it’s going to be full of compromises and discomfort. And we’ll still have billions of people stuck on earth.
Technology isn’t the solution to all of life’s problems.
Technological optimists have had a poor record over the past 50+ years. Infotech is the exception rather than the rule, and even it has encountered progressively formidable headwinds.
Heating and cooling necessarily heat the exterior of the heated or cooled environment more than they do heat or cool the interior. As the temperature warms, you need to cool your interior space even more, pumping yet more heat into the surrounds. For one, all that energy has to come from somewhere. For two, hopefully you don’t drive the system beyond a point where your heating and cooling can keep up.
> There are people working on plans to colonise Mars - while that might not be viable in the short term - we are talking about making an environment without an atmosphere suitable for life - and there's no reason why this shouldn't be achievable. Reducing reliance on systems such as plants requiring bees for pollination should be trivial in comparison.
There is a huge, vast, expansive, unimaginably large, ridiculously wide chasm between “working on plans to colonize Mars” and “actually colonizing Mars.” In the meantime, we’ve got ~10 billion people dependent on the existing ecosystem we’ve got here. Keeping that global ecosystem healthy enough to support those people without massive die-offs or total chaos, without the benefit of any globally organized effort to speak of, is deeply and profoundly not trivial, probably much less trivial than supporting a very small population on another planet.
Plus, even if we do manage to colonize another world without first learning how to maintain the one we have, what exactly is the end game? Hop from planet to planet, destroying any life we find or create along the way?
If we were to think long-term, we could stop this invasive species. Crop duster planes spray everything within at least several generations or years of insect migration. That might mean 10,000 square miles gets completely soaked in a mix of Sevin, Malathion, and neonicotinoids.
Compared to the roughly 16,300,000 square miles at risk of being irrevocably harmed by an invasive species, that local and temporary ecosystem damage would be practically nothing.
We'll argue a bit and do nothing. The wasps are here to stay. Say goodbye to bees.
Consider climate change. Let's take it as given that climate change is an existental threat to humanity, and that it is caused by carbon dumped into the atmosphere by mankind. If this is true, then we need to leverage the full arsenal of technology available to us to solve the problem.
Nuclear power is a solution we have in-hand, today, to atmospheric carbon.
Of course, it comes with trade-offs. Nuclear waste is a big downside, but nuclear waste is a tiny annoyance compared to a runaway greenhouse effect.
And yet, environmentalists have, for sixty years, fought tooth-and-nail against nuclear power.
This brings me to the point: the track record of environmentalists, and the of green movement, shows that they do not care about the environment, nor do they care about solving real problems with real solutions for real people.
What they do seem to care about is money. Especially taxpayer money, because once you're in, the gravy never stops. Actually solving problems doesn't matter, as long as you look busy and get interviewed on MSNBC and NPR a lot.
The image of the envrionmentalist is of someone who will chain themselves to trees to protest their university building a new parking lot, with lots of pictures for Instagram and the news, but only until the semester break. Instead of organizing transportation and/or walkable housing for other students, thereby eliminating the demand for additional parking.
The opposition by-and-large cares very deeply about the environment. You'd be hard-pressed to find more environmentally-conscious folks than in the hunting and homesteading communities.
But they also believe, from observed behavior, that environmentalists are mostly interested in prolonging the problem while making themselves rich.
While I’m at it, please allow me to remind everyone that there are thousands of solitary bee species in the world. They are the ones that go extinct or in real danger compared to our honey bees. There are many struggling beekeepers like me in the world, and we’re doing our best to keep our bees alive. But thousands of species are without keepers and they are dying. Please be gentle to the nature. Let them live.
(Edit: wondering how you can help, here's what I humbly suggested below in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24889023)
There can be many reasons. The Varroa Mite [0] is one that we have to constantly fight against, these days. The mites don't kill the entire colony, but weakens it so much that the colony can't overwinter. Or there viruses [1] that deform the bees' wings that can debilitate the colony. There are also other problems that we don't see where I live, but other beekeepers have to fight, such as the Small Hive Beetle [2].
I suspect because of the ongoing wildfires and poor air quality in this region, one of my queens stopped laying eggs mid-summer, at a time when she normally lays 1,500-2,000 eggs every day. I had to replace her. I don't know if that colony is going to survive the winter.
Some other colonies had similar problems. Yesterday a beekeeper friend told me she lost a colony and she has another one on the brink of collapsing.
Then, we also don't know who is using what type of pesticides around here. Bees can forage anywhere in the 2-3 mile radius. It's near impossible for me to know what's going on in such a wide area.
It's a constant uphill battle.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varroa_destructor [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deformed_wing_virus [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_hive_beetle
The video's caption:
"Alright, here is what I want everyone to know about ‘murder hornets’. Only one nest of Asian Giant Hornets has been found in North America and it was quickly eradicated. Right now, the nation’s top entomologists are watching the situation and beekeepers like myself are not worried. If these hornets become a serious problem for honeybees, we will find a solution to keep bees safe.
If you really want something to be afraid of and if you want to know what keeps beekeepers awake at night, look closely at the bee in this video. You’ll see a dark, round speck on the side of her body. That, my friends, is something far more terrifying than these so-called ‘murder hornets’—it is a Varroa Mite. (Scroll through to see it up close.) The Varroa Mite is a parasitic mite that feeds on the fat bodies of bees and its decimating bee populations around the world.
At this point in time, Varroa Mites are a much greater threat to honeybee populations than Asian Giant Hornets and if they got the same attention in the press, maybe we would have a solution for them. Everyone now knows the term ‘murder hornet’ but the thing we should be talking about In the US is the Varroa Mite, a creature whose scientific name is literally ‘Varroa Destructor’.
Please stop the murder hornet hype and please start talking about the thing that’s killing more honeybees in the US than anything else right now—varroa mites."
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/B_03jhvnFt6/
"If these hornets become a serious problem for honeybees, we will find a solution to keep bees safe."
It can easy be too late. Look at what's happening in Europe. They simply can't stop the hornets.
Of course it's more dramatic to show these huge insects. They are impressive and scary. Mites are small and look insignificant. They are not dramatic. They won't generate hype. I understand the frustration as a beekeeper, but don't let yet another problem become too big to reverse the tide on. It is obviously cheaper to deal with the hornets right now, hype or no hype.
Don't let murder hornets become the bee's new Coronavirus equivalent. It sounds like they're already dealing with plenty of pandemic-like issues as it is.
To quote George W Bush, who actually took pandemics seriously, "A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire. If caught early it might be extinguished with limited damage. If allowed to smolder, undetected, it can grow to an inferno that can spread quickly beyond our ability to control it."
So this, but with murder hornets.
How?
Or May be just look at what other Asian countries have done (outside of China) and look at what they did. It’s exactly everything the US did not do
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/times-watchdog/sin...
This seems contradictory to me as a beek. 5/16 holes as a mouse guard should also keep huge insects out of the hive. It also should be easy to create pheromone traps if it is true that the hornet's seek out the scent of other dead hornets.
On a side note, I see mites as a genetics issue. I would rather see commercial outfits using selection rather than treating with chemicals and shipping packages with weak genetics all over the US. Spearding weak genes is kind of the opposite of Darwin...
Drone entry/exit and blockages would be an issue after a period presumably.
I’m currently using some nice American made excluders and they are really nice. They are made of wire and are quite quite rigid.
My method has got pretty cheap - oxalic acid is about as cheap as it gets for treatments.
I can't help but think of when we only had one covid case and people said not to worry.
> Right now the nation's top entomologists are watching the situation and beekeepers like myself are not worried.
... and ...
> It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.
There is a tiny bit of information on them in german Wikipedia [0] (automatic translation [1], let me know if I can help with translation). Wikipedia says that they can be found worldwide, so maybe they will be of help.
(Please note that under _no circumstances_ this was meant as encouragement to introduce new invasive species to your area!)
Here is more information: the page of the beekeeper researching pseudoscorpions and bee interactions is at [2], [3] is about a book he wrote, called "Instruction manual for species-appropriate husbandry of bees and pseudoscorpions". A comment in [3] also suggests that under ideal circumstances, these pseudoscorpions might be able to deal with a small hive beetle.
This poster [4] states that having pseudoscorpions in hives unfortunately had no influence on varroa numbers, though.
[0] (german) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCcherskorpion
[1] (machine translation de-en): https://www.translatetheweb.com/?from=&to=en&dl=de&ref=trb&a...
[2] (german) https://beenature-project.com/epages/6aa71639-792d-4a95-9e8c...
[3] (german) https://bienen-nachrichten.de/2019/handlungsanleitung-f%C3%B...
[4] (PDF, english) http://apicultureconference2016.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/201...
The paper is a plasterboard jointing paper and 3-5 layers are sewn together and soaked in a solution of about 40% Oxalic acid, 60% glycerine. Used like conventional mite strips they need replacing more often but seem to work really well.
Randy Oliver has been trialing other delivery methods in California.
My hives are the best they have ever been this season, with a very strong start.
http://scientificbeekeeping.com/
Hasn’t officially launched yet, but the early trials are promising.
(Disclosure: I have advised the company)
Are things like the beetles and virus new introductions to the area, or is it just a confluence of factors that are hitting harder now?
I'd also heard (many years ago) that, while the colonies can collapse, the bees normally reproduce quickly enough that you don't see much of a net loss in colony counts year-over-year - how do you see that?
My impression is that the bee populations have been remarkably resilient year over year, but whenever I see this kind of stress-and-recovery cycle, I worry that there's a tipping point - many systems seem Fine under stress until they overwhelm their recovery mechanism and collapse catastrophically.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/05/150524-bees-...
I have been guilty of that error countless times.
An individual's actions will not solve a society's woes, but they don't need to. If they help a little bit where they are, they can be worth doing.
Furthermore, individuals trying to help does not preclude larger-scale solutions. The people attempting individual actions could even contribute to the larger-scale or policy-based solutions.
Or, given that the described standpoint suggests I have enough attention for either planting a meadow lawn or supporting 'big action', why are you wasting it telling us about this, instead of naming names of the big actors to write to our representatives about and avoid electing representatives that hold a favorable position toward them ?
I'll just add two points:
1) Individual good actions virtually never outweigh large-scale bad actions, but the world is actually worse off if individuals do not take those little positive actions. Little polluter + big polluter yields more pollution than big polluter.
2) Taking the small positive actions is actually a lot of what helps people work on the huge, difficult problems. Humans are more effective when our psychology is a unified self rather than in conflict with itself, and taking small, positive concrete steps helps us keep ourselves in alignment with our big-picture goals and ideals.
I guess both of those fit into the abstract observation that you're bifurcating - people don't have to choose between individual concrete actions and contributing to policy efforts and other high-level approaches.
By all means, if you see someone explicitly saying they choose one at the expense of the other, say something.
When they don't say that, though, don't assume that's what they're doing.
You can learn about the wild bees in your region and understand what natural resources they thrive on. Some of them are so specialized that they can easily be threatened by the loss of habitat. Some of the bee "houses" can become great activities for children. For example kids can build Mason Bee houses and watch them attract bees.
Supporting local beekeepers and bee-friendly farmers.
By trying to keep an immaculate lawn or mosquito-free areas, most of us sacrifice the local insect population including various bees that are affected by those pesticides.
By spreading awareness, but also starting your own hive is a great hobby and it's quite affordable if you have the time. You don't even have to have them in your garden or balcony. You can speak to local farmers, and they can be happy to host your hive on their property. That's how I started.
I have a bit of garden but in the middle of a residential district of a city. Do I have any chance to attract bees or is
> starting your own hive
the only way?
If I had a bigger yard I would host a couple hives of my own, I love just sitting out in the flowers in the warmer weather and watching them forage.
I have no issues with neighbours and have somewhere between 3 and 6 hives depending on how you count. This is in a backyard of a suburban section. Preemptive honeystrikes may have helped - I get 150-250kgs of honey that it’s no issue giving it away and that seems to generate good will.
> the only way?
Not sure if I understand. I've also heard of schemes where you can sponsor a hive, but I've never tried it.
sorry I meant a continuation of your quote as part of of the question there: ie. "is starting your own hive the own only way?"
I've started to plant bee friendly flowers, but they haven't grown much. I'll continue again in spring.
Edit: I don’t understand the vicious pointless downvotes over this question.
How is that an easy connection? Your argument essentially says without bees then nature as we know it falls apart catastrophically - I am incredulous you could interpret this as obvious. Species go extinct all the time and yet Earth is still doing just fine, apart from the damage humans are doing to it.
> No pollinators
Bees are not the only pollinators
> leads to decreased germination
A decrease is not the same as elimination
> which leads to less food
A decrease is not the same as elimination
> for the lower levels of the food chain and on and on
Your argument is a about knock-on effects, which certainly exist. But you seem to think if any point in the chain breaks, it leads to ecological collapse. Why do you assume nature is so fragile? I am not a biologist and maybe bees are special or there is something I do not understand, but I certainly don't think it's an obvious conclusion.
You might want to investigate about the sparrows in china, quick version; a campaign to exterminate the sparrows to increase grain production ended up with famines.
In Europe it is..in fact it was the main-theme 3 years ago. And not just bees but insects overall...the honeybee was just the friendly looking ambassador for that message.
One small data point, but too many and too few are both bad. https://www.airborne.co.nz/pages/bee-keeping-statistics-new-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations
The scope of North America's invasive species problem is enormous. For many folks in urban areas, it's possible that you might go your whole day only encountering one native bird species (American Crow), but a whole host of invasive species (Rock Pigeon, House Sparrows, European Starlings).
History shows that early, active intervention can pay enormous dividends. For example, Alberta remains the only area in North America without non-native rats due to a major interventions: https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta.asp...
Washington State department of agriculture’s budget is public information; they spend about a quarter of a billion dollars a year on all their programs. I can’t imagine this particular operation is making much of a dent in that overall spend. According to the captions of those photographs, they have entomologists and pest control specialists on staff already. Salaries are also public. Sven Spichinger, shown in one of those pictures, Managing Entomologist, is on $87,000 a year - whether he’s hunting for murder hornets or not, presumably. There are three different levels of ‘Pest Biologist’ job in the department. It kind of looks like this is a project that is taking up the time of a few people who they already had on staff, to deal with exactly this kind of problem.
Does all government spending make you nauseous, or only when it’s visibly helping?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
When I read the article I thought there are likely other nests nearby. Perhaps they should use some of the forestry budget to do a controlled burn in the area. It'll reduce severity of future fires and get any of any hornets nearby ;-)
If there's evidence of multiple other hives in the area, a controlled burn may get some of them, but the scope of the fire necessary could also be massive.
I'm not saying the option shouldn't be part of our arsenal. And if this is an area prone to wild-fires, then as you said it could assist there as well. However, I'm not sure it's a good option at this time, especially considering the side effects on other local indigenous species.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet
Or do you just generally like to bully anyone who challenges any form of government spending by attacking strawmen?
Are you suggesting the government of the State of Washington is responsible for providing food and basic sanitation in Los Angeles?
If they get a second call which would require the engine, they didn’t want to risk having the fire personnel on scene in the little rescue truck and away from the engine, delaying response to the fire. (For the same reason, they wore the full turnout gear to support medical calls.)
There is probably more to it, but at least the way you describe it doesn't sound convincing.
Also I should add the in the previous cities I lived in they of course didn't do that. They just used small vans for medical emergencies. Originally when I moved here i thought it was burning a lot more when I saw all those engines on the street all the time, but it wasn't that.
My suspicion is that it's related to justifying having so much of the big equipment.
But if the big engines are overused too much they likely break down much faster too, driving a vicious circle of needing more and more of them, creating bigger budgets, more power for the fire chief etc.etc.
What equipment with what personnel is dispatched is incredibly complicated. You would be shocked. And most fire districts/departments regularly tweak their "response plans."
Maybe you’re right, though - the progressive militarization of state pest control departments during the global war on terror is probably one of the principal ways in which inequality is perpetuated in this country.
Though generally I'd argue both environmental and social concerns are underallocated relative to others.
Also you could make a case that large houses with nice kitchens also have environmental costs to build and maintain, and living in small apartments with communal kitchens or restaurants nearby is better.
Most people end up leaving a lot on the table when eating out, and 100% of that food ends up in the trash / wasted.
If you want to save the environment, then you should reconsider your whole diet. Reduce meat intake and make smaller meals with more environmentally conscious ingredients(likely more expensive).
Regarding leftovers, plenty of people put restaurant leftovers in a container and take them home to eat later. The people who don't would likely waste food at home too.
I'm not against government spending. I think there are plenty of problems that market forces alone cannot solve. I think the government should provide a solid safety net for its citizens. That is precisely why I lament the resources required for this. They are absolutely necessary, and at the same time it means there are fewer resources to go to other absolutely necessary needs.
I guess we could wish that the hornets never arrived here, but the life of a government is solving thousands of problems like these. If not the hornets, it would be something else. The uplifting moment is that this was a successful containment. Money well-spent :)
This effort to destroy one hornet's nest probably had direct result of bringing someone a little closer towards having asthma and indirectly, through supply chain effects, costing a few dozen insect colonies, animals, and plants their lives somewhere else in the world.
Now that you mention it, it does make me a bit nauseated.
https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/657947826782505650/
I have no idea how accurate it is, of course.
https://www.vividmaps.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/rats-10...
Hemelin, Germany on the other hand only found a temporary solution to the problem when the anonymous Pied Piper visited the area. Perhaps he was unaware that some rats can swim up to a mile and simply drove the local rat population to the surrounding area. Regardless, the example clearly illustrates that music-based solutions to the problem are, at best, temporary.
https://vividmaps.com/global-rat-distribution-map/
Vividmaps.com is a great site.
I'm not suggesting it's bad or wrong to try, only whether there's evidence that the odds favor doing so.
[1] https://entomologytoday.org/2019/03/08/invasive-species-succ...
Perhaps little hope for widespread eradication, but important areas can be cleaned up.
For these murder hornets, if we make a big up front investment in eradicating them now, there’s hope that we can prevent them from establishing themselves and becoming another perpetual battle.
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=invasive%20species%20erad...
well that's a little dramatic
Partially fill a shop vac with soapy water, stick the nozzle as close to the nest entrance as possible, then turn on the vacuum and hear the wasps get sucked into the machine as they try to enter or exit the nest. It takes a few hours, and potentially a couple of separate sessions to mop up any stragglers.
No fancy beekeeper suit necessary, and, best of all, no need to spread nasty poisons.
Does that perhaps depend on the species of wasp, or maybe the reach of the wand?
IIRC, there was one youtube video where the little bastards went straight for the dude's face during shop-vac'ing. He could smell the venom they were trying to spray in his eyes.
When one of the wasps (or hornets?) went straight for his GoPro sensor, its face filled my large monitor and I nearly had a heart attack.
My impression is that if you put a vacuum cleaner next to the entrance you may, if you're lucky, catch nearly all the wasps that leave the nest, but the queen never leaves the nest, and the eggs and larvae don't leave the nest, and I think there may also be some workers that stay in the nest looking after the larvae, so things will be quieter after you've finished vacuuming, but the colony will probably regenerate itself in a week or so.
With Vespex you don’t go looking for nests, you let the colony poison itself.
Because it is protein based and not sugar based, it’s not attractive to as many species. The downside is that the wasps only take it at a specific time of year - when they are consuming protein.
https://www.merchento.com/vespex.html
Soapy water is actually a powerful insecticide against many arthropods:
https://extension.colostate.edu/topic-areas/insects/insect-c...
We used a mix of vinegar, soap, and water in a spray bottle to rid our patio of earwigs this year and it seemed to work incredibly well. The insecticides we were spraying them with before trying the soap did absolutely nothing but cost $7 a can.
I once blew a few hours to anxiously watching youtube videos of people destroying nasty wasp/hornet infestations. (I'm still not sure why. Probably some mix of morbid fascination and aggression fantasy.)
The soapy-water-shopvac trick appeared in a lot of those videos. (Less commonly: thermite, or quad-propeller drones.)
What? have you seen size of that hornet? I am wearing space-suite if available.
https://youtu.be/1WkS5fyXDqU
Professionals wear PPE because if you incur a low-probability risk every time you do X, and you do X often enough (because it's your profession), X will happen to you.
For example, if you have a 99% chance of nothing going wrong, and you do that thing 500 times, it's essentially guaranteed to happen (0.99^500 = 0.0066).
The stinging insect removal guys will be stung if they are in the profession for decades without PPE.
Seems like you'd just have a huge pile of mostly-alive wasps in your shop-vac.
What? That seems crazy (and cool) to be able to create a tracking device light enough for a hornet to fly and still have enough battery to transmit even a periodic chirp.
This one is 3x11mm and weighs 0.15g;
https://atstrack.com/tracking-products/transmitters/product-...
All of this would add weight and size, and those trackers are really small and really lightweight. Judging by the photos, the battery is just hard wired to the circuit, and the whole thing is encapsulated with a thin layer of epoxy for waterproofing. That's by far the cheapest, easiest, and most reliable way to build something as lightweight as possible.
It says it's light activated. So likely they've put a tiny light sensor in it that the microcontroller polls occasionally during the lowest power mode. That might be a tiny solar panel too. But using that to electrically drive an electronic power switch is tricky if you don't have the budget for a custom ASIC; if you don't have that budget, you'll add a decent amount of weight in a device that tiny.
Honestly, I'm not at all surprised that they've chosen to accept a short shelf life instead. It's pretty remarkable that they can squeeze that much functionality into a 11mm long by 3.5mm diameter cylinder.
I wonder why its not just two interconnecting cylinders (using a tiny gasket) that you push together with thumb/finger when you want to activate/power the device.
Given that there would have been some serious engineering to think through the design there must have been trade-offs that I'm not considering though.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3sX7bmNv10c
https://youtu.be/EZ1eAM8CChc
30,000 bees killed by just 30 hornets in an hour or so. The bees just have no defence against them at all.
Brutal.
Worth noting that one nest can create hundreds of new queens that will hibernate the winter and establish a nest in the spring. Not all will survive, but with minimal competition, and significant feeding opportunities from a mostly untapped ecosystem, many will. Destroying one nest to stop exponential growth is a great investment, especially early on.
Note: I'm not an expert in this area, I'm mostly parroting stuff I read in other articles.
No, they probably think that it is likely that, if that is not the case, it is likely to still be small enough that the progress can be significantly slowed by that means until a more complete solution is found.
Given that magnitude matters a lot and that it's a major threat to bee populations and through them much of the agriculture of the country, stalling tactics are a lot better than nothing.
But those are species that don't have centralized nests.. This might be easier if you can trap them and trace them back to their homes..
It looks like in 2019 Vancouver island (which is huge) had a colony get eradicated, but otherwise haven't seen much else reported.
https://www.ontario.ca/page/asian-giant-hornets
What's interesting is the way that honey bees defend against them. A bunch of bees surround each hornet, then they intensify the flapping of their wings, which then generates enough heat to kill the hornet. In other words, the hornets are cooked alive.
European honeybees, which are used in most of the world, have no such defense mechanism and would indeed be helplessly slaughtered by these hornets.
I’d definitely advocate watching some YouTube footage about these creatures, they’re fascinating.
A fuckup led to the release of several of swarms of african bees which went on to crossbreed with local european honeybees, so africanised honeybees were not actually a human creation.
The result turned out to mostly take from their african ancestry: highly defensive, fast reproduction, readily swarming (or even absconding), way less picky about their nesting sites, … leading to high invasiveness.
AFAIK africanised honeybees are no worse than their african ancestors (though I'm not sure they're any better).
When I first heard about the hornet defense I wondered how on Earth the bees could've come up with that. But if they already clumped up for warmth it's a lot more scrutable.
The honeybees don’t just swarm the hornets, they will actually retreat into the hive and allow the hornets to enter, then trap them inside while they roast them to death. All of this works because the honeybees can vibrate themselves to a temperature just warmer than the hornets can tolerate, which is also just less than the bees can tolerate. Just one or two degrees celsius of tolerance is the difference.
Hopefully no Asian giant hornets ever evolve a slightly higher temperature tolerance!
A similar story for the scotch broom. And the english ivy, which is killing the trees.
All of these are everywhere and very difficult to kill.
2020: Surgical masks are a bit much to expect people to wear during a pandemic, Ebola has been circulating in Congo since 2014, and we'll need airtight space suits for a murder hornet outbreak.
Truly, the 90s were a simpler time.
Basically, since the 90s we've put a much much higher value on human life. I expect mask usage to extend far beyond covid and handshaking to cease being a cultural greeting.
The world is significantly colder this year. I can't be the only one that feels it.
I find adults smiling to be gaudy and disconcerting, ever since I was a child. My wife included, although I like most of her so it's ok. Children don't bother me though, as it seems sincere.
COVID-19 has become more infectious over the course of the pandemic, with a strain that results in higher viral loads becoming predominant: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32697968/
It's hard to compare across countries. But mask-wearing Japan and South Korea have higher rates of flu and pneumonia deaths than the US/Canada/Europe: https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/influenza...
As surgical masks are much less than 100% effective even in ideal conditions, let alone actual wear, it wouldn't be surprising if more usage of them would just be an evolutionary pressure for flu to have higher viral output. Quite similar to how widespread use of less than 100% effective anti-bacterial agents just results in bacteria evolving resistance, reducing the usefulness of those agents for the most vulnerable part of the population who need them most.
Possibly confounded by disparate population densities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
Bangladesh also has a slightly lower flu/pneumonia death rate than Japan, even though it has 3x the density (though Bangladesh has a somewhat lower life expectancy (72) than Japan (84); Belgium, Netherlands, and Israel are all fairly close (80+) to Japan).
I think they are just sting-proof suits.
Whatever happened with that? I haven’t heard about them in years.
Interestingly, that video suggests that some beekeepers actually prefer the aggressive, "africanized", bees as they can be more productive than less aggressive bees in the right situation. But they're a public health hazard, so most beekeepers choose to euthanize more aggressive hives to deliberately breed calmer, safer, bees.
This video also suggests that the high level of aggression wasn't optimal in at least some areas, so it's being evolved out and the bees are becoming less aggressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psBomn2cPNw
I wander why they don’t just requeen?
Also, in the case of that video, IIRC having the still aggressive workers in the locations available to that beekeeper wouldn't be desirable, even if later generations were calmer.
Yes, removing the genes is needed, but that can be done by killing the old queen, waiting a day then putting in a caged queen of known good genes. There is no need to kill the hive that I am aware of.
Requeening to correct temperament is part of beekeeping and killing the hive seems extreme. It is also wasteful of the equipment and comb because depending on the method used it won’t be able to be salvaged.
Killing hives is generally done by pouring petrol in the top then sealing the hive up, and is seen as one of the more humane methods. However I’ve only known this being done for American Foul Brood, not for temperament.
The improved temperament sometimes happens almost instantly, but is generally over a about a month as the workers die off. The total lifespan of a worker is only about 6 weeks in midsummer.
I keep bees, but in New Zealand an aggressive colony is a lesser beast than an africanised monster. I hope I’m missing something (eg what is africanised bees reject new queens, but I can’t find anything suggesting this is the case).
The workers only start laying eggs if the hive goes without a queen for several weeks, and either way the eggs they lay are unfertilized and therefore cannot be raised into new queens. So requeening it is certain to work in that regard.
However, unless you euthanize whole hive, the aggressive drones will continue to live for a while and can mate with queens in neighbouring hives and spread the aggressive genes that way. So there is an advantage to euthanizing the whole hive instead of requeening it.
The drones in a hive are not all raised there, they move about hives, so killing the hive won’t get them all.
Hives that have got a laying worker are also very hard to requeen and it usually isn’t possible. One way is to shake all the bees out some distance away then hope the laying worker doesn’t make it back to the hive (she can’t fly). However those hives are hard to fix, as they usually reject the new queen.
There is a lot of differences in beekeeping region to region and country to country, so whatever I have seen and done may be very different to other places.
Interesting. Why do they use red lamps?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodopsin
Did you know that the province of Alberta has no rats?
Literally. No. Rats.
It takes a serious, concerted and systematic effort but it can be done. [1]
Much like we're still not doing a very good job at COVID (i.e. still applying crude measures because it's all we can do right now whereas we could be taking cues from Taiwan etc.), we can 'get good' at these things with good leadership.
[1] https://www.alberta.ca/history-of-rat-control-in-alberta.asp...
His whole channel is also excellent.
They brought this on themselves.
(I'm a beekeeper)
Nature? You realize this almost certainly happened because of international travel/trade, right?
You mean hornets? Of course I know, but we can still adapt our consumption mode, honeybees are for what? honey mostly. We can also reduce planes travel, that wouldn't hurt as well
No, I mean this specific species of hornet suddenly appearing thousands of kilometers away. That wasn't nature, that was mankind's intervention.
Getting rid of them is hardly us 'dictating' things, it's restoring the natural order.
that sounds weird, of course human influence massively things, but you can't just decide on how to restore the "natural" state like this, it may be even worse by trying to do something brutally.
The good honeybees vs the bad hornets or wasps. It's much more complex. There are articles about how wild bees do a better job at pollination https://www.google.com/search?q=wild+bees+vs+honey+bees+poll..., wasps similarly play a huge role, for example with fruit trees (figs is the best example)
And, you know, pollinating all of the plants we use for food.
They're a major pollinator. Sure, there are others, but why would we risk adding more catastrophe when we've already wiped out such a huge number of insects?
All children eventually become stronger than their parents, and most parents reap what they sow, and are treated a combination of how they treated their parents and their children.
In this case, our ancestors is all the other DNA-based life on earth, and our children are silicon machines.
Now, think about how we are treating the animals and also the machines (yelling at, cursing out, smashing, being very impatient with, expecting perfection)
The picture is downright scary.