• RangerRick@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    1 year ago

    I used to have several hives in Texas until moving out East. The heat and droughts were brutal for them. We were constantly trying to split healthy hives to increase success for our queens.

    This coming spring I’ll try to add two hives to our backyard as the city allows for up to 3 hives per residence. I’m hoping the more temperate climate and docile queens will help our area.

    • darknavi@vlemmy.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      How much work per month do you find them?

      I’d love bees on our property but I don’t have the time to do lots of maintenance.

      On that note I wonder if I can pay a keeper to colocate a colony on my property…

  • tymon@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    1 year ago

    Honeybees moved into my backyard recently. I guess they somehow attract a lot of different wildlife in some mysterious way, because we now have cardinals, blue jays, possums, chipmunks, and marble lizards living back there too.

    For context, I live in Ridgewood Queens, so this feels absolutely insane. Loving every second of it but god damn

  • arefx@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    1 year ago

    A friend of mine moved to Texas and became a beekeeper. Doing what they can!

  • PmMeYourBees@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    1 year ago

    The USA can take this large losses, they have relative few hives and can easily import bees if needed.

    IIRC there are 2 million hives in the USA with 100 Million managed hives world wide. A lot of the 2 million hives in the USA are managed by big commercial beekeepers (1000+ hives) and I doubt a lot of them take the survey. While I’ve heard about higher winter losses from commercial beekeepers I doubt they are this high.

    I work with/for a european commercial beekeeper and we had low winter losses ~3%. While the hobby beekepers had a record high loss according to the national survey ~30%.

    • planetaryprotection@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      1 year ago

      Native flowers attract bees and offer pollen + nectar for them :)

      Don’t forget that honeybees aren’t the only bees nor the only pollinators. Ask your local university or beekeepers / native plants association about what you can do to help out in your area!

      • aneura_mirabilis@mander.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 year ago

        Even worse, honeybees can compete with wild local bees… Best solution is indeed flowers (local plants are usually better choices) and providing a good environment for wild pollinators

        • freeskier@centennialstate.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          I don’t think most people even know honeybees aren’t native to North America. Native bees are the ones at risk, and non-native honeybees aren’t helping.

    • Drusas@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      Flowers attract bees. The best sources of food for bees are wildflowers native to your area. Bees especially like blue and purple flowers because they see this color range particularly well.

        • interolivary@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          39
          ·
          1 year ago

          It’s understandable that that’s a sensitive issue for you, but the advice honestly is pretty accurate

            • Gil (he/they)@beehaw.org
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 year ago

              I personally disagree with the sentiment that going child-free is the solution to ecological catastrophe. Any individual’s decision to have children, or not, hardly compares to the systemic issues within agriculture and natural resource management which are causing it.

              I thought beehaw was supposed to be the “nice” instance. You and others have done a wonderful job proving that otherwise today.

              Well, the original comment in this thread which upset you came from your own instance. From where I’m sitting, that comment has been pretty much the only not-really-nice interaction you’ve had all day on here. Don’t really see where this strawman is coming from.

        • alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgM
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          1 year ago

          …what? this is such an absurd non-sequitur. how do you arrive at this from “don’t have kids”. what is with kbin posters and takes like this man

          • Colombo@kbin.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            This is “don’t have kids” taken to its logical conclusion. Nothing absurd about this.

            Pains me that more people are unable to follow the chain of thoughts and reach this conclusion.

            Let me entertain a hypothetical solution. Would you suggest to Palestinians to “not have kids” to solve the ethnic conflict in that area?

            what is with kbin posters and takes like this man

            If anything, this is a non-sequitur.

            But maybe there is a grain of truth in there. People who were horrified that the lemmy dev and main mod of lemmy.ml was a proponent of hard left stayed away of lemmy (both SW and instances) and went to kbin instead. And since “don’t have kids” is mostly popular on the more extreme left… you get self-selected opinions.

            (honestly, I had no clue that I was not beehaw, just saw a braindead post and replied)

            • ffmike@beehaw.org
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              7
              ·
              1 year ago

              Telling one person that they can help out by not having kids is rather different from, as the dictionary says

              the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group

              Even suggesting to a whole group of people not to have kids is not the same as killing them.

              So no, it’s not a logical conclusion. It’s illogical rhetoric. But you do you, I guess.

              • Colombo@kbin.social
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                Telling one person that they can help out by not having kids is rather different from, as the dictionary says

                Your definition seems to be quite limited. Many acknowledged genocides would not be treated as such. According to Wikipedia, the UN Genocide Convention is much broader:

                Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people[a] in whole or in part. In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.[1][2]

                Spreading an ideology according to which one shouldn’t have kids, thus preventing births, would fall into this definition.

                Even suggesting to a whole group of people not to have kids is not the same as killing them.

                You are correct, it is not the same as killing them, but no one was arguing that. Again, limiting genocide to the deliberate killing of individuals would be quite a lenient definition, and various laws that targeted various ethnic minorities would not be considered genocides, despite them being considered as ones and having the same exact effect. Consider forced sterilization. You don’t have to forcibly kill anyone, yet probably everyone here would agree that it is a genocide.

                • ffmike@beehaw.org
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  5
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  You appear to be unable or unwilling to distinguish between “preventing births” and “voluntarily choosing not to have children.”

                  Not sure why you’re quite so interested in escalating the rhetoric here (forced sterilization? in a thread that started with individual action to save honeybees? really?) but in view of the first rule of Beehaw (“Be(e) nice”) I’m not interested in joining you.

                • Lionir [he/him]@beehaw.org
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  2
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  1 year ago

                  Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people[a] in whole or in part. In 1948, the United Nations Genocide Convention defined genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” These five acts were: killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, imposing living conditions intended to destroy the group, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children out of the group. Victims are targeted because of their real or perceived membership of a group, not randomly.[1][2]

                  Spreading an ideology according to which one shouldn’t have kids, thus preventing births, would fall into this definition.

                  Even with this extended definition, your argument fails the most important criteria for genocide wtih the UN definition which is:

                  intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

                  And it also fails to mention that the argument being made is voluntary and so it wouldn’t fall under the act of :

                  preventing births

    • cd24@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      One concrete thing to do is to work with your governing body to promote diverse crop rotations. Ask them to end subsidies for single-crop farms, especially crops that don’t serve as a food source for bees or have been made toxic by pesticides (frequently found on massive corn farming operations).

      • OOFshoot@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        1 year ago

        We really do need to just straight-up ban pesticides, antibiotics, and synthetic fertilizers in agriculture.

        If there was a way for legislate that all farms needed to be mixed use, I’d go for immediately.

          • OOFshoot@beehaw.org
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Yeah, I’m aware of the Haber-Bosch process.

            I’d honestly have to do the math, but I suspect we’d be able to get rid of synthetic fertilizers if we actually wanted to. Afterall, what do you think happens to the nitrogen after we eat it? We pee and poop it out, for the most part. Yes, there are losses to the air when you till the soil, but a proper farm that focuses on soil health has ways to deal with that problem.

            Right now we use the system we have because it’s cheap and easy to do so on an individual level. Growers want to simplify their workflow; they don’t want to actually manage the health of the land they work. It’s too much effort.

            Plus, there’s a bunch of government policy that encourages bad farming practices and discourages good ones. Corn subsidies, banning the use of treated sewage for fertilizer, blatant blind-eye enforcement of labor laws, price-dropping policy instead of price-stabilizing policy, etc.

            It’s not that we would starve, not in a properly structured system, anyway. It’s that food would become more expensive and some of us would transition to careers in agriculture. The pay would become seductive when the farms become desperate for labor. A farm that actually takes care of the land and the animals is absolutely more labor-intensive, and that’s why very few modern farms do it.

            Edit: I should also say that the plants and animals we have today are not the same as the ones we had when the Haber process was invented. We wouldn’t be going back to the yields of the early 1900s. Even if we did everything exactly the same as they did back then, we’d still get better returns and have a more robust food delivery system. Hell, they didn’t even have refrigeration back then.

    • EnchiladaHole@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      My impression is the problem is primarily pesticide use is too ubiquitous. Help normalize pesticide free environments and you help bees.

    • Stumblinbear@pawb.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Just would like to note that honeybees are not native to the US, we have tons of native pollinators

      Still sucks though

  • VegaLyrae@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    Despite big annual losses the situation is a far cry from 2007 when many bee experts expected an end to managed pollination said U.S. Department Agriculture research entomologist Jay Evans, who wasn’t part of the survey.

    “There are threats certainly in the environment and honeybees have persisted,” Evans said. “I don’t think honeybees will go extinct but I think they will always have these sort of challenges.”

  • Cap@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    A good portion of that half that died are the fuckers I stumbled upon in the woods that ended up stinging me.