I think bees can easily live without humans, they would just became another insignificant species like many others, say for example, like Alburnoides Bipunctatus. Wait, why did I picked that one? What's so special about it that I picked it? Nothing, that's why I picked it.
That's true, but I do agree in part that we've a pretty good relationship with bees.
And, any beekeeper will respect the bees and only take what's needed without making their life harder.
> Beekeper extracts almost all bee and replaces it with sugar
If you mean that the larvae combs are removed and replaced by sugar... most probably not. The idea is having as much bees by beehive as you can breed.
If you mean that beekeepers remove "almost all" honey leaving bees to starve, this is an oversimplification. Any professional beekeeper know that will need to leave enough honey for winter. Leaving a minimum of 12-15 Kg of honey is standard and should suffice for the bees. If the beehive looks weak may not be harvested at all. Sugar is provided if needed as winter emergency feeding. The beekeeper will feed the bees in autumn also to assure that the fall born bees are as strong as fatty as possible.
> If you mean that the larvae combs are removed and replaced by sugar... most probably not. The idea is having as much bees by beehive as you can breed.
GP almost certainly meant that beekeepers take all the honey then they feed the bees sugar-water. That actually is true of some (many?) beekeepers.
It depends strongly on location. Winter bees live on autumn fat. If the bees are well feed in fall and the winters are warm, will need much less honey to survive. The beehive will not be required to be warmed against chilling temperatures for example so bees don't need to spend so much energy warming it
Not I! Sugar water is terrible for the bees. If you want strong colonies that over-winter fine and bounce back fast in the Spring to make lots of honey, then you'd best leave them plenty of honey to make it through the winter. I only extract half of what I harvest (freezing that which I don't extract so I can give it back later if the colonies need it), and I leave a fair bit in the hives too.
Don't buy commercial honey. Buy local, small- and medium-batch honey.
Basically this. Colonies stay for the room and occasional board, as well as all the flowers that beekeepers typically plant in the hopes of making their bees productive.
Colonies do abscond, absolutely, and there's lots of feral honeybee colonies out there.
> As always with these kinds of headlines the answer is no.
The article is making the case that the answer is Yes. It goes over the reasons why the current way of Beekeeping (predominately for harvesting their honey) could be bad for bees and explains methods that the 'natural beekeepers' are using to make their pollination role more sustainable.
From the article:
> Most beekeepers’ colonies are much larger than those which occur in the wild, and rival colonies might be separated by only a few yards, rather than by half a mile. Much of the bees’ honey, which is supposed to get them through the winter, is taken before they have a chance to eat it. A queen bee goes on a spree of mating flights early in her life, and then lays the fertilized eggs until her death. In apiaries, queens often have their wings clipped, to interrupt swarming (a colony’s natural form of reproduction), and are routinely inspected, and replaced by newcomers, sometimes imported from the other side of the world. Propolis—a wonderful, sticky substance that bees make from tree resin and that has antibacterial qualities—is typically scraped out of hives by beekeepers because it is annoying and hard to get off their hands.
> Natural beekeepers leave their bees alone. They seldom treat for disease—allowing the weaker colonies to fail—and they raise the survivors in conditions that are as close as possible to tree cavities. They fill their hives with swarms that come in on the wing, rather than those which come from dealers who trade on the Internet.
> > In apiaries, queens often have their wings clipped, to interrupt swarming
This is nonsense. Beekeepers like to do "splits" (simulated swarming) because it increases the number of hives they have (and if they have too many, they can sell them), and mated queens don't and can't fly far unless the colony prepares her for swarming by making her lose weight for a couple of weeks before swarming.
> > and are routinely inspected, and replaced by newcomers, sometimes imported from the other side of the world.
This is true. Well, the queens themselves don't get "inspected" so much as the whole colony, because the beekeeper wants to see the queen laying lots. Re-queening is very much a thing, and quite frequent too.
> > Propolis—a wonderful, sticky substance that bees make from tree resin and that has antibacterial qualities—is typically scraped out of hives by beekeepers because it is annoying and hard to get off their hands.
I never scrape off propolis (which really is wonderful), and all beekeepers really should not scrape it off. But it's generally understood that propolis is very good. Indeed, there are beekeepers who stimulate production of propolis to harvest and sell it (you can definitely find propolis products out there), but only ignorant ones scrape it of because it's annoying.
> > Natural beekeepers leave their bees alone. They seldom treat for disease—allowing the weaker colonies to fail—and they raise the survivors in conditions that are as close as possible to tree cavities. They fill their hives with swarms that come in on the wing, rather than those which come from dealers who trade on the Internet.
True! Except that catching swarms is no guarantee that those are not "from dealers who trade on the Internet" (oh noes, not the Iinnnternet! and dealers!!). I've bought queens "on the Internet", though not from dealers but from beekeepers who do queen rearing. The problem with those queens is that they're often not very good, possibly because the larvae used for the grafts was too old, or because they didn't get enough chances to mate, or because of in-breeding.
> replaced by newcomers, sometimes imported from the other side of the world
Depending on how you view it that bit is actually wrong. You are specifically NOT ALLOWED to ship bees between e.g. Europe and North America. I think you can send sperm and maybe eggs (not sure if that's possible).
Our current civilization certainly seems to score very high on neuroticism.
50 years from now, people will label the Zeistgeist as a resurgence of old Victorianism, with different (in direction, not in kind) racial and sexual taboos and an extra dollop of hairshirt environmentalism.
Not quite. Much of the industry for growing fruit depends on beekeepers renting out their bees as pollinators. As for cattle, well, yeah, they wholly depend on us. If you are in doubt just look at the relative sizes of populations of cattle vs mammalian wildlife.
I don't think you appreciate quite how many heads of cattle exist compared to comparable mammals that live in nature, and what it would look like if the world's cattle population was "free range".
The way we raise cattle is extremely efficient. Not least in terms of space.
> I don't think you appreciate quite how many heads of cattle
Born and raised on a cattle station with multiple STEM degrees and decades mapping the world (large scale geophysical land and ocean survey) behind me ..
I don't think you appreciate how laughably condescending you come across.
Points being:
* I understand the total number of cattle under direct human management,
* I know that cattle can survive just fine without human management .. even in urban environments (ever seen free range unowned cattle in India?),
* I've already linked to what feral cattle look like and the damage they do.
Humans live in a symbiotic relationship with bees, we can not exist without each other.