All very good points. I’m definitely learning a lot about bees in this thread.
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Here in the northeast, I believe clover in the mix encourages certain fruit pests, including tarnished plant bug. It is also takes a lot of water out of the soil, if that’s an issue. Its N fixing ability is not nearly enough of an advantage to make it a useful orchard groundcover here, as I understand it.
Many native bees tend the flowers of clover here, and when I was a child I used to get stung walking bare foot over clover in Arizona. As I recall the flowers were white.
Seed producers of various clovers require honey bees for pollination according to this link.
http://www.aces.uiuc.edu/vista/html_pubs/BEEKEEP/CHAPT8/chapt8.html
Crimson clover has flowers difficult for honeybees to harvest the pollen from but varieties of native bees will harvest its pollen as well.
Moral of the story, if you spray your trees with pesticides harmful to bees, do not plant clover where spray will land.
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My wife is interested in keeping a honeybee hive. So your comment is something to think about.
My gut tells me they favor different species.
I see our natives increasing as we plant more wildflowers but my crops still suffer from lack of pollination.
There is a lot to learn on this subject.
Yes, the continual learning process is what makes gardening a great hobby. Best to have something blooming all the time during the growing season so that local beneficial insects (pollinators and predators) have ample food. Find out who your local beneficials are and what they prefer. I don’t grow wildflowers, but I let a number of garden crops flower and often times reseed. Cilantro, chives, arugula, mustard, Swiss chard, to name a few, all have great flowers that beneficials flock toward.
Peach, plum, etc are just another flower. The local bumbles, hover bees, and various types of flies do the majority of the pollinating for me. I do see honey bees but they are well out numbered as they should be. And I assume the honey bees that I do see are localized/feral.
I know, that’s the agri-business model. You can have vast deserts of momo-culture crops, spray insecticides to the be-jeezus belts, and get a few quarts of honey at the end of the season. 40% losses to a hive under that model can be written off as a cost of doing business. I’m talking about a model where local pollinators that don’t capture headlines, and you’ve taken the time to get to know and promote, are doing this work for you. Arguments about why the latter modal doesn’t work will be coming in 3…2…1.
Thanks for sharing the video Drew. Paul Stamets is doing some cutting-edge research and I’m always interested in hearing his ideas.
2014 honey production up 19%.
Yes there are great hive losses in winter. The 5% losses historically were the norm. Seems like greater losses started with the new mites. The bee keepers must use pesticides to get the mites off the bees and these also hurt the bees. Bee keepers have become very good at splitting hives multiple times so honey production and pollination of our crops can be still accomplished. I know 60,000 hives are imported for our wild blueberries. Prices to rent hives is up. I suppose we have to pay a fair price to the bee keepers for their extra work keeping the bees working. I hate to use pesticides but must. Most good farmers are very careful with the stuff and not just for environmental reasons. Some of the stuff is $500 for 14 oz.!!! Trust me I am not going to put that stuff where it is not intended.
I raised bees and even queens for quite a few years before all this CCD came about and even then in the cold north I encountered 50% winter loss. I gave it up until I could get a cellar to put them in.
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It’s not that the latter model “doesn’t work” – it’s hard to deny that it worked for millennia and still does for much (maybe even most) of the world’s population and food supply – the issue is that given a choice, that model isn’t compatible with how people want to work and live, including 99% of the people championing that model, native pollinators, etc. To a small extent that model is compatible at the margins (and only at the margins) of the diets of rich people, people that make money doing anything besides growing food by that model (which is particularly notable when one considers how labor-intensive that model is and how many people would actually need to be doing that work for that model to get anywhere or amount to anything, especially if one were to measure by percentage of dietary calories or by food acreage footprint.) But for the average American (or resident of any “1st world” country) it’s not hardly compatible with a modern lifestyle even at the margins. So, yes, the model works, but in our contexts it only substantially works for those that would choose a radically different and “backwards” lifestyle (and have the flexibility to do that, not have student loans to pay off, etc.), affecting not just how people shop and eat, but also how and where they live and make their livings. Or for shorthand, you could just say it doesn’t work.
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Unless we have another planet to go to i think we all need to find a way to make the "radically different and “backwards” lifestyle you mention work.
What we are doing now (planet mining) is a relatively short term thing.
Space X is going to have limited seating and i’m guessing my family and probably yours isnt on the passenger list.
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Maybe so, but that doesn’t make a lot of the arguments for native pollinators realistic or applicable in the contexts those arguments are made, and even if we can and do get to that radically different lifestyle I expect honeybees will be valued for their honey (and maybe also wax) even more highly than they are as masses of moveable pollinators now.
@cousinfloyd native pollinators will fly at a way lower temps than honey bees.
I’ve seen lots of money lost in the commercial fruit industry when the weather turned cooler and the contracted honey bees never left their hives.
Native pollinators won’t fly at way lower temps than honeybees if they aren’t there (and the major commercial fruit growing areas have more regular/predictable weather anyway), and in the commercial fruit industry there are typically several big reasons native pollinators aren’t there. In the places where most Americans live (regions with a lot more rainfall than where the fruit is grown, regions with interspersed areas of woods, regions where even commercial horticulture operates on a much smaller scale…), and especially in backyard orchards, I would agree that honeybees are generally over-rated as pollinators, but that’s not the context of the commercial fruit (and nut and vegetable seed…) industry (even the USDA organic fruit industry.)
I also just want to second what Muddy said in the post immediately below the youtube video. I think that was very well said and very pertinent. Her comments about 40% losses being entirely compatible with year-to-year increases in bee populations were also right on.
I also especially appreciated some of Bear’s honeybee icon bullet points (for content, not just the nifty icons.)
In NY native pollinators play a big role in fruit production. About 15 years ago we had a very hard late frost that wiped out the apple crop in the Hudson Valley. The next year the trees were set up with very heavy bloom but when the flowers opened the weather turned cool and wet and the honey bees wouldn’t leave their hives. Complete disaster was predicted- consecutive years of crop failure would put many growers out of business.
But to the surprise of many, the natives came on like the cavalry and helped produce a record crop for the entire Hudson Valley.
Only problem is a record crop means lower prices. When you are a farmer much of the time you can’t win for losing. (is that the saying?- makes no sense)
All this mainstream and forward thinking (in the agri-business sense) is what got us to 40% bee losses, which everyone is bemoaning here, right? Although I wholeheartedly dismiss the premise that promoting local/free pollinators is somehow radically different or backward thinking --it’s certainly an attractive concept in this context. Call it whatever name you want.
I watched 4 different bee species work my blueberries today, which are native. Nice. None seemed to be on my fruit trees. They bloom so early. Of course none are native. The pluots flowered but the flowers were damaged, and not one fruit. I tried to help with pollination, but when I touched the flowers they just fell off. No doubt had severe winter injury. The peach trees had about 1/3 normal blooms, and about 1/3 of those are producing fruit. Arctic Glo nectarine seems the hardiest of all of them. No die-back, and the most flowers and fruit set. Followed by Indian Free then PF 13. Indian Free is not self fertile but set fruit. I’m going to have to grow those out and see what crossed with it.
There isn’t a soul posting in this thread who is against promoting local pollinators. Nobody called that radically different or backward.
I know that I have “a lot” of locals and their numbers have appeared to grow year by year. And I don’t mean my managed hives.
We don’t currently have a way to even vaguely monitor the numbers of native pollinators across the board. All the gathered stats are for managed honey bee hives. So, there’s no way to tell what the overall % losses/gains for non-managed pollinators, including moths, flies, and some bats, are from year to year.
In your posts, I feel a resentment against honey bees for displacing local pollinators. I, myself, would consider that an ecological concern if it were true to a meaningful extent. Fortunately, for us all, and the bees as well, it is not. According to the Bee Lab at UC Berkley, over 300 varieties of bees have been identified in urban CA neighborhoods. The lab has dubbed displacement by honeybees an urban bee myth, and states, "It is often rumored that native bees are declining because honey bees are displacing them on flowers, however, there is little hard evidence of this. It is possible that native bees avoid flowers if they detect a sparse or declining resource. But, apart from some occasional territorial scuffling between male bees, native and honey bees appear to peacefully coexist.
That is interesting because male bees are not active foragers. They live for the purpose of spreading their genetics. That’s their job.
I can tell that you do appreciate your natives. I hope that like BearWithMe, me, and many others, that you also make it a point to plant native flowering plants in your environment, along with the non-local/non-native plants that we all enjoy cultivating.
That’s not the agri-business model anywhere. I can understand how you might take different aspects of crop growing, pollination services, and bee keeping and assume that’s what it adds up to, but you left too much out of the equation. Nobody is arguing for that because it’s unsound practice and doesn’t exist as a business model.
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Drew, I’ve never seen a honey bee on my blueberries. They get well pollinated, though. Mostly by a hawk moth that looks like soft, slightly smaller honey bee (but it really is a moth), and by carpenter bees. I enjoy watching the moths. They can hover right beneath the flowers and stick their proboscis up to reach the nectar.
I think I have last year, but usually it’s small bees. They seem to like my strawberries too.
That was a direct quote from @cousinfloyd, and I was speaking directly to him. Generally speaking, if the shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it.
Not at all. There isn’t enough data to be sure, and that’s my key point, local pollinators don’t have an industry behind them. They certainly don’t grab the headlines. If you factor in Gause’s law of competitive exclusion , overloading an area with bees may or may not be bad news for local bees, but it is likely to displace moths, flies, and other lesser pollinators that struggle to compete with bees as it is. Local pollinators have more than likely reached some level of equilibrium.
If you want to keep bees, keep bees. To me, they have no more or less value than hummingbirds, bumbles, hover bees, mason bees, moths, pollinating flies, etc.
I think local pollinators are great for local plants, but most of the fruit I grow is not native, so honey bees make a lot of sense, Plus honey is so fantastic, So many types. Flavors vary so much it is so cool to try all the different honeys. What a great product.
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