[kneath]

> "…the overall increase is largely the result of constant replenishment of losses, the study showed."

Very misleading headline. The bees are not bouncing back, humans are splitting up stronger hives into weaker hives. Kinda like saying humankind is beating cancer by having more babies in third-world countries.

[radiorental]

This is simply not true.

As other have noted, splitting is a natural process of beekeeping.

however, I've noticed a discernible change in the beekeeping profession in the last 10 years.

To take a step back - there is a huge variation in bee characteristics from hive to hive.

What I've noticed is that package and nuc suppliers (aka bee breeders) are far less likely to treat hives. And it has become near impossible to buy 'traditional' chemical bee disease medications.

The prevailing modus operandi these days is to leverage natural evolutionary processes. I.e. let weak hive fail and therefor let undesirable genes phase out.

[roel_v]

"As other have noted, splitting is a natural process of beekeeping."

Uh, splitting is very much not natural (at least, I'm taking this to mean artificial splits - if you're saying swarming is a form of splitting, which isn't unreasonable even if it's not the wording I'd use, then disregards this comment). It's part of 20th century beekeeping, yes, but swarming is natural bee behavior, and unnatural practices like splitting, queen clipping, brood cutting, sugar feeding etc. are creating fragile colonies with weak resistance that depend on human intervention (including chemical varroa treatment) to survive.

And this is not just ideology, this is the trend in all apiculture/bee entomology journals over the last say 5 years.

[radiorental]

If you have a strong hive, do you let it swarm or do you intervene and split it?

(for the uninitiated, good hives grow to the point that the queen and half the hive leave to make a new colony, then you have a 50/50 chance the original hive will raise a new queen, that the queen will mate and make it back to the hive without been eaten)

Let me expand my original statement for clarification. splitting leverages the natural process of swarming in the field of beekeeping.

As to some of the other 'interventions' you mention I politely disagree. It's sort of like saying cows are weak in Canada because farmers don't let them freeze to death in winter.

I recently had a hive attacked by ants. They lost a lot of food and brood. Do I let them head into fall and winter with little to no chance of survival? The fact the ants got into the colony was no fault of the bees, just bad luck.

There's survival of the fittest and there's animal husbandry. The two aren't completely incompatible.

[Retric]

They are largely incompatible. The ideal animal husbandry model is different for populations that are going to be culled without breeding. Ex: Veal.

Useing similar methods on fast breeding species where you keep the offspring is a very bad idea long term. The only way to keep things stable is to have breeders who focus on culling the weak. But, you need a large breeding population to maintain genetic diversity.

[jly]

This shift is happening, but I see it far too slowly, still. At least in my area, the dominate beekeepers who do it for commercial enterprise (and have the majority of all hives) still treat because they are protecting their income. Hobbyists are more quickly adopting treatment-free methods which I think is accelerating this trend.

[lostlogin]

I wonder if this is region specific. It isn't a thing here in New Zealand. My understanding is that the US has a very genetically diverse bee population with many different genetic strains available. A strength and weakness of being remote down here is that we don't necessarily get the diseases, but we don't have the genetic pool available to fight diseases when they arrive. The mites are a colossal problem here.

[kneath]

This was literally from the article.

> “You create new hives by breaking up your stronger hives, which just makes them weaker,” said Tim May, a beekeeper in Harvard, Illinois and the vice-president of the American Beekeeping Federation based in Atlanta.

There are many ways to split hives, the way we've been doing it to combat CCD is creating weaker hives (and thus more susceptible to mites and other diseases).

[_rpd]

Hive splitting is quite a natural process. New "weak" hives quickly become "strong" hives. A single queen bee can lay hundreds and even thousands of eggs per day. During late spring, hive population doubles every few weeks.

You can read a brief overview here ... http://americanbeejournal.com/beekeeping-by-the-numbers-2/

[civilian]

Ahh, I don't think so. The _rate_ of CCD has decreased since last year. If we were "splitting up stronger hives into weaker hives", shouldn't CCD have stayed the same or increased?

> The number of hives lost to Colony Collapse Disorder, a phenomenon of disappearing bees that has raised concerns among farmers and scientists for a decade, was 84,430 in this year’s first quarter, down 27 percent from a year earlier. Year-over-year losses declined by the same percentage in April through June, the most recent data in the survey.

//edit: but idk, maybe I'm confused here too. At the very least, we've figured out a way to breed bees quickly so that we can outpace CCD?

[_rpd]

Colony Collapse Disorder is roughly defined as unexpected colony death over winter. A previous base rate of 10% colony loss increased to 15-25% colony loss during different years. There are lots of theories about why, but note that wild swarm mortality during winter is over 80%. CCD is a problem in domestic hives, and may very well be a consequence of some aspect of modern beekeeping practices.

[PhasmaFelis]

This is the chance of an entirely colony dying out, right, not just the per-capita mortality rate?

[jly]

Yes, per-capita rates are tricky with honeybees since they adjust their hive numbers significantly during the year and slim down for winter and potential summer nectar dearth.

Measuring colony survival is what is really important.

[pyre]

The percentage of colonies that don't survive the winter.

[tptacek]

Honey bees in the United States are livestock. Their existence on this continent is mediated entirely by our actions.

[QuarterReptile]

Do you mean to say that the ones I see in grass and parks are some beekeeper's? I'm doubtful, but that would be pretty interesting. Are there that many amateur beekeeper's? I figured they were much less common a backyard project than chickens.

[brownbat]

Not all bees are honey bees. GP was talking about Apis mellifera. You probably encountered Bombus impatiens.

Bumble bees aren't honey bees just like buffalo aren't wild milk cows.

Some have recommended farmers replace pollination with hardier indigenous mason bees or bumble bees, rather than use domesticated honey bees, in response to CCD.

[quesera]

Of course there are wild honeybees. Non-native (to the US), yes, but definitely wild.

It's highly unlikely that GP cannot tell the difference between a bumble bee and a honey bee.

[brownbat]

> Of course there are wild honeybees.

Huh.

For me, the word "honey" in front of the word "bee" indicates a function it is performing for humans. If that's the case, then well, you can't have a "wild honey bee;" it'd be self-contradictory. It'd be like talking about a "wild milk cow" or a "wild show dog" or a "wild support animal."

It just sounds... off.

So, no, I didn't think you could have wild honey bees. You seem pretty certain I'm wrong though, so I'm thinking it over.

Also, n.b., maybe the confusion is partly about "wild" vs. "feral?"

http://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-feral-an...

Maybe you and I just use a few of these words in radically incompatible ways.

> It's highly unlikely that GP cannot tell the difference between a bumble bee and a honey bee.

It honestly wasn't very clear.

CCD is one of those topics where lay people and especially journalists get really confused or possibly just lazy about what bees are relevant to the conversation. So I took tp's comment way back as noting that we're mainly talking about domestic bees here, as a shot at focusing the discussion. He got a response about random bees found in parks, which, what with the comparison to chickens especially, seemed either sarcastic and missing the point or just deeply confused.

So I started at the lowest possible level of confusion and decided we could work up from there if necessary. Maybe I should have been more charitable to start, but I didn't want to risk another detour because we skipped too many steps ahead, which seemed to be the exact problem the first time.

Maybe the comment was literally just expressing excitement at the possibility that the apis seen in parks are related to backyard cultivation, and I read it completely the wrong way.

[quesera]

Unkept honey bees can be either wild or feral. And the distinction is not always clear -- how many generations does it take for a bloodline to revert to "wild"?

And of course, a honey bee is any apis that produces honey. While not species-specific, it is genus-constraining, instead of function-labeling. More like "sugar maple" (most of which are untapped, but they still produce), and not "milk cow".

Fair points on the confusion and ambiguity. My comment wasn't really worthwhile (and you obviously know all of these rejoinders) but the floated implication seemed absurd and a little pointed. Future self will endeavour to be more valorous.

[nsxwolf]

The bees I've seen swarming my garbage all my life are definitely not bumble bees.

[steanne]

might not be bees at all. yellowjackets like trash.

[reitanqild]

Had to look up yellowjackets. Here's what Wikipedia says:

Yellowjacket or yellow jacket is the common name in North America for predatory social wasps of the genera Vespula and Dolichovespula. Members of these genera are known simply as "wasps" in other English-speaking countries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowjacket

[lostlogin]

An interesting thing that allows the killing of these wasps without harming bees - they go for protein in a big way, while bees usually don't.

http://www.doc.govt.nz/waspcontrol

[lostlogin]

The standard range is given as 3km, but have been observed far further out than that at times. Given that they communicate to each other where food sources are, they can efficiently harvest for a long way off. It's also surprising where hives are and you can quite easily hide one away such that it's not easily noticed by neighbours - an entrance facing a high fence or wall forces them to fly way up before moving horizontally.

I have no idea how common it is in the States but poking about suggests that here in NZ there are about half a million hives. There are about 5550 total beekeeping enterprises in New Zealand, of which only 803 were commercial. Anything less that 50 hives was considered hobbyist.

[jly]

There are very many backyard beekeepers, even in urban areas. I have a pair of hives on my small city lot and most neighbors don't even know. This isn't uncommon these days.

Having said that, there are wild bees, and bees 'escape' from beekeepers by swarming and forming new hives on their own. They try to reproduce by creating new hives as frequently as they can.

[tptacek]

I guess my question would be, why should I care about isolated feral honey bee colonies? They're not a native species; they don't "belong" here. As long as beekeepers can cost-effectively maintain their pollination capabilities (perhaps at marginally higher cost), what's the public policy implication of CCD?

[lostlogin]

Poison builds up in comb and honey from the agents required to treat mites. It's making beekeeping harder, and the relationship between bee keepers harder (e.g. People treat diseases out of sync with each other, messing up the treatment process as bees drift to each others hives, spreading disease). Pollination as a service is expensive and lastly, it's a bit sad walking past a feral colony that's been there many years and seeing it dead.

[tptacek]

But this isn't unknowable. The prices for pollination are basically public, as are the prices for precursors of bee colonies. If beekeeping is getting untenably expensive, that should be reflected in both those prices. Why isn't it?

[bpodgursky]

> humans are splitting up stronger hives into weaker hives

That's not really an accurate way of describing beekeeping procedure. Yes hives are split, but that's how hives reproduce in nature. "Weaker" hives just start smaller and grow.

Not that CCD isn't worth looking into, but it's not like the average hive comes out weaker.

[tptacek]

My understanding is that CCD is defined by an increase in overwintering losses of whole hives. But overwintering losses of hives are something that happens with or without a new disease, and represent essentially a livestock management problem for beekeepers.

Losses are made up for by splitting hives and introducing new queens, which are bought on an open market. You can see the price for a new queen right now; it's low tens of dollars.

[Angostura]

>In the survey, a hive loss was attributed to colony collapse if varroa or other mites were ruled out as a cause; few dead bees were found in a hive, a sign that they fled; a queen bee and food reserves were both seemingly normal pre-collapse; and food reserves were left alone after fleeing.

[vanattab]

How are the queens produced? Do they naturally just occur in the hive or are there ways to trigger embryonic bees to become queens?

[patio11]

Fascinatingly, you can intentionally induce it. First Googleable cite I could find: http://www.glenn-apiaries.com/queenrear.html

Agriculture: security research as applied to biology.

[adrianratnapala]

Life is information embodied physically to take care of itself. Starting with the first vaguely reproducing whatever, all the way down to us DNA-encoded eukaryotes.

It should not be surprising if some aspects of biology are analogous to aspects of computing. In fact it isn't even an analogy.

[jly]

All workers are also females, and they start out the same egg as a queen (fertilized). The workers choose to create a queen which has mature reproductive organs by what it feeds the larva. Specifically, NOT feeding it honey and pollen, typical worker larva food, and continuing a diet of royal jelly. Once the larva exceeds a certain age (typically 4-6 days), the path is set and cannot be changed.

[lostlogin]

Look up how you split a hive (basically you take some brood cells, and some food and a load of bees and put them in a new hive). The bees realise they are queenless and raise some brood to be queens. The first queen to emerge goes and kills the others being raised. Slightly strangely for a very organised species, the winner often isn't the best option and is usually the queen who emerges first. However the better queens are those that were fed royal jelly for longer. Mating flights(s) then occur and then she is ready to go like crazy laying eggs, sometimes up to 2000 per day.

[gwenzek]

Totally agree with you that the title is misleading. Commercial bee hive number increased by 3% year on year, but there is still a lot of CCD. So it's not clear if "Bees are bouncing back" or if beekeepers are getting better at preserving them or if USA just had a nicer weather.