3d ago

New pollen-replacing food for honey bees brings new hope for survival

news.wsu.edu

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5 comments

I’d really like to see more bug conservation in general. There’s a lot of good to be done in saving bees, but wasps are also critical pollinators. I get that paper wasps are jerks and it can hurt, but social wasps are just trying to protect their families.
We are in a mass extinction event when it comes to insect populations. I get liking the (not indigenous to the US) honey bees because they make tasty stuff, but we also need to work on protecting ants, beetles… it can’t all be focused on monarchs and the cuter bee species…
- I’ve had a ton of people asking if I’m going to keep bees as part of my homestead, and I have to explain that while somewhat useful, they aren’t native and so I don’t want them. Only way I’d be willing to keep honey bees is if they are completely contained in my greenhouses, and frankly that’s a lot of work I’m not willing to do.
  People tend to get confused until I tell them about the dozens of native bees and other pollinators that are struggling to maintain populations in the region.. I want to encourage those to hang out by my crops. They need a lot less from me, and are significantly more useful because they belong there.
- Which ants? What important work do they do?
  Where I come from, Argentine ants are dominant, and considered pests. Apparently, there is also some evidence of them being problematic for pollinators.
  
  Argentine ants are an invasive species, and are harmful because they are displacing native ants. (The danger with Argentine ants is that they all recognize each other as part of the “same colony” and so team up as an invading force.)
  Ant species are pretty good markers of biodiversity - you can use the number of different species in a square meter as a kind of measurement tool. As far as the roles they play - complicated as shit and depends on the species. Some have complicated interactions with aphids, some do things like farm different kinds of fungus which might make different nutrients available at the micro biome level. It really depends on the ecosystem we are looking at - when I worked in an ant lab we were looking at their interactions with the prairie and micronutrients. Kurzegaszt’s ant series is a pretty awesome exploration of the ways a bunch of different species wage wars, impact the environment…
  Argentine ants are wrecking all of this.

While I live in an area that doesn't have too big a problem with bee populations, I'm excited for my friends who have to manually pollinate their plants and trees by hand