Bees are collapsing in the U.S. A key to their secrets might vanish. The top federal lab on native bees is set to close under President Trump’s budget.
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Everyone with extra outdoor space to spare, call your local beekeepers and see if they will put a colony on your property. It helps the local plants and wildlife, and they'll do all the work in maintaining them. They just need volunteers to offer up space.
Also, talk to your local government about reducing the types of pesticides available for non-commercial purposes.
What's actually needed in most places are the native furrow bees, sweat bees, carpenter bees, and the likes. With the exception of some bumble bee species, they're not raised commercially
EXACTLY! That's why I'm turning my yard into a native habitat for all sorts of critters. I'm planting mushrooms, wildflowers, native shrubs and trees, ferns, etc. I've already noticed an uptick in the year and a half I've been doing it and maintenance is a breeze. Way easier than keeping up with grass and I love having some clover in the yard and the bees go nuts for it!
Thanks for reminding me I've always wanted to have bees. I'd never considered just calling up beekeepers.
This won’t help native/wild bees or the specific ecosystems they are a part of though.
It's actually a part of the collapse of native pollinators.
This will just exacerbate the collapse of native bees and pollinators. Honey bees are aggressive forrragers, and beat out native species. There are bee enthusiasts and conservationists who actually kill and remove honey bee nests for this reason.
Native Americans called them white man's flies because they aren't native and only were introduced by Europeans who wanted honey.
I have space, but I'm allergic :/
Is the space a ways from your normal paths? As long as you leave em be (heh) they'll usually ignore you
This is the case for almost all wildlife in my experience of nearly 40 years (including a Boy Scout-focused childhood). There's an energy you can summon through your attitude, body language, tone of voice, expressions, etc that makes you more palatable to animals. It's "demonstrating you don't want to hurt them and you won't surprise them". I think of it as "Buddha vibes", as new agey as it sounds. (Im not a Buddhist, but Soto Zen in particular is a lifelong influence for me.) We are vectors of trauma for most animals and they respond accordingly.
I have a wild rabbit I've gotten to know over the past few years. She lives in the yard i own, so I make sure my yard is healthy for her. No pesticides, infrequent mowing, etc. Nowadays she lets me get close enough for these kinds of pictures (very little zoom, I was <10' from her).
Honeybees generally stay away from human activity. If you have a lot of flowers in your area, and big open spaces, they'll just stick to the flowers and away from your house. They're also unlikely to sting you unless you go to the hive and start messing with it and they don't recognize you.
This is like when Mao didn’t like sparrows during the Great Leap Forward and told everyone to kill the sparrows and then there was a famine
Definitely not his finest moment
A more common strategy than you'd like to think. For instance, in 1918 the state of California declared a War On Squirrels.
In 1937, the Colorado National Guard conducted a campaign to eliminate locusts with flamethrowers.
The idea that we shouldn't be attempting to eradicate whole species that local populations consider hazardous or harmful is a relatively novel one.
I guess if Trump does away with pollinators he doesn't have to worry about who is going to work the farms. Stable Genius at work yet again, 4D chess when everyone else is playing checkers. All this winning feels like we are being dragged backwards...
Lol we can't blame Trump exclusively for this. The entirety of the Human Industrial Organism has been working tirelessly for decades. It wasn't their goal, but when is "apocalyptic food chain collapse" anyone's goal?
[Hums "Which Side Are You On" while sitting on my front porch, watching fireflies]
Bees are collapsing in the U.S. A key to their secrets might vanish.
I fucking hate these nonsense clickbait headlines.
Is it click bait if the explanation is also in the title? I admittedly have not yet clicked on it, but it looks like (at least now) the next line "office is to be closed" is that same key to their secrets (though admittedly yeah that's a pretty cringe way to put it)
We have planted two large pollinator gardens in our front yard with nothing but native plants. We try to let the grass grow as long as possible to allow the bees to get their fill on our clover flowers. We also have several raised beds with plenty of stuff flowering for the bees to enjoy. It’s not much but it’s honest work. Save the bees!
any luck? I've noticed a sharp decline in pollinators over the last two or three years. I DID manage to get some success with the native bees with some guerilla gardened sunflowers, though. That is, until someone cut them down.
Yes! It took a year of growth but we’ve seen an uptick. It’s pretty cool to see.
I'm also having much less bees (and most other insects, besides some pests) around here, even my tomatoes on the balcony are not fruiting, because there seem to be no pollinators
I'm in Austria/Europe btw