This article buries its lede, which is about how honey bees get all the attention but are at less risk than wild bees:
> And that brings us to the actual problem. The honey bee (Apis mellifera) is only one of about 20 thousand different bee species. The non-honey bees are usually referred to as wild bees, and each location has its native species. According to an estimate from researchers at Cornell University in 2006, wild bees contribute to the pollination of 85 percent of crops in agriculture."
> [...]
> But last year the magazine Cell published the results of a study with a global estimate for the situation of wild bees. The authors looked at the numbers of bee species that were collected or observed over time using data publicly available at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. They found that even though the number of records has been increasing, the number of different species in the records has been sharply decreasing in the past decades.
> The decline rates differ between the continents, but the species numbers are dropping steeply everywhere except for Oceania. The researchers say there’s a number of factors in play here, such as the expansion of monocultures, loss of native habitat, pesticides, climate change, and bee trade that also trades around pathogens.
> So the problems that wild bees face are similar to those of honey bees, but they have an additional problem which is… honeybees. Honey bees compete with wild bees for food and habitat and they also pass on viruses. Now, a big honey bee colony can deal with viruses by throwing out the infected bees. But this doesn’t work for wild bees because they don’t live in large colonies. And worse, when honey bees and wild bees fight for food they seem to both lose out.
The whole point of being alarmed of the Bee Apocalypse is that you look at the honey bees as an indicator, just like the lichens on trees are an indicator of air pollution (few lichens mean a bad air quality).
When honey bees are dwindling, pretty much all the insects are too.
The Bee Apocalypse has not gone anywhere, it's just still here, and it is in fact an Insect Apocalypse, which is many orders of magnitude worse.
I don't know what's driving it but I've been observing sharp changes in insect populations that visit our balcony which has been completely taken over by some kind of huge black wasp/hornet monsters.
These bastards seem to hunt baby grasshoppers all day long and butcher all kinds of other wasps and bees, too. I used to find piles of chopped bodies but until competition got the message and show no more. I even found a stash of dead spiders they've managed to build inside a cupboard.
I am starting to get worried.
I do observe other changes in different species but this one is the wildest I've got. Haven't seen a big grasshopper in a decade. My cat used to hunt them all night. What changed? I don't know. Firebugs used to cover some trees in red 3 summers ago. Haven't seen one in months.
Edit: as to why I am replying to your post? I liked it so much, I decided to share my extremely limited experience.
> just like the lichens on trees are an indicator of air pollution (few lichens mean a bad air quality).
Lichen indicators for air pollution are fascinatingly more complicated than that. Certain lichens respond positively to air pollution due to excess nutrients like ammonia and nitrates in the air. Imagine an algal bloom but the nutrient pollution is in the air instead of in the water. The US Forest Service produced an interesting video overviewing these phenomena.
I think the colloquial term for (edit; the most commonly well-known) many wild bees in English is "bumblebees". They're often burrowing species that don't have honey producing hives (They do stuff like make little caves in moss, dirt, and underbrush), and are often crucial pollinators of certain species of plants which are specifically attractive to certain wild bees (Orchids are a good example here) but which domesticated honeybees might not even touch.
I was once dreaming how cool it would be to get into beekeeping but after realizing it might be at a greater detriment to wild species in my area those dreams have become somewhat faded.
Bumblebees are a genus[1] (_Bombus_) of (wild) bees. There are many more genera of bees (taxonomic superfamily _Apoidea_) out there. They are, however, adorable chubby fluffs.
Same here on our tiny farm. I don't need any more hobbies, but I often entertain keeping bees. But I also have a bias towards native plants and native insects. So I cultivate lots of flowering plants, and leave areas wild, but have never done anything with honeybees.
I kinda wish there was a native Northeastern American bee that had some of the utility of honeybees for sugar and/or wax production.
TIL that bumblebees actually have a history of domestication but that international movement of bees led to serious health issues and transmission of pests that decimated both wild and domestic populations: https://www.sare.org/publications/managing-alternative-polli...
Random trivia I learned from a visit to a fruit farm a few weeks back: Fruit farmers much prefer bumble bees to honey bees because they're much better fruit tree pollinators - bumble bees start much earlier in the day than honey bees (e.g. 07.30 vs 12.30), will work at much lower temperatures, and will pollinate 6 flowers in the time a honey bee takes to do 1 (because the honey bees tend to stick around longer on a flower to get more nectar out).
As an Australian, I hadn't really heard the term "wild bees". We call them native bees, following our usual pattern of distinguishing native animals from exotics/introduced species.
The call for action at the end is also not great. From what I can tell, these people are your best bet, assuming you want to help local wild bee populations. (If you have other suggestions, please let me know!)
Around here honeybees do not compete with wild bees for much. Honeybees are a domesticated non-native species incapable of pollinating most native plants. Native bees are well adapted to pollinating native plants but have trouble with the non-native plants.
The problems that native bees here have are several.
o Insecticides (aka pesticides) applied to agricultural crops affect all insects, good and bad, including bees.
o Loss of, for lack of a better word, habitat. Native species of plants are displaced by introduced species that the native bees can not harvest nectar from. Note that urbanization isn't really a big problem for bees because there are plenty of flowers in the city. But are they the right kind of flowers? Orchards full of foreign plants like tree nuts on the other hand, is loss of habitat.
o Introduced disease. Not only are foreign bees brought in (eg. honeybees) but foreign honey is brought in from far away continents chalk full of spores of varieties of nosema or foulbrood or other threats. Honeybees catch these diseases, and bring varroa and tracheal mites and other problems, and spread them to the native bees.
o Honeybees are domesticated agricultural animals like beef cattle and pigs. If the numbers decrease we just breed more until market demand is met. It takes 21 days to breed a new queen and split a colony. Native bees, well, they rely on natural methods of reproduction. The birds and the bees, literally.
As to how a big colony of honeybees deals with a virus: they don't just "throw out the infected bees" since it usually affects the brood more than the workers. If the brood dies, there will be no more workers in a few weeks and the colony collapses. How it usually gets dealt with is the beekeeper medicates the hive. Or, in the case of foulbrood, digs a pit, burns the hive and all nearby hives and all equipment, and buries it like so much nuclear waste.
There is no threat to honeybees. No such luck for wild bees.
(1) Stop using neonicotinoid pesticides. There are plenty of alternatives for protecting food crops from insect infestations, such as neem oil applied as a foliar spray or a soil soak in response to infestations. Neonictoninoides are based on the tobacco nicotine molecule structure, but are typically chlorinated and modified to make them more persistent and toxic to insects relative to animals. There's a good argument for banning the entire class due to their persistent ecological effects on beneficial native insect populations.
(2) Have undisturbed habitat set aside for wild bee populations. This can be something as simple as maintaining undisturbed hedgerows on the sides of agricultural fields, but in general means maintaining a fair amount of undisturbed native habitat.
We use it in our personal garden, but you need to continually re-apply every 4-5 days with really good coverage for a period of time for it to be effective. It has been hit or miss for us. If neem doesn't work then its oh well, plant something else, but we aren't selling a crop.
Demonization of neonics is misplaced. You can spray at night when bees aren't active. You can spray when your plants aren't in bloom and attracting bees. Oh well, the 2 minutes hate have emerged against neonics and farmers pivot like they ways do.
If we're talking about trying to stem the destruction of wild species here (The problem really isn't about domesticated honeybees), then you should definitely consider the fact that spraying at night won't help those wild bees which are nocturnal [1], nor does your point of view on these address the fact that these pesticides have a degree of environmental persistence. [2] This isn't demonization, it's just straight facts when there's plenty of alternatives out there which aren't feeding the giant agri-industrial complex behemoth.
This is a dramatic overstatement. You’re disagreeing about neonics, I’m sorry if that’s hard not to take personally but it seems like something than could be discussed without the vitriol.
I appreciate that she draws the link between monoculture crops, land use, and the health of ecosystems upon which agriculture depends.
Organics are important not because GMOs are the enemy but rather because the land use change is inherently bad for all life in that area. GMOs don't have to lead to monoculture crops that span acres or rampant neonicotinoid insecticides, but they often do, and it's precisely at that point we can see drastic changes in a biome's stability and therefore the health of bees among many other pollinators. That's why we need to be talking about insect numbers at large and not only bees.
The study of biodiversity has an extremely difficult time modeling these kinds of changes, and that's probably why many scientists won't go to bat against this kind of land use change. A self-respecting scientist won't say that converting croplands to monocultures ready for insecticide use lead to biodiversity die-off because it's hard to actually track the fluctuations between species. It takes so much time to collect data to analyze before we even get an inkling of the interplay. We understand so little about the microscale interactions and how it fits into our larger understanding of agriculture and land development.
For those who think this is all overblown and alarmist, go sit on the grass -- if you can find a patch -- and stare at a spot until it comes alive. Things are moving around and teeming with a multitude of species of plants and insects. The reality you see escapes unnoticed until you stop to think about the ecological systems that underpin our fragile existence. Our health depends on a functional biosphere. If we cannot figure out how to share the earth with its other inhabitants, what the fuck are we doing going to Mars?
While I heartily agree with most of your comment, I must strongly disagree with the third paragraph (this is exactly what I'm doing my PhD on):
> many scientists won't go to bat against this kind of land use change. A self-respecting scientist won't say that converting croplands to monocultures ready for insecticide use lead to biodiversity die-off because it's hard to actually track the fluctuations between species
Although you are correct that the details are complicated and different species respond in different ways, the overall picture is abundantly clear. Intensive agriculture with large monocultures, simplified landscapes, and heavy fertiliser/pesticide input is wreaking havoc on biodiversity around the world. The scientific literature has been very explicit about this for over twenty years [e.g. 1-5], and lots of scientists (including my colleagues and I) are actively engaging with farmers, NGOs, and policy-makers to find workable solutions to ameliorate the problem.
Roundup also seems to be bad for humans, which is probably why it has been the subject of various lawsuits and settlements and is also banned or restricted in a number of US cities, though not yet in the US as a whole.
The bee apocalypse is still here. The bees haven’t come back.
Other fauna have declined as well, without us noticing.
I go to northern Maine a few times a year and I’m always looking for moose. I used to be able to find them. Now I only see them when I’m in the air (from a plane).
My friend showed me a study the state did tracking 60 newborn moose calves. Due to overwhelming winter tick population, 90%(!) did not survive the first year, and therefore could not reproduce. This problem has led to a massive decline of moose.
Hobby beekeeper here... I kinda disagree with her final summary... I get her point, but there are benefits to encouraging more people to keep them:
-- Additional pollinators.
-- Awareness. I've witnessed for myself in my own backyard the effects of our unusual weather this spring (ahem: climate change) through observing how my bees are interacting with my garden and trees.
-- Overall benefit: Personally, tending them makes for great therapy and my neighbors love the honey.
-- Advocacy. When you are in-tune with the impact of climate change, pesticides, herbicides, and overall aware of the ecology around you, you are more likely to make political and consumer choices based on those learned / observed experiences.
Perhaps its a coincidence, but I noticed more native bees in my garden now too. I don't think I've done anything net-new in terms of flowers or trees since I started keeping honey bees, but maybe I'm just more aware of the native bees now? Disappointed I've not been able to attract Mason bees, but I've got at least three other varieties buzzing around regularly and I've identified the hive of at least one of those types.
It probably helps that millions of people are helping insect and bird populations by planting stacks of wildflowers, doing No Mow May, and being a bit nicer to local wildlife which all adds up.
If you're trying to help bumble bees, they tend to like to build their nests in the ground under/around rocks, or occasionally in dense duff like straw bales/wattles.
Last year I had a plant to move a flat stone behind a masonry retaining wall on my property to be a hat on a low stone wall that extended off of the end of it, hoping to create some bee habitat. The rock turned out to be too heavy to move, and as soon as I started jostling it, bumble bees came out from under it to see what the ruckus was. So apparently that rock was working just fine where it was. Instead I bought some new stone, but I haven't observed any bees so far this year.
Some people use old pots for this task, but I know people, and an upturned pot is going to be inspected, potentially destroying the hive. Kids in particular would be both more prone to this, and more traumatized to learn what they'd done. A big ol' rock is less of an attractive hazard.
I unwittingly disturbed a solo bumblebee who made his winter home in my compost pile. I wasn't quite sure what I came across, I'd unearthed a wildly vibrating ball of fine fluff, once I teased it apart out flew a big ol' bumblebee. I've got dozens of bumblebees around my yard this part of the summer as our comfrey goes to flower. I believe they winter among my raspberries where its basically an undisturbed hugelkultur mound. Besides bumblebees and carpenter bees I'm pretty much unaware if I'm looking at a wild bee or some type of fly. There are at least a dozen probably closer to two dozen different bee/fly species on the raspberries alone this time of year. I also see honeybees but they stick to the clover, I will see more of them when sunflowers and stonecrop flower. I feel very fortunate to see that kind of variety, we even get monarch butterflies enough to cause the branches to move under their collective weight, I wasn't aware that happened outside of Mexico.
> However, the numbers may sound more alarming than they really are because honey bees are efficiently bred and managed by humans.
Could that be part of the problem, they mention diversity loss in habitat, how about diversity of honeybee genetics. At the same time, HoneyBees are basically barnyard animals, we don't monitor the collapse of pig populations as they head to the slaughterhouse. I understand its not quite an apt analogy because that is the known causative agent and nobody is trying to slaughter their HoneyBees. All the same, they are not natural, I wonder if the public realizes that.
Honeybees are basically an invasive species that humans brought to the Americas in order to pollinate old-world crops (and also harvest honey). The thing is, we've replaced a lot of native new-world ecosystems and foods with old-world crops that depend on old-world bees.
There are a few separate problems that the media often mixes up:
One is that our old-world crops aren't getting enough old-world bees to meet their pollination needs.
Separately, new-world bees (what the article calls "wild bees") are also being replaced by old-world bees, losing out in competition, and not being cared for by professional beekeepers. They're more vulnerable, less protected, and less monitored.
To top it all off, many kinds of bees, old-world or new, are also suffering from the cumulative (and unfortunately complex) domino effects of habitat loss, pesticides, climate change, etc.
I think what's happening in the media is that journalists, knowingly or not, are using #2 and #3 to amplify the concern of #1 even though they're not always aligned (e.g., old-world bees are often one of the reasons contributing to the decline of native new-world bees).
It's relatively harder to get the public to care about an industrial economics problem (#1, where farmers have to resort to expensive human manual pollination instead of cheap bees), so trying to sell that as environmental crisis a la Silent Spring gets more eyeballs.
Remember "Killer Bees"? People killed a lot of wild honeybee hives from fear they'd hybridize and introduce new genes into the domestic population.
There's a few people who will talk about the lack of diversity in domestic bee genetics. AFAIK they're not popular, everybody wants to blame anyone but regulators.
What happened is that the apocalypse did happen, is still happening, and will continue to happen until such time as people quit using tons of pesticides.
Worse is that warmer air usually means more oxygen is available which should make insect and arachnid populations explode, and should result in physically larger insects and arachnids. That we do not see this speaks to the health of these populations.
So an apocalypse can happen for an indefinite period of time? I'm calling BS on the use of that term. A decline in some insect populations is not an "apocalypse". An apocalypse would be a massive extinction level event on a global scale, like when a giant rock slams into the Earth, or there's continuous volcanic activity for a million years.
Readit News
> And that brings us to the actual problem. The honey bee (Apis mellifera) is only one of about 20 thousand different bee species. The non-honey bees are usually referred to as wild bees, and each location has its native species. According to an estimate from researchers at Cornell University in 2006, wild bees contribute to the pollination of 85 percent of crops in agriculture."
> [...]
> But last year the magazine Cell published the results of a study with a global estimate for the situation of wild bees. The authors looked at the numbers of bee species that were collected or observed over time using data publicly available at the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. They found that even though the number of records has been increasing, the number of different species in the records has been sharply decreasing in the past decades.
> The decline rates differ between the continents, but the species numbers are dropping steeply everywhere except for Oceania. The researchers say there’s a number of factors in play here, such as the expansion of monocultures, loss of native habitat, pesticides, climate change, and bee trade that also trades around pathogens.
> So the problems that wild bees face are similar to those of honey bees, but they have an additional problem which is… honeybees. Honey bees compete with wild bees for food and habitat and they also pass on viruses. Now, a big honey bee colony can deal with viruses by throwing out the infected bees. But this doesn’t work for wild bees because they don’t live in large colonies. And worse, when honey bees and wild bees fight for food they seem to both lose out.
When honey bees are dwindling, pretty much all the insects are too.
The Bee Apocalypse has not gone anywhere, it's just still here, and it is in fact an Insect Apocalypse, which is many orders of magnitude worse.
These bastards seem to hunt baby grasshoppers all day long and butcher all kinds of other wasps and bees, too. I used to find piles of chopped bodies but until competition got the message and show no more. I even found a stash of dead spiders they've managed to build inside a cupboard.
I am starting to get worried.
I do observe other changes in different species but this one is the wildest I've got. Haven't seen a big grasshopper in a decade. My cat used to hunt them all night. What changed? I don't know. Firebugs used to cover some trees in red 3 summers ago. Haven't seen one in months.
Edit: as to why I am replying to your post? I liked it so much, I decided to share my extremely limited experience.
Lichen indicators for air pollution are fascinatingly more complicated than that. Certain lichens respond positively to air pollution due to excess nutrients like ammonia and nitrates in the air. Imagine an algal bloom but the nutrient pollution is in the air instead of in the water. The US Forest Service produced an interesting video overviewing these phenomena.
Air Pollution & Lichens: A Tour of the Columbia River Gorge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3dPrgAkN3M
It seems they are not dwindling.
That was one of the clarifications of the piece. The bigger concern is the number of species rather than the number of honeybees.
I was once dreaming how cool it would be to get into beekeeping but after realizing it might be at a greater detriment to wild species in my area those dreams have become somewhat faded.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomic_rank
I kinda wish there was a native Northeastern American bee that had some of the utility of honeybees for sugar and/or wax production.
TIL that bumblebees actually have a history of domestication but that international movement of bees led to serious health issues and transmission of pests that decimated both wild and domestic populations: https://www.sare.org/publications/managing-alternative-polli...
https://xerces.org/
The problems that native bees here have are several.
o Insecticides (aka pesticides) applied to agricultural crops affect all insects, good and bad, including bees.
o Loss of, for lack of a better word, habitat. Native species of plants are displaced by introduced species that the native bees can not harvest nectar from. Note that urbanization isn't really a big problem for bees because there are plenty of flowers in the city. But are they the right kind of flowers? Orchards full of foreign plants like tree nuts on the other hand, is loss of habitat.
o Introduced disease. Not only are foreign bees brought in (eg. honeybees) but foreign honey is brought in from far away continents chalk full of spores of varieties of nosema or foulbrood or other threats. Honeybees catch these diseases, and bring varroa and tracheal mites and other problems, and spread them to the native bees.
o Honeybees are domesticated agricultural animals like beef cattle and pigs. If the numbers decrease we just breed more until market demand is met. It takes 21 days to breed a new queen and split a colony. Native bees, well, they rely on natural methods of reproduction. The birds and the bees, literally.
As to how a big colony of honeybees deals with a virus: they don't just "throw out the infected bees" since it usually affects the brood more than the workers. If the brood dies, there will be no more workers in a few weeks and the colony collapses. How it usually gets dealt with is the beekeeper medicates the hive. Or, in the case of foulbrood, digs a pit, burns the hive and all nearby hives and all equipment, and buries it like so much nuclear waste.
There is no threat to honeybees. No such luck for wild bees.
Deleted Comment
https://organic-center.org/research/neonicotinoid-pesticides...
(2) Have undisturbed habitat set aside for wild bee populations. This can be something as simple as maintaining undisturbed hedgerows on the sides of agricultural fields, but in general means maintaining a fair amount of undisturbed native habitat.
https://www.planetbee.org/planet-bee-blog//native-bee-series...
We use it in our personal garden, but you need to continually re-apply every 4-5 days with really good coverage for a period of time for it to be effective. It has been hit or miss for us. If neem doesn't work then its oh well, plant something else, but we aren't selling a crop.
https://cen.acs.org/environment/pesticides/France-bans-uses-...
but there has been a recent exception made for the sugar beet crop:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/france-sees-no-easy-fix...
Colony collapse to some degree is also supposedly normal, see 'beepocalypse nah' (sarah taber) https://soundcloud.com/farm-to-taber-podcast/farm-to-taber-0...
[1] https://www.buzzaboutbees.net/do-bees-fly-at-night.html
[2] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.7b06388
This is a dramatic overstatement. You’re disagreeing about neonics, I’m sorry if that’s hard not to take personally but it seems like something than could be discussed without the vitriol.
Organics are important not because GMOs are the enemy but rather because the land use change is inherently bad for all life in that area. GMOs don't have to lead to monoculture crops that span acres or rampant neonicotinoid insecticides, but they often do, and it's precisely at that point we can see drastic changes in a biome's stability and therefore the health of bees among many other pollinators. That's why we need to be talking about insect numbers at large and not only bees.
The study of biodiversity has an extremely difficult time modeling these kinds of changes, and that's probably why many scientists won't go to bat against this kind of land use change. A self-respecting scientist won't say that converting croplands to monocultures ready for insecticide use lead to biodiversity die-off because it's hard to actually track the fluctuations between species. It takes so much time to collect data to analyze before we even get an inkling of the interplay. We understand so little about the microscale interactions and how it fits into our larger understanding of agriculture and land development.
For those who think this is all overblown and alarmist, go sit on the grass -- if you can find a patch -- and stare at a spot until it comes alive. Things are moving around and teeming with a multitude of species of plants and insects. The reality you see escapes unnoticed until you stop to think about the ecological systems that underpin our fragile existence. Our health depends on a functional biosphere. If we cannot figure out how to share the earth with its other inhabitants, what the fuck are we doing going to Mars?
> many scientists won't go to bat against this kind of land use change. A self-respecting scientist won't say that converting croplands to monocultures ready for insecticide use lead to biodiversity die-off because it's hard to actually track the fluctuations between species
Although you are correct that the details are complicated and different species respond in different ways, the overall picture is abundantly clear. Intensive agriculture with large monocultures, simplified landscapes, and heavy fertiliser/pesticide input is wreaking havoc on biodiversity around the world. The scientific literature has been very explicit about this for over twenty years [e.g. 1-5], and lots of scientists (including my colleagues and I) are actively engaging with farmers, NGOs, and policy-makers to find workable solutions to ameliorate the problem.
[1] https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2005.00782.x [2] https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1253425 [3] https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2019.03.002 [4] https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14606 [5] https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abg6995
https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2021/04/roundup-s...
Roundup also seems to be bad for humans, which is probably why it has been the subject of various lawsuits and settlements and is also banned or restricted in a number of US cities, though not yet in the US as a whole.
Other fauna have declined as well, without us noticing.
I go to northern Maine a few times a year and I’m always looking for moose. I used to be able to find them. Now I only see them when I’m in the air (from a plane).
My friend showed me a study the state did tracking 60 newborn moose calves. Due to overwhelming winter tick population, 90%(!) did not survive the first year, and therefore could not reproduce. This problem has led to a massive decline of moose.
https://www.mainepublic.org/environment-and-outdoors/2022-05...
-- Additional pollinators.
-- Awareness. I've witnessed for myself in my own backyard the effects of our unusual weather this spring (ahem: climate change) through observing how my bees are interacting with my garden and trees.
-- Overall benefit: Personally, tending them makes for great therapy and my neighbors love the honey.
-- Advocacy. When you are in-tune with the impact of climate change, pesticides, herbicides, and overall aware of the ecology around you, you are more likely to make political and consumer choices based on those learned / observed experiences.
Perhaps its a coincidence, but I noticed more native bees in my garden now too. I don't think I've done anything net-new in terms of flowers or trees since I started keeping honey bees, but maybe I'm just more aware of the native bees now? Disappointed I've not been able to attract Mason bees, but I've got at least three other varieties buzzing around regularly and I've identified the hive of at least one of those types.
Last year I had a plant to move a flat stone behind a masonry retaining wall on my property to be a hat on a low stone wall that extended off of the end of it, hoping to create some bee habitat. The rock turned out to be too heavy to move, and as soon as I started jostling it, bumble bees came out from under it to see what the ruckus was. So apparently that rock was working just fine where it was. Instead I bought some new stone, but I haven't observed any bees so far this year.
Some people use old pots for this task, but I know people, and an upturned pot is going to be inspected, potentially destroying the hive. Kids in particular would be both more prone to this, and more traumatized to learn what they'd done. A big ol' rock is less of an attractive hazard.
Dead Comment
Could that be part of the problem, they mention diversity loss in habitat, how about diversity of honeybee genetics. At the same time, HoneyBees are basically barnyard animals, we don't monitor the collapse of pig populations as they head to the slaughterhouse. I understand its not quite an apt analogy because that is the known causative agent and nobody is trying to slaughter their HoneyBees. All the same, they are not natural, I wonder if the public realizes that.
There are a few separate problems that the media often mixes up:
One is that our old-world crops aren't getting enough old-world bees to meet their pollination needs.
Separately, new-world bees (what the article calls "wild bees") are also being replaced by old-world bees, losing out in competition, and not being cared for by professional beekeepers. They're more vulnerable, less protected, and less monitored.
To top it all off, many kinds of bees, old-world or new, are also suffering from the cumulative (and unfortunately complex) domino effects of habitat loss, pesticides, climate change, etc.
I think what's happening in the media is that journalists, knowingly or not, are using #2 and #3 to amplify the concern of #1 even though they're not always aligned (e.g., old-world bees are often one of the reasons contributing to the decline of native new-world bees).
It's relatively harder to get the public to care about an industrial economics problem (#1, where farmers have to resort to expensive human manual pollination instead of cheap bees), so trying to sell that as environmental crisis a la Silent Spring gets more eyeballs.
There's a few people who will talk about the lack of diversity in domestic bee genetics. AFAIK they're not popular, everybody wants to blame anyone but regulators.
Worse is that warmer air usually means more oxygen is available which should make insect and arachnid populations explode, and should result in physically larger insects and arachnids. That we do not see this speaks to the health of these populations.