Honeybees Are Overrated

[aggienaut]

   Don't get me wrong, you know I like bees, but I'm also a huge fan of being realistic about things. I just finished about a month of working the beekeeper's association booth at the local fair, and have some venting to do about the things people say. I address most of the dumb questions in this other post, but I'd like to address two issues more in depth.


I. "Albert Einstein said if the bees disappeared all humans would be gone within four years"

   Is a quote I've seen bandied around a number of times and a pretty fair number of people coming through the booth liked to recite it for me. However, consider:

(A) Honeybees aren't native to the Americas
(B) Humans lived in the Americas just fine prior to the introduction of what they called "white man's flies" by European colonists

   So how would a genius like Einstein get this wrong? Well the answer is quite simple really: he didn't. He didn't say it.

   The quote doesn't appear anywhere until 1994 (39 years after his death), where its used in a pamphlet protesting tariffs alleged to harm French beekeepers.


II. Honeybee Pollination is Responsible for 1 Out of Every 3 Bites You Eat

Is often noted anywhere people are trying to talk up bees and beekeeping, including on some of our club stuff at the fair I think. My main objection is just that putting it that way makes it sound like some odd sort of food russian roulette, where no matter what you're eating, every third bite was touched by a bee.

   Also, I'm not sure who did the math on that one, but I'm told that none of the world's top 12 most consumed crops ("bananas, wheat, rice, potatoes etc") are pollinated by bees. (But most fruits are, and meat counts via the pollination required for alfalfa for livestock feed, so it depends on your diet really)


III. Honeybees are just so special!

   Or some such. Don't get me wrong they ARE important because while life won't stop without them, nothing else extant is as effective at mass pollination of fields. BUT in terms of inherent value other than that, they're not more special to me than say bumblebees or wasps or butterflies or .. possums. But people come into the bee booth acting like honeybees deserve some special sacred appreciation just because.. they're useful to us?
   Someone was going on the other day about all the harmful things humans have done to the honeybee's environment, to which I pointed out "you know what the most environmentally destructive thing we've probably done involving honeybees is? Introduce them to America ... which pushes all the native pollinators out of their niche and messes up the ecosystem."


   In conclusion, it's not that I've become actually anti honey bee or anything, I still think they're fascinating, I just would prefer people keep everything in perspective.


(special thanks to klig and whatisbiscuits for the mythbusting help (: )


***Edit: dammit this was supposed to be posted to emosnail. Hence the reason it partially rehashes the last entry here. d: Sorry about that

Comments

[tick-wonderdog.livejournal.com]

so it's all a bunch of propaganda from the bee lobby?

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Haha well, yes, actually. It does appear that the French Apiculture Society either made it up in 1994 or .. was confused.

[greyweirdo.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that bees weren't indigenous to the Americas. That's very interesting.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yep! Well HONEYbees aren't. Bumblebees, carpenter bees, and a 1000+ more rare types of solitary (ie non-colony-building) bee are native.

There's an interesting article in the most recent American Bee Journal about beekeeping on the frontier. Apparently Indians considered the presence of honeybees anywhere to be a a sign that European encroachment was near at hand.

[vakratunda.livejournal.com]

Except in Maya country, where there were (and are) native, domesticated stingless bees.


.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Well yes, there are those, but those aren't honeybees either.

[vakratunda.livejournal.com]

No, they are a distinct species.

However, they are domesticated and they do produce honey.

It is really cool, also, the way they are domesticated. The wild ones live in hollow tree limbs, and these are carefully harvested without disturbing the bees, and fitted with clay or stone end pieces, and hung over the fireplace in someone's house.

I am not sure how they do it, but the brood is in the middle of the log and the honey towards the ends, so they periodically remove the ends and harvest the honey. Since the bees don't sting, they are kept as household pets.

Their reproduction is completely different (from this interesting article:

Unlike true honey bees ... the caste system in meliponines is variable, and commonly based simply on the amount of pollen consumed; larger amounts of pollen yield queens....

There is also a genetic component however, and as much as 25% (typically 5-14%) of the female brood may be queens. Queen cells in the former case can be distinguished from others by their larger size, as they are stocked with more pollen, but in the latter case the cells are identical to worker cells, and scattered among the worker brood. When the new queens emerge, they typically leave to mate, and most die. New nests are not established via swarms, but by a procession of workers who gradually construct a new nest at a secondary location. The nest is then joined by a newly-mated queen, at which point many workers take up permanent residence and help the new queen raise her own workers. If a ruling queen is herself weak or dying, then a new queen can replace her.



.

Stingless Bees

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's really interesting. Thanks for the links btw. The way they establish new colonies is really interesting. Too bad they don't live around here, it would be fun to have a colony of them.

Re: Stingless Bees

[vakratunda.livejournal.com]

Attempts have been made to introduce them to other parts of the World than Mayapan, but so far with no success. I agree that it would be way fun to have some.

The idea of the bees inside the house is just so cozy, somehow.




.

[whatisbiscuits.livejournal.com]

I. Honeybee Pollination is Responsible for 1 Out of Every 3 Bites You Eat

The article I was reading recently about this was 'On Einstein, Bees and Survival of the Human Race', by Keith S. Delaplane, in the British Beekeeping Association's August 2009 News journal.

According to Delaplane it was S.E. McGregor who made a statement in 1976 saying 'it appears that perhaps one third of our total diet is dependent, directly or indirectly, upon insect pollinated plants'. This statement has often been paraphrased since to 'honey bees are responsible for every third bite of food we eat', but in fact McGregor was talking about insect pollination as a whole.

Delaplane believes that even in 1976 this estimate was generous and applicable only to the most affluent economies where hay powered beef and dairy products, oilseeds, and fruits make up a significant fraction of the diet. Although about 75% of the world's crops benefit to some degree from animal pollination, only 10% of that 75% depend fully on animal pollination. Also, pollination dependent crops tend to have lower average production levels than non-pollinated crops.

Twelve crops currently provide 90% of the calories that support human beings on earth - banana, barley, cassava, coconut, corn, millet, potato, rye, rice, sorghum, sweet potato and wheat - but none of these top twelve need bee pollination. Therefore human life doesn't depend on bee pollination, but the quality and variety of our diet would be diminished without it.

[gringo-in-tj.livejournal.com]

This is a compelling argument, but it could also be argued that there are exogenous influences that would affect such crops should there be no such thing as pollination. Flowering plants, regardless of edibility by humans, grow and die and grow and die again, providing nutrients, not to mention the animals that feed on them, and irrespective of the carnivore factor, such animals also provide nutrients to the soil, or are prey of other that do as well.

It's a relatively complex cycle.

[whatisbiscuits.livejournal.com]

I think you're right, if there was no insect pollination at all there would be terrible effects on most ecosystems. In a worst-case scenario, if flowering plants failed to reproduce many species of birds and mammals could become extinct, with knock-on effects up and down the food chain. Humans would survive on wind-pollinated grains, but there would be wars for control of crop land.

Of course there are many pollinators other than honeybees. It might make more sense to use native bees as pollinators in the US. Part of the reason honeybees need to be trucked in is that crop growers often destroy the habitat of the native pollinators by eliminating weeds and removing hedgerows. I hate the way it's fashionable for people to mow their lawns constantly too, lawns are much more interesting and better for bees when plants like clover, buttercups and dandelions have a chance to grow. Grass on its own is so boring.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Ah, knowing that Keith Delaplane is the one who debunked this makes the debunking even more convincing, being as as you probably know Delaplane is a prominent figure in the beekeeping community

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

Okay it's reposted in emosnail now. I found the Delaplane article. The bottom paragraph in your above comment wasn't in the article though so i just attributed it to you for the time being.. but I'm assuming it came from somewhere? Maybe the version that was actually printed in the BBA journal was different than the one online or something..

Anyway thanks again for the info!!

[gringo-in-tj.livejournal.com]

Regarding Einstein, I can only offer the following opinion: Pretending that Einstein actually said this, I'm not sure that the quote is what he meant as something to be taken scientifically as fact.

In other words, we all know that pollination is performed by not only bees but by wasps, birds, butterflies, etc. I think that Einstein's point was to demonstrate how fragile the planet's environment is; that the disappearance of one species could have amazing negative consequences that us humans might never consider. It's sort of in line with the Chaos Theory (manifested in the Butterfly Effect).

In my opinion, it certainly sounds like Einstein. He did this sort of thing, an example of which was claiming that God did not play dice with the universe. That statement wasn't literal, it is figurative, in that science predicts the randomness of whatever nature intended.

[(Anonymous)]

Have you looked for new tuxedos?

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

?!

[emosnail.livejournal.com]

Oh god I'm sure they'll get it horribly wrong. It amazes me how absolutely everyone seems to have their head in their ass about this. And the people in the beekeeping community who know better aren't terribly keen to correct everyone cause they like the concern and attention it's giving them and the industry. d:

[vakratunda.livejournal.com]

Einstein, like many really smart people, was much better speaking within his area of expertise than out of it.

This is neither the only nor the stupidest stupid thing that Albert Einstein said and believed. He was, after all a Socialist.



.

Yup, people are dumb.

[ankhst.livejournal.com]

But without honey bees what will I put on my toast?

Oh, hang on...would peanut butter survive?

Re: Yup, people are dumb.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Hm yeah I think peanuts would.

Honey is indeed lovely on toast though. I like to put creamed (crystalized) honey on toast because its about the consistency of butter.

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe if you and other people stopped eating your toast made from industrial wheat fields (on which they use plenty of insecticides), then the bee might have had one less factor fucking up their immune system.
But that's just it then, we'd rather have our soft and crusty toast instead, even if it means not having any at all in the end...