| ▲ | schainks 4 hours ago |
| Honeybees are not native to North America. It is great and currently necessary we use them the way we do. It makes one wonder in the age of AI and evolving farm practices, can we start finding ways to cultivate already-climate-adapted native bees to do the work? Can we leverage adaptations for specific crops? I get it that honeybees work great at pollinating monoculture fields, etc., but that does not change the fact we are perpetuating a square peg in round hole problem and pushing it very very far right now, at greater and greater cost, all while climate change is fighting us. |
|
| ▲ | looping__lui 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I suppose honey bees are not native in North America pretty much the same way as the human species? I don’t quite understand why there seems to be a pretty persistent thread around “honey bees are invasive and harm the ecosystem by stealing all the food from the native bees and doing all their pollination; that’s why they decline” - when at the same time the use of pesticides is so rampant that insects are literally gone entirely. Honey bees are not great and reliable pollinators btw. So the solution is: more genetically modified crops? More pesticides? Unless “we need to stop our use of pesticides and we should also acknowledge that honey bees are an invasive species and consider making changes to the way we do monocultures” are in the same sentence this entire “honey bees are invasive” argument just feels super weird. Pesticides kill native pollinators. It’s not the honey bees. Edit: and just to be clear - honey bees do not survive in the wild by themselves anymore due to varroa mites. They essentially depend on humans to protect them. That’s what the entire purpose of this article is about. So, if humans stopped keeping honey bees - they’d have a pretty hard time surviving in the wild on their own. |
| |
| ▲ | mastermage 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | An idea that sprang to mind and please point me out at which points its unrealistic and why because I am talking completely out of my ass here. If we want to reduce mono culture but we still need to somehow figure out how to provide humanity. Could large scale vertical farms, in Green Houses reduce the footprint of monocultures? By being more productive year round? Or is that just technolgist delusions of mine? | | |
| ▲ | forlorn_mammoth an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I appreciate you being upfront about the depth of your knowledge. Regenerative farming and/or permaculture offer ways to run industrial-scale agriculture without the monoculture. See i.e. https://peercommunityjournal.org/articles/10.24072/pcjournal... Another innovation I see is the use of "crop tunnels" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytunnel) to greatly extend the growing season in colder climates (another poster mentioned "Ohio"), and/or better control evaporation. | |
| ▲ | j4k0bfr 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The thing that always baffles me with vertical farming is sunlight. Assuming most crops are pretty good at turning full spectrum sunlight into useful stuff, why shrink your solar energy per crop? And assuming you get around this via grow lights, surely the energy and material cost goes up too much for high-volume crops to make economical sense. | | |
| ▲ | ssl-3 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think it's hard to generalize whether vertical farms are good or bad; efficient or inefficient. It seems that whether it works or not relies very heavily on the locality. In my part of Ohio, we have lots of farmland -- and plenty of water that just falls out of the sky. We've got reasonably-long, generally-hot days during our growing season and we get some serious crop production done here while it lasts. The rest of the year? The days are short. It's dark and cold outside; frozen, even. We can't grow crops outside here in the winter. But vertical farms (eg, fancy greenhouses) can just keep going. With artificial light and/or supplemental heat, they're still producing even in the depths of winter. Thus, I can go to the grocery store near my house and buy a locally-grown tomato in February. It's expensive to get this done, but the alternatives include paying someone to drive it up here from thousands of miles away or just going without a tomato until after things have warmed up again and stayed that way for awhile. | |
| ▲ | b112 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This only makes sense in certain circumstances I think. For example, shipping tomatoes from 5000km away when it's winter in Canada. I recently did some research, and there are multiple local greenhouses around many large Canadian cities for just this reason. They are competitive in the winter, and sell to local supermarkets. The cost of the greenhouses vs shipping + loss. And there is a loss in nutrition, when you harvest green and it takes weeks to hit the table, vs something picked yesterday and picked when actually ripe. Of course, these are large warehouses, not typical greenouses. So I guess the answer is, it can make sense in certain circumstances. A warmer place where you can grow fruit outside year round, not so much. |
| |
| ▲ | bell-cot 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Over the years, many firms have poured many $millions into vertical farms. If you're growing extreme-value crops - marijuana, or maybe exotic salad greens for Michelin-starred restaurants - that can actually work. Otherwise, you're trying to compete with millions of square miles of naturally sun-lit dirt, and extremely efficient modern agro-tech stacks. Bankruptcy awaits. > just technologist delusions of mine? I'd bet you've read several articles about techno-utopians setting up vertical farms, and their grand dreams. Which always hand-wave the "how can this massively expensive setup complete with dirt?" part. Farming sun-lit dirt does not magically require monoculture, nor poor farming practices. The problems is monoculture's appeal to certain human cultures - especially profit-maximizing "big ag" capitalists - and the agricultural policies enacted by naive politicians. | |
| ▲ | looping__lui 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I’m just saying: stop hating bees with made up arguments |
|
|
|
| ▲ | bregma 40 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The catch is that native North American pollinators are adapted to native North American flowers and have a great deal of difficulty pollinating introduced species that are native to Eurasia. Given the vast majority of commercial crops are not native plant species, the only way to mass pollinate them is to use non-native pollinators. Also, few native North American bee species are eusocial. That's another quality one would need to be able to use them the same way as commercial honeybees are used today. The there is the issue of honey production. |
|
| ▲ | gadders 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >>Honeybees are not native to North America. Neither are horses. I guess the issue is you don't get honey with the native bees. |
| |
| ▲ | nerbert 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Neither with horses | | |
| ▲ | gadders 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Good point. We need to genetically modify horses that can pollinate plants and create honey. | | |
| ▲ | galangalalgol an hour ago | parent [-] | | GMO hyper competitive feral cat colonies that ignore birds and pollinate gmo soybeans whilst collecting for their kitten hives. Each claw is of course a stinger. What could go wrong. | | |
|
| |
| ▲ | colechristensen 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A quite similar horse species went extinct in North America ~10,000 years ago likely due to humans. The horse ancestor species come from the Americas and migrated to Eurasia over the bearing land bridge. Horses were only missing from North America for 10,000 of the last 50 million years. | | |
|
|
| ▲ | NoMoreNicksLeft 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You could pick up a catalog from any of these places and find half a dozen different species of bees to cultivate for pollination. Blue mason bees come to mind. Anything that's even slightly domesticatable is being pursued. Some of these bees are loners too, perfect for the hipster crowd. |
|
| ▲ | halflife 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| If they are not native, how did plant propagate seeds? Flies? Wasps? Butterflies? |
| |
| ▲ | EdwardDiego 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Native bees. Apis mellifera are introduced bees across most of the world. But yes, there are other pollinators like butterflies, moths, flies, birds, etc. | |
| ▲ | Jedd 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Amusingly, propagate has a horticultural, and non-horticultural meaning, and it's not obvious which one you're using there, because the bee's role is long over by the time the seed is ready to go out into the world. Pollen can be carried (as noted by sibling and you) by lots of different insects, and there's myriad solitary and other (by conventional standards) weird bee species around, plus lots of plants are happy to pollinate themselves (tomato is a good example) or rely on wind (corn/maize is the famous example there). When the common honeybee landed in the continental USA, about four centuries ago, the same people also brought in lots of (other) european plant species that had co-existed with Apis mellifera for millennia. |
|
