Backyard bees disfigure yards in ways we are only beginning to comprehend

[mopinko]

interesting take. i never bought into the hysteria about honey bees, and i dont have a hive on my urban farm. i always plant/leave flowers for the native bees, and i see many.
my fruit trees mostly get more fruit than they can bear.

The honeybees came in, and native pollinators started disappearing. Now even some urban beekeepers are sounding the alarm. Urban environments have a surprising number of flowering plants — but not enough for a hive on every corner.

One study last year of beekeeping in Switzerland also found the number of urban hives has become “unsustainable”; the country lacks sufficient flowering plants to support them. A newer study of beekeeping in and around Montreal found that hives in the French Canadian city increased from 238 in 2013 to almost 3,000 in 2020. As each hive can contain up to 80,000 insects, that’s a lot of bees to plunk down into an ecosystem.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/13/bees-urban-beekeeping-native-pollinators/

[Botany]

1. FYI

[keithbvadu2]

2. Too many/too few?

Some articles say we are in danger of having too few bees and here's one that talks of too many.

[mopinko]

3. it's native bees v livestock bees.

i call them slave bees. their whole purpose is to push nature farther than it wants to go.
why? plus, you can make more honey bees. you cant just make more native bees.

[hunter]

4. I like this post a lot.

Just went out to our urban garden and maybe half the pollinators were "livestock" bees.

Don't know how many of those livestock bees are feral. Some of our neighbors may keep bees but we are some distance from the nearest orchards where the bees are hired.

I'm not a fan of any controlling religion. Artificial lands of milk and honey don't appeal to me at all. That god promoting those is a capricious asshole.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_highways_in_Utah

It's a beehive. And, of course, Switzerland...

My Irish self is more tolerant of nature's chaos. I am by natural inclination and some formal training in evolutionary biologist.

God's true name is random chance.