1. I'm aware. We'll see how they adjust to climate change, but all this was mostly a theoretical to emphasize how important their duties are. Despite the name they aren't just there to make sure our foods are sweet so I wanted to point that out. We'd have better luck going back to trying to eliminate mosquitoes over trying to eradicate honeybees.
I didn't "notice" because people who are experienced in this field went out of their way to correct this. I'll just say that I'm not a huge fan of this narrative "it isn't affecting my everyday so it clearly doesn't matter". That's how so many things slip down to a slope of "we'll fix it when it's too late".
>What you want to be paying attention to are our diverse native pollinators, including a variety of native bees
And you don't think a massive reduction of any one pollinator would have drastic effects just because you care about this "native" aspect? Again, these bees have been here for over 400 years. Where's the line?
I'll be honest and just say you're making a mountain out of a molehill here. I just wanted to pitch in that honeybees are important to the ecosystem and you're reacting as if I'm saying only honeybees matter. You as someone who understands the basics of such pollinators weren't necessarily my audience here. Those who think that bees just make honey and are a "luxury species because we don't need honey" were. And I hope that point got across to that audience.
I don't think it's true that you didn't notice because of a huge effort to fix the problem, because I don't think that effort happened. Again: honey bees are invasive in North America. Where there are feral honey bee colonies today, they trace to escapes from husbanded colonies. From the late 1980s until probably the 2010s, there were very few feral honey bees at all (and for some stretch of that, there were none).
I think you're thinking I'm calling back to the "colony collapse" scare of roughly ten years ago; I'm not. Here's a paper:
Also worth noting: that paper establishes a history of honey bee introduction into America, and they have not in fact been here for 400 years (at least, according to that paper; I don't have a dog in this hunt, it wouldn't matter to me if they'd been here for longer).
Here's a fun paper from back in the day where they found honey bees in the Channel Islands off California, and immediately set to work eradicating them:
2. www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/economy/struggling-beekeepers-stabilize-u-s-honeybee-population-after-nearly-half-of-colonies-died-last-year
I didn't "notice" because people who are experienced in this field went out of their way to correct this. I'll just say that I'm not a huge fan of this narrative "it isn't affecting my everyday so it clearly doesn't matter". That's how so many things slip down to a slope of "we'll fix it when it's too late".
>What you want to be paying attention to are our diverse native pollinators, including a variety of native bees
And you don't think a massive reduction of any one pollinator would have drastic effects just because you care about this "native" aspect? Again, these bees have been here for over 400 years. Where's the line?
I'll be honest and just say you're making a mountain out of a molehill here. I just wanted to pitch in that honeybees are important to the ecosystem and you're reacting as if I'm saying only honeybees matter. You as someone who understands the basics of such pollinators weren't necessarily my audience here. Those who think that bees just make honey and are a "luxury species because we don't need honey" were. And I hope that point got across to that audience.