Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees? | [Gift link]

5 comments

1. Honey bees aren’t the bee problem, they are likely a contributor to it

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   But this may not be good news for bees in general.

   “It is absolutely not a good thing for native pollinators,” said Eliza Grames, an entomologist at Binghamton University, who noted that domesticated honeybees are a threat to North America’s 4,000 native bee species, about 40 percent of which are vulnerable to extinction.

2. Yep didn’t have to read article to know where this was going. Buy or make bee hotels with your kids folks

3. When I was an environmental scientist major, I read a lot of journal articles for my research papers on agricultural honeybees. Not a lot of studies done on native invertebrates by comparison. The agriculture industry will find studies on honeybees because they are tied to their profits. Not so much every other insect population.

4. In my hometown they plant a small percentage of many different trees. This is so if a certain tree variety gets a disease, they don’t all die.

5. Can we talk about the llama colony collapse?