[HN Gopher] More honey bees dying, even as antibiotic use halves
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More honey bees dying, even as antibiotic use halves
Author : pseudolus
Score : 111 points
Date : 2025-07-29 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.uoguelph.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.uoguelph.ca)
| more_corn wrote:
| Pesticides
| deaddodo wrote:
| A problem that's been plaguing every nation in the world and
| been studied by the world's top scientists for 20+ years now.
|
| Nope, all a waste of time. We should've just asked "more_corn".
| morkalork wrote:
| Not even mentioned in the article, which is strange because
| they're definitely a culprit. Which by the way, the ever
| expanding culture war is starting to seep into that space.
| There are neonicotinoids banned in Ontario, Quebec but not
| Alberta (of course) and people getting around them by shipping
| inter provincially because the bans are "woke bullshit".
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think at this point we should admit that the culture war
| bullshit is the thing that most of the population is
| responding to, unfortunately. So now we have to wonder...
|
| Are pesticides turning the bees depressed and non-virile?
| Woke pesticides are stealing your manliness?
| meneton wrote:
| A lot of Research into colony collapse is funded by agrotech.
| bawolff wrote:
| > There are neonicotinoids banned in Ontario, Quebec but not
| Alberta (of course)
|
| You say that like its purely due to AB gov's conservative
| bullshit. That may play a part, but it probably also has to
| do with how important canola is to ab economy (obviously
| still not a valid excuse, but maybe a better explanation)
| 9rx wrote:
| _> You say that like its purely due to AB gov 's
| conservative bullshit._
|
| What suggests "conservative government bullshit"? The NDP
| held power in Alberta when these regulations were coming
| into force elsewhere. That is about as far away from
| conservatism as it gets in Canada.
|
| "Of course" no doubt refers to the fact that Health Canada
| found the culprit to be dust-off from pneumatic planters.
| Whereas the crops in Alberta are almost exclusively seeded
| with drills, which are quite different in design to a
| planter and don't exhibit the same dusting characteristics.
| In other words, they never had the same problem Ontario and
| Quebec had. -- Not to mention that Health Canada had
| already updated regulations to require technical changes to
| planters to minimize/eliminate dust-off, so for what little
| planter use might be found in Alberta, Health Canada was
| already on top of it, leaving little reason for the
| province to step in.
|
| Calling it a ban in Ontario and Quebec is what is
| misleading. Farmers had to become licensed to use them, but
| they were never banned. It was mostly theatre.
| frollogaston wrote:
| Either my cmd+f is broken, or the study linked doesn't even
| mention that word.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Saw a bee lecture recently [1].
|
| Honeybees aren't native to North America [2]. The native
| pollinators, such as bumblebees, are outcompeted by honeybee
| hives [3]. Those honeybees then selectively pollinate certain
| plants, reducing biodiversity further [4].
|
| Honeybees, however, unlike local pollinators, can be industrially
| distributed to industrial agriculture. So they get a lobby.
| Meanwhile, well-meaning folks put a honey beehive in their
| backyard and inadvertently wipe out the local bumblebee and
| butterfly populations.
|
| [1] https://uwnps.org/event/6-26-25/
|
| [2] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/are-honey-bees-native-north-
| americ...
|
| [3] https://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/em-9524-impact-
| bee...
|
| [4]
| https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002...
| mattgrice wrote:
| It's true but honey bees are still extremely economically
| important. And very useful because their hives are large and
| portable.
|
| The billionaire Resinick pomegranate/pistachoi/almond oligarchs
| put quite a bit of effort into native bees which seemed quite
| successful but they shut it down I think about 5 years ago. I
| can't find the article now. Gen X+ might remember them as
| owners of the 'Franklin Mint' hawkers of knickknacks you either
| are or soon will be throwing into a dumpster.
|
| They are BTW also largest renters of honeybee hives in the US.
| tptacek wrote:
| Right, it's interesting from a technical perspective, but
| it's a story about battery-farmed livestock, not about North
| American ecology. My guess is they'll figure out how to keep
| growing more bees. The prices of honey bee queens have been
| pretty stable for the past 15 years.
| mattgrice wrote:
| I think it is not a great analogy. As Jeremy Bentham wrote,
| "The question is not: can they reason? Nor, can they talk?
| But can they suffer?"
|
| I have relatives that do or have raised bees (as a hobby).
| Can bees suffer? I don't know. I kind of think a bee can
| experience suffering in a small degree. I'm not going to
| run the experiments on that because I'm not a sociopath.
| Also arguably the hive is the basic unit of the honeybee
| organism, not the bee itself.
|
| I do know for certain hogs can suffer. I'm a farm boy from
| Iowa. I've been around them from a young age and I hate
| everything about them. I hate the smell, I hate the way
| their meat tastes to me like they smell, I hate how if you
| are small enough and don't take care, they are mean enough
| to knock you down and eat you.
|
| I'm probably one of the few people on HN who have actually
| experienced in person what a hog confinement facility looks
| and smells and sounds like. I wouldn't wish it on my worst
| hog enemy. It is a vision of hell, illegal to film in Iowa,
| and in no way comparable to how we treat bee hives.
| tptacek wrote:
| I am for complicated reasons unusually familiar with
| battery hog farms. I'm not making an ethical comparison;
| I'm just saying: ecologically speaking, American honey
| bees are an industrial product, not part of our fauna.
| hinkley wrote:
| If you pay close attention in Seattle, you'll find that
| bumblebees are particularly fond of making nests in the hollows
| of the loose boulder retaining walls that are still in fashion
| in the region. It's hard to catch them because they have much
| smaller numbers per nest and thus less traffic per minute, but
| they do.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I let the wildflowers grow in my lawn, and in the summer
| there's a constant hum from the bees. I enjoy the sound and
| their industriousness.
|
| My only problem is the invasive plants which are determined
| to overwhelm everything.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Out of left field, but do you have any sources on
| developing small riparian environments to promote dragonfly
| populations?
|
| I recently learned that a popular anti-mosquito trick by
| painters in my area is to put a fake dragonfly on their
| cap. Which led me to wonder where the actual buggers have
| gone.
| hinkley wrote:
| They're all in my yard, and I honestly don't know why.
| I'm almost half a mile from the nearest wetland. I think
| it's tall weeds. They seem to be like cats and want to
| perch on high spots.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _They seem to be like cats and want to perch on high
| spots_
|
| I love this.
| 0898 wrote:
| So what you're saying is that honeybees just have good bee-R?
| taeric wrote:
| I mean, somewhat true, but probably a touch oversold? I don't
| think people putting in a single beehive are doing much to
| impact a neighborhood. Probably less than having a house cat.
| Which, is not nothing, but is not ecosystem changing, either.
|
| I'm reminded of how much we were taught that monocrops were bad
| things in grade school. And yet, you'd be hard pressed to name
| a popular food that isn't grown in giant monocrop fields.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| The damage is largely already done because the non-native
| bees are now a feral invasive species that have out competed
| natives, and the invasive honey bees haven't co-evolved to
| pollinate native plantlife
| tptacek wrote:
| My understanding is that there are in fact very few feral
| honey bee colonies in the US ("if you see a honey bee in
| your yard, chances are someone owns it") and at some points
| over the last 20 years feral honey bee colonies had
| essentially been eradicated by the Varroa mite.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _probably a touch oversold? I don 't think people putting
| in a single beehive are doing much to impact a neighborhood_
|
| Probably not, especially if they're in an urban environment.
| The bees being shipped to farms, on the other hand, are
| ecologically destructive (as well as economically
| invaluable).
|
| My takeaway is not that honeybees are evil. It's that we need
| more pollinators in more stripes, and that the agricultural
| industry has successfully confused pollinators in general
| with honeybees in particular.
| kulahan wrote:
| Mason Bees are hilarious bees native to North America that
| don't fly very well, so they just kinda dive-bomb flowers to
| get pollen. This is important because that heavy slam (well,
| heavy for a flower) is enough to distribute pollen into the
| air. These bees are fat, fuzzy, and winter over by crawling
| into holes and sealing themselves inside with some mud-spit.
|
| It's VERY easy to create homes for these guys - if you've ever
| seen someone with a large log that has lots of little holes
| drilled in it, they were likely prepping a Mason Bee habitat.
| Ideally, they burrow into hollow, dry grass stems that broke
| off at some point in the fall.
|
| I try to tell people about this bee because it's _so_ easy to
| make homes for them. Just make sure to move the home every
| year, or it becomes too easy for predators to find them.
|
| edit: also worth mentioning this bee is so docile, it usually
| only stings when it's squeezed or wet, and its sting is very
| light, and the hook is unbarbed. Better than honey bees in so
| many ways.
| tptacek wrote:
| During the season we had a bunch of mason bee nests inside
| the hollow metal of our porch furniture. Supposedly, mason
| bees _can_ sting, but the sting is barely perceptible.
| mattgrice wrote:
| I've got a ton of mason bee tubes. They are awesome.
|
| To use a silicon valley analogy, nobody has figured out how
| to scale out mason bees. Not to the > 200sq miles of
| pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds owned by the Resnicks.
| The Resnicks funded some in-house research and apparently
| considred it a failure.
|
| It's probably possible. Might not even be hard once you know
| the trick, but it's certainly not a slam-dunk.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Supposedly, it only takes 250 mason bees to do the same
| pollination as 10,000 honeybees. I think there are people
| working on scaling this. The honey business is secondary to
| the pollination money, so having pollination done without
| having to truck around large hives, could be a big deal.
| morgoths_bane wrote:
| You have now convinced me to be the biggest supporter of
| mason bees now, thank you.
| troyvit wrote:
| I wonder what it would be like to have a giant Mason Bee
| hotel in a riparian buffer strip alongside a plot. One
| problem would be as you point out that predators could find
| them easily. Another might be that pollinating one crop
| doesn't do enough for a mason bee all season long.
|
| It looks like some folks use them for berries though:
| https://backyardbeekeeping.iamcountryside.com/plants-
| pollina...
|
| We have some of those in our wild crazy yard. I gotta build
| me some homes for them because you're right they are so cute.
| pamelafox wrote:
| I love native bees, I've been trying to find ways to
| incorporate native bee facts into my tech talks. The "Insect
| Crisis" book was a nice overview of issues like overuse of
| honeybees, plus others. Highly recommend planting native
| pollinator-friendly plants in garden if you want to meet
| adorable, hilarious, beautiful native bees!
|
| My current fav is the Fine Striped Sweat Bee, where the females
| are 100% turquoise. Dazzling!
| https://bsky.app/profile/pamelafox.bsky.social/post/3lv3eycl...
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Yes thank you, we're supporting the wrong bees!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we 're supporting the wrong bees_
|
| Our farms don't work with bumblebees. Honeybees are fine. The
| problem is thinking we only need honeybees. We need more bees
| of all kinds. And in some cases, yes, that may mean fewer
| honeybees.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "The native pollinators, such as bumblebees, are outcompeted by
| honeybee hives"
|
| ... in urban environments, and it' still debatable. Your #2
| source provides additional details.
|
| There are a lot of other dubious claims here that the sources
| seemed to contradict each other.
|
| Something you didn't bring up is that people raising honeybee
| can benefit other pollinators due to changes in human behavior
| such as planting beneficial plants and refraining from
| pesticide use.
| tptacek wrote:
| People can plant beneficial plants without introducing
| invasive competitors.
| giantg2 wrote:
| They _can_ , but they _don 't_. You missed the point.
| Awareness through exposure to beekeeping can change human
| behavior in a beneficial way. If you read some of the
| previously linked articles, you will see that it is still
| debateable if the competitors are actually causing any real
| problems for native bees. If the problems are debatable and
| on a low scale, then it's possible the benefits are a net
| positive.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _can, but they don 't_
|
| Do we have evidence backyard beekeeping promotes these
| behaviours better than directly messaging folks to plant
| pollinator-friendly gardens? (Genuine question.)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _in urban environments, and it ' still debatable_
|
| In all environments.
|
| The source argues this competition is fine in urban
| environments because we've already displaced the native
| pollinators there.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Please read your #2 source. That one says competition is
| fine in rural areas because carrying capacity is still
| sufficient. This might be different than your #3 source,
| hence the comment about contradictory sources.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _read your #2 source. That one says competition is fine
| in rural areas because carrying capacity is still
| sufficient_
|
| Do you mean No. 3, the _Oregon State University_ article?
|
| No. 2, the _USGS_ article, explicitly says "honey bees
| are also significant competitors of native bees and
| should not be introduced in conservation areas, parks, or
| areas where you want to foster the conservation of native
| plants and native bees."
|
| (As for the _Oregan State University_ article, the word
| rural never appears. It 's focussed on urban areas, where
| honeybees have a smaller foraging radius and native bees
| are largely extinct. The carrying capacity argument only
| applies "during periods of abundant pollen and nectar.")
| imzadi wrote:
| This seems like it would be the obvious outcome? If bee keepers
| have been keeping bees healthy by giving them antibiotics, then
| stopping the antibiotics would lead to them being less healthy?
| Especially since the previous antibiotic use would have killed
| off the healthy bacteria.
| seunosewa wrote:
| Yes, of course. The pretence of ignorance in the article is
| hilarious.
| endo_bunker wrote:
| Seems like they may not have realized that the fact that
| antibiotic use was associated with hive death could be because
| antibiotics are likely given primarily to unhealthy hives.
| mushroomba wrote:
| Modern beekeeping practices are a kind of factory-farming. Tim
| Rowe developed a method of beekeeping that takes advantage of
| evolution to improve the vitality of bees. It is described
| succinctly in his book, The Rose Hive Method. [1]
|
| I, unfortunately, developed a severe bee-sting allergy, and can
| no longer put these ideas into practice. I anticipate that
| commercial beekeeping cannot sustain its current practices.
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18279124-the-rose-
| hive-m...
| ct0 wrote:
| a deck for those beek's that are interested
| https://projectloveforbees.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/...
| Rendello wrote:
| Looking through this, beekeeping is a strange and interesting
| world that I know so little about. Cool!
| ACCount36 wrote:
| As always: if those ideas are so good, why aren't they used?
|
| If existing practices are somehow radically worse, I would
| expect the first entity to adopt better practices to obtain a
| significant advantage - and the competition to copy them
| eventually.
|
| I'm incredibly skeptical of any "everyone is doing X completely
| wrong and you should listen to ME and BUY MY BOOK instead".
| horacemorace wrote:
| I know I'm not the only one alarmed by the fact that we used to
| have to clean bug splats off our windshields weekly during the
| summer and now don't. The downstream and parallel effects must be
| massive.
| cluckindan wrote:
| Aren't modern windshield coatings awesome?
| Hammershaft wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windshield_phenomenon
|
| The reduction in windshield bug splats has more to do with
| the decline in insect populations.
|
| EDIT: I originally said 75% decline over 30 years. Those are
| the results for studies in parts of Germany. We don't have
| solid data on global loss in insect populations.
| hinkley wrote:
| There's a degree to which aerodynamics play a role in the
| number of splats but the numbers are also definitely way
| down.
| hadlock wrote:
| We switched from a sedan with a very sloped windshield,
| to an SUV with a suprisingly upright windshield (one of
| the cartoonishly offroad mall crawlers). I've never had
| to scrape bugs off my windshield in my life before we
| bought the SUV but we go through a lot more windshield
| wiper fluid now than we did a couple months ago despite
| keeping the same driving patterns.
| hinkley wrote:
| Some of that design is about keeping pedestrians from
| going head-first through your windshield if you hit them.
| With the SUV the top of the hood is above the center of
| mass of the hypothetical pedestrian, whereas the sedan is
| below, and so they have to encourage the flying human to
| slide over the roof instead of go teeth first into your
| back seat.
|
| That it helps with bugs is more of a happy coincidence.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Anecdotally I also feel like I've notice a decline in
| windshield splat. But wouldn't we notice severe bird
| population declines as well?
| seszett wrote:
| But we do notice severe bird population decline:
|
| https://www.cnrs.fr/en/press/agricultural-
| intensification-dr...
| kreyenborgi wrote:
| https://trends.ebird.org/ that's exactly what we do (and
| have been since we started poisoning with pesticides etc)
| mc32 wrote:
| It's also possible some insects have learned to avoid
| certain corridors at certain altitude to avoid getting
| splattered.
|
| Animals do adapt behavior to avoid new threats. Now,
| admittedly it's just conjecture but I would not rule it out
| nor am I saying it would account for all windshield spat
| decline.
| JLCarveth wrote:
| I still get a large amount of bugs on the front of my car,
| makes me wish I had applied PPF.
| Hilift wrote:
| I saw lightning bugs and dragon flies for the first time in a
| long time this year. Our county banned pesticides for
| residential and recreation areas.
| sarchertech wrote:
| I left a lot of the leaves on my lawn this year and only
| thinned out the spots where they were thick enough to kill
| the grass.
|
| Huge increase in lightning bugs this summer.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| I reseeded my lawn with clover and saw a huge increase in
| all kinds of lightening bugs, bees, etc. Alos rabbits which
| surprised me (I'm in the middle of a dense urban area...
| there is a park nearby, though)
| deadbabe wrote:
| This is actually due to evolution. Insect populations have
| evolved generation by generation such that the ones who avoid
| flying over roadways survive more often, and in time we end up
| with less bugs getting killed. Because the lifecycle of insects
| is very short, this can happen easily over the course of
| decades, enough to witness in one human lifetime.
| chrisgd wrote:
| Seems hard to believe but I want to believe
| tired-turtle wrote:
| While this claim is plausible, it's (admittedly pleasing)
| conjecture until you provide evidence.
| deadbabe wrote:
| I saw it myself, we did high speed off-roading and smashed
| a ton of bugs. But on the highway? Little to no bugs.
| Bjartr wrote:
| That's a neat possibility. Do you have any sources to share
| that go into more detail?
| packetlost wrote:
| I'd be willing to bet this has more to do with more aerodynamic
| designs of cars than less bugs in general.
| poncho_romero wrote:
| I believe the same decrease is visible when driving older
| (less aerodynamic) cars, but I don't have any studies on hand
| pamelafox wrote:
| Yep, that observation is discussed frequently in the book
| "Insect Crisis". Highly recommend!
| 7734128 wrote:
| Perhaps we should instead avoid antibeeotics?
| animitronix wrote:
| Yeah, cuz it's a pesticide problem not an antibiotic problem...
| alionski wrote:
| I wish the industry and governments spent an equal amount on
| battling the decline of wild bees. When they say "save the bees",
| it's not honeybees they mean. Honeybees are cattle.
| mattgrice wrote:
| I'm not saying anyone is doing 'enough' but neonicotinoid bans
| in EU are perhaps the most effective and 'costly' thing done so
| far. In Not that costs borne by poisoners
| riffraff wrote:
| The EU neonicotinoid ban seems potentially very useful but do
| we have data that it actually was effective?
| tptacek wrote:
| North American native bees tend not to form giant eusocial
| colonies and are less vulnerable to pathogens; their biggest
| threat (after habitat loss, of course) may in fact _be_ honey
| bees.
| smithkl42 wrote:
| Am I the only one who was surprised and kind of mystified by this
| sentence?
|
| "You'd assume the lessening of antibiotics might be associated
| with improved health outcomes, especially since antibiotics are
| so overused."
|
| It sounds more like something coming from Robert Kennedy, or one
| of those cranks who refuse to take antibiotics to treat strep
| throat, than from a mainstream researcher. Like, OF COURSE
| populations treated with antibiotics are going to do better in
| the period of a study like this. Under what plausible theory
| could you expect otherwise?
|
| That's not to say that antiobiotics are an unmitigated good! I
| get that they have weird and complex downstream ramifications.
| It's just that those aren't the ramifications you'd expect to be
| able to measure from a study like this.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Ugh no. There is a difference between treating a diagnosed
| condition with antibiotics and just regularly giving all
| livestock consistent doses as a preventative.
|
| Drugs aren't just "take it and everything will be improved
| regardless of the situation". Better to think of them as
| carefully used poison, good but only when used wisely.
|
| The 1950s vibe of sterilizing everything needs to be done.
| hinkley wrote:
| Livestock aren't given low level antibiotics as a
| prophylactic. They're given as an alternative to growth
| hormones. Antibiotic consumption gives you bigger cows.
|
| That's the ugliest part of this whole thing. We aren't trying
| to keep animals safe, we are trying to keep the cost of
| hamburgers down even if it means people dying of incurable
| infections in hospitals.
| thebees wrote:
| I always thought it was fascinating that Africanized honey bees
| ("killer bees") are the dominant honey bee in many regions of
| Central and South America for honey production.
| ceedan wrote:
| I read something recently that colony collapse disorder was due
| to viruses transmitted by varroa mites and/or pesticides
|
| https://www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news/research-news/2025...
| miellaby wrote:
| This article seems like fantasy fiction: 'We thought antibiotics
| were to blame, but actually, it's NO2.' (next 5G?) while it's
| widely recognized for the last ten years that the primary culprit
| is neonicotinoids: very potent and pervasive chemicals that
| accumulate in the biotope, killing all insects indiscriminately,
| contrary to the misleading claims made by the agro-industry.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Bacterial issues aren't that much of a concern for beekeepers. It
| can be used to treat European Foulbrood, but the only other issue
| is American Fouldbrood and that isn't treatable.
|
| There are some interesting things being done in the biome
| research. Even stuff like bacteria related to mosquito dunks.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01476...
| Gnarl wrote:
| Radiofrequency radiation
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