5d ago

We are so cooked

Web Archive link for those interested in more.

191 comments

I was worried so I looked for the source of the information, it seems to be from 'Washington State University" from their website they say it concerns "Commercial honey bee colony", so it might not be all bees (I don't know enough to say what the difference is exactly), they say "60 to 70% losses" (not 80), and they also say "Over the past decade, annual losses have typically ranged between 40 and 50%.", so it is probably worrying but not as much as the CBS article was making it seem.
Source: https://news.wsu.edu/news/2025/03/25/honey-bee-colony-declines-grow-as-wsu-researchers-work-to-fight-losses/
- so worry but not panicking yet. gotcha, nothing will be done then.
  
  Part of the panicking should be wild bees. They're dying at accelerated rates.
  We also know why, commercial bee keeping is part of it, as is hobbies bee keeping.
  And pesticides.. and monoculture farming.
  
  I don't know whether you were satiric or not, but it feels like it, hard to tell on a text medium. No hard feelings either way 😄
  If you were "mocking my post in a satiric way": I didn't mean to say that nothing should be done or that it was not a reason to worry. I actually believe we should protect our ecosystems, but I think we need accurate data and this kind of posts, even if they convey the "right" message according to me, are misleading and create false information about what is going on. I truly believe we should try to avoid doing this.
- This story is about domesticated honeybees, which have been declining for decades due to Colony Collapse Disorder and other stressors. Native North American bees are in their own long-term decline, with 1 in 4 species at risk of extinction. However, domesticated honeybees are tremendously important for the pollination and yield of many crops important to humans, and this population drop, thought to be the largest annual losses seen, should be considered in the context of the longer decline, and the possibility that we could hit a tipping point when pollination, and a crucial pillar of our food system, could fail.

Probably the same reason we had 40+ tornadoes, huge hailstorms, floods, and drought-enabled wildfires in six adjacent states within 48 hours. Anthropogenic climate change is real, whether you believe in it or not.
The upside is now farmers won’t have to worry about what to do with the crop surplus from trade wars, dismantled USAID, and defunded school lunch program.
- Dont forget that time the hurricane hit Tennessee and it fucking flooded the mountains
  Everything is totally normal
  
  Well, one would expect mountainous areas to flood because elevation focuses water flow. I'm in Florida, flattest state in the union. We never flood except in hurricanes, and those floods don't last like they do in other places, in and out.
- Anthropogenic climate change is real, whether you believe in it or not.
  You know who believes in climate change? Fossil fuel companies, insurance companies, the military industrial complex, and every single politician talking about buying or taking Greenland by force. All the very same people who have spent the past half century publicly denying the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Not only do they believe in it, but they are designing their profit models around it at our expense.
- Please stop saying sacreligious comments like this. It's offensive to religious people.

That's $15 billion worth of crops.
They just can't break out of that frame, even when the topic is EVERY LIVING THING FUCKING STARVING TO DEATH.
- But also
  "there are now an all-time high number of honeybee colonies in the US – 3.8m, around 1m more than five years previously."
  According to the guardian
- We could always eat the rich.
  
  Everybody says this. Nobody posts recipes.
  
  The inherent problem with that is how few there are. Don't get me wrong--yes, let's do that, too.
  
  They're hoarding all the wealth and are a rich source of vitamins and minerals
- Think of the shareholders!
- This is why we're doomed.

We're pretty sure it's the Monsanto pesticide and anyone who suggests it is hit with a litigation threat. Curiously, as we're speed-breeding domesticated bees the wild bees are dying out faster, so as the bee population dwindles it also becomes more domesticated and less wild. I know that's a bad thing, but I am fuzzy on the why details.
I'm a brown thumb, and plants wilt as my shadow falls on them, but if you're a green-thumb, plant pollinators, which will help the bees.
Also plant milkweed for the monarchs.
- Some beekeepers actually mentioned that they've been scraping the beeswax clean off their hives more frequently because its known that the beeswax collects pesticides and herbicides over time which affects the colony due to exposure.
  The problem is its not just monsanto acid, there's a ton of other issues also correlated like weather/climate, seasonal flowering, untreated parasites, bacteria, etc.
  We've literally nuked the environment so hard that even if we fix one problem, the population will not make a full bounce back (although I would think monsanto is the biggest threat)
  Biggest scam of this century was corporate produce monoliths convincing people Organic was about health and not the fact that it doesn't use a scorched earth policy and scam one off hybrid plant seeds to grow food which has been setting us up for a widespread fammine for decades.
  Some random superweed is gonna crossbreed with some rapid out of control growth plant and wipe out half of the food chain.
- Plant native. Plants that are native to your ecosystem. Those are the true pollinator powerhouse plants that bees need to survive
  
  I forget the term for non native, non invasive plants (naturalized?) but those are good too. Native is best, of course. I see a ton of carpenter bees (native bees to my area) on my red clover (non native, non invasive).
- Also, the domesticated bees are generally honeybees. And unfortunately, honeybee and wild bees don't fulfill the same rile, so even if we replaced wild bees with honeybees 1:1, we still wouldn't be able to polinate everything.
  
  Honeybees cant buzz pollinate for shit, lazy ass bee
- It’s Bayer’s now. Monsanto sold it to Bayer when they started getting heat for neonicotinoids killing all the bees.
- I'll hop in here and add that your locality probably does pesticide fogging/spraying. For what it is worth, you can ask them not you spray your property. Make some local wildflower patches in your yard. Less stuff you have to mow, more food and habitat for native birds and insects. It's a win-win.
  
  Native plant patches can also absorb some of the harmful crap like pesticides to a degree. It does help.

it's the European honey bee that's dying in unprecedented numbers
but it's not all bees
European honey bees are the easy button for farmers but they are going to have to decide if pesticide is more important or not
this nobody knows what's happening is bullshit provided by the likes of the Monsanto and other chemical companies
- They (save for a smarter minority) are 100% gonna decide that pesticides are more important. Until they learn they aren't, but it will be too late.
  
  The company that makes roundup and the GMO plants that can resist it will decide for them
  
  Say what you will about RFK, but he's broken clock right on a couple of issues, pesticides being one of them. Sure, maybe his rationale isn't right, but his end game may be a benefit. Unfortunately it's at odds with Trump's complete destruction of regulation, but he (RFK) seems to be chugging along. I think making America healthy is good; I don't think pesticides or ultra processed foods make kids transgender.
- I'm not too up to date with this story, but haven't pesticides been used for forever now? Why would the suddenly cause a 80% drop in population?
  
  I think bee populations are under threat from pesticides, habitat reduction, disease, climate change, nutrition, et cetera.
  Of that list, pesticides are probably the easiest to solve.
  
  It's not the same pesticides year over year. My bet is some MBA pushed a tweak to the formula for short term gains.
  resist
  
  neonicotinoids were invited in the 1980s and it's been recently understood that it's like a forever chemical. it will get into the dirt and go through the plants and pass on through pollen
  
  Different pesticides?
- Finedust from traffic, mircoplastics, insecticides, GMO infertile weeds.. etc. Bayer as well.
  
  Haven't you heard? Bayer and Monsanto are one. And Dow and Dupont have fused too. Together, Bayer-Monsanto and Dow-Dupont control over 60% of all grain seed production in the world. All your wheat, corn, rice... it's all in the hands of these 2 companies.

Imma go out on a limb here and blame late stage Capitalism and some sort of pesticide or whatever that could solve the problem if it costed 5 cents more but the solution is to save that money and let the bees die.
Imma take my chances on that.
- Idk about others, but mine died due to temperatures not reaching above 27 for 14 days straight.
- there’s a crazy scene in the documentary More Than Honey where they compare beekeepers with US Almond Farm pollenators. It’s all about money and it’s sickening.
  
  I was gonna quote the documentary too. My favourite scene was when they pollinated by hand and said: who's better at pollinating? Humans or bees? It's definitely not humans.

Have you tried persecuting all the scientists yet??
- They just got fired, together with anyone who might begin to fix this.
  
  And the US government banned words related to climate change from any future studies. If your grant proposal includes those keywords, it'll get denied automatically without a human even looking at it.

This doesn't say 80% of the bees have died.
- I agree it does mention hundreds of millions but is confusing because...Shook said. "If we lose 80% of our bees every year,..." Not very clear in the article on exactly what percentage of the bee population died.
- Pretty huge distinction

well if that is the case, humans can take pollinator job roles when AI will take their excel jobs.

I know it’s likely pesticides, but have we officially ruled out bee assassins?
- You mean wasps? They have been pretty quiet lately...
- Ah cmon now, stop spreading conspiracy theories. They probably just couldn’t prove citizenship and were deported.
  
  All those darn African killer bees! Stealing all the jobs!
- i personally just think the bees are sentient and have depression
- Idk, I heard that trans people and immigrants are murdering bees.
- Isn’t pesticides just bee assassination on a mass scale? Thus, I argue, we cannot not yet rule that out.

Want to help? Plant pollinator gardens. Easy peasy. Even some pots of local wildflowers on your patio. It all helps.
- It does, but the problem everyone's talking about isn't about wild bees, it's about farming bees. Monospeecies of non-native bees pollinating monoculture of probably corn. They are dying, but only because they're basically kept in bees analogue of factory farming conditions.
  Wild pollinators are fine (well, as fine as any wild species can be in our world, so not really, but at least not worse than others)

Bees have been under assault for a while.
It's hive mites. The Varroa mite is going to wipe out all bees from the planet. And there's not a damn thing we can do about it.
Source: talked to a beekeeper.
- there’s a fungus that protects against the mites and it’s being researched. it’s genius, the bee picks up the fungus in a contraption where it has to crawl through to get to nectar and then brings it back to the hive. i read it in Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life.
- Is now a bad time to get into mead making?
  I wonder if I can return my yeast...
  
  It's a bad time to enjoy being alive

I definitely don't want to downplay a crisis, but I feel like I've been seeing headlines saying "all the bees are dying and we don't know why" every year for nearly 20 years now.
I'm no bee expert. Just seems to me, based on the headlines, bees would've been extinct 10 years ago.
Some cursory searching led me to Colony Collapse Disorder which seems to have no agreed-upon cause. It appears devastating losses to honey bee colonies started being reported around 1900. But it also mentions:
In 2024, the United States Census of Agriculture reported an all-time high in commercial honey bee hives (mostly in Texas), making them the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country.[38]
Link to the source cited there: https://archive.is/nfeb2
Apparently last year saw the largest honey bee populations in US history. Though they write that huge boom in honey bee population is a threat to other native pollinators, so I guess that presents its own unique problems.
- Usually, when people talk about bees dying, they mean wild bees. Unlike honey bees they aren't cultivated by us. They also tend to be better pollinators than honey bees, adapted to local plants that honey bees can't handle well.
- The issue is OP is spreading misinformation. You‘re right, we haven‘t lost 80% of the bee population, because this was a hypothetical statement in the article saying it would have consequences if it happened.
  
  The person in the article says you can't keep up the industry if 80% of the bees die every year.

honeybees are an invasive species, fun fact
unfortunately they outcompeted a lot of the native pollinators so we're fucked without them though
- humans are a more invasive species, probably the most
  
  No "probably" about it.
- https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/native-bee-populations-can-bounce-back-after-honey-bees-move-out
  
  Bees are not the only native pollinators, though, plenty are extinct

Care about the environment? Great me too. Thats why im asking ya'll to sign up for the General strike.
Generalstrikeus.com
Share it with your family, friends, social media.
- I am in Canada. But I wholly support this. We must defeat the cheeto madman.
  
  As one stuck in Cheetoland, I deeply apologize for what he's doing despite the efforts that had been undertaken to stop him and if he does end up attempting to annex your nation, I want you to know I preemptively surrender and defect to the Canadian Armed Forces.

The longer I live the more I see modern civilization collapse inevitable and happening in the relatively near future.
How the fuck do you even prepare for something like that?
- Fall back to the fundamentals - communities, you're part of many, join more. The people in your community can work together for survival or or turn against each other. You have a chance if you work with people, but not much of one if you try to lone wolf it. History is prologue. (your community should include everyone you can get on board, I'm not saying huddle up, I'm saying join the fight - It's wealth disparity and it's a global war)
  If we were to do that now, we could take it all back in a week, but we won't do that. Humans have to lose something important to them before they really take a look around and desperation kicks in, and too many aren't seeing much difference yet. If you really connect to your community, they'll see your suffereing or someone elses and that might be the catalist for them, but we're easy to pick off piecemeal and lazy as fuck, so we're losing meters every day.
  There's volumes of context here and I'm getting dragged into minutia, but we die apart, live together. That's the formula, history proves it.
- U don't. U just watch it collapse. If u cannot control something, don't worry too much. That's my take. Enjoy everyday.
- https://c.tenor.com/QE-6iR0I3rIAAAAd/tenor.gif
- No idea.

Actual link for those interested
- Best comment lmao
  
  The people need their ads (or whatever the reasoning is), show some compassion, in a few decades they'll only be seeing the same Nuka Cola ad everywhere.
- Also, bees usually survive cold winters, which could be a thought for last few months.

At least i saved one from my dogs water bowl yesterday 🤷‍♀️

LETS KEEP PUMPING CAPITALISM UP
NEW IPHONE WITH AI LETS GOOOOO
Sorry for getting all excited, it’s just we don’t have much time.

Honey bees are dying but you can help native bees in your area. Find out what they like and plant that shit. Also just letting weeds grow helps a lot of species.
I get leafcutter bees at my place as well as a few other solitary species
- Making bee hotels for solitary bees is child's play. Take a chunk of wood, drill holes, hang in a tree.
  Technical aspects:
  Don't use pressure treated lumber, anything else is fine.
  Look up "solitary bee hotel" for your area to see what size holes to make for the locals. In any case, it's going to be a variety of different sizes to cover all your bases. Doesn't have to bee (heh) perfect.
  Make the holes, especially the edges, nice and smooth. They're not dumb enough to nest their if the hole is raggedy and might jack up their wings.
  That's mostly it. You can research easily enough in an hour or less There's a woman on YouTube that sells bee hotels and has solid advice for making your own. Wish I remembered her name. Anyone?
  Damned satisfying when you find the holes plugged with wax! You have new tenants! Stupid easy and basically free.
  CAVEAT: These things are single use. Chunk 'em out every season, or better, burn them. Keeps the mites out. Make another for free.
- I can't do that! What about my nice green grass lawn? /s
  
  My city will put a letter in my mailbox telling me to get rid of weeds and fine me $150 if I don't. Rip
- Weeds? I thought they were pests
  
  Weeds aren't really a thing. A weed is just a plant we don't like.
  
  As long as you mow them it’s all good. Just having a yard with anything than just a monoculture grass is better.

Bees live less than two months, so if only 80% of bees died in the last 8 months that would suggest a sharp recent population increase. And even if you take it as read that it means bees dying and not being replaced, 8 months is still a terrible timeframe to use because it's literally saying "there are 80% fewer bees now, at the tail end of winter, than there were at the height of bee season".
I'm not saying there isn't a bee crisis, just that this factoid is very badly worded.
- Without looking at data it could also mean "beginning 8 months ago we noticed a downwards trend of bees compared to the prior year(s) that culminates to an 80% decline at the time of writing."

Imagine when we find out bees were the only thing holding it all together.
Aaaaand, it's over.
- It's like nobody paid attention to bee movie.
- What are we supposed to do? Not rolling coal and eating meat every day? There is just nothing we can do.

Thanks for researching this! Still not good news for bees 🐝 😪
- This is bad news for every animal on land

Remember that honey-producing bees are terrible pollenators compared to the specific pollenators who don't produce honey. The honey producing bees being kept by everyone are artifically outcompeting the specific pollenators, which are what we really need to be supporting.
- Okay, but how do I personally monetize non-honey making bees? Sure, the general ecology needs this, but what's in it for me, right this instant?
  
  Hey, it doesn’t need to be right this instant. It could instead be projected revenue next quarter.
  
  Those bees sure have plenty of legs for plenty of bootstraps
  
  A bee petting zoo! Bumblebees are very cute and very fluffy. Having a petting zoo would help people get I touch with nature, and if the guests are too belligerent about it then the bees will just sting them. I think that bumblebees might also not die after stinging, and if so they'd learn how to fight humans. When the time is right you can unleash a swarm of cute fluffy bees trained in anti-human warfare. You could use them to crush any competition. If you still want more money you can become a bee-based supervillain and rob banks or something.
  
  All you can do is add to pollen I guess. Plant seeds of native plants that bees love. Indiscriminately in random places.
  Maybe someone else has some better ideas.
- I was watching some of my native plants and noticed a fair amount of house flies crawling on them. So, I looked it up. It turns out that flies as a group are the second most important pollinator behind bees as a group.

The running thought is these non-native European honeybees couldn't find forage at the right times due to climate change and these massive commercial hives died of malnutrition. That's why introduced species and monoculture agriculture don't work out so well.
- Okay, but European honeybees in the US aren't exactly new afaik. That would be like if all of the sudden, 80% of wild horses up and die and the answer is "well, they're an introduced species, so it only makes sense".

Shame. The US is a beautiful country and psycho cult rednecks have let deregulation ruin such beautiful wilderness.

Pesticides, same as always.

I can't find any research on the impact of increased prevalence of vaping on bee populations. I feel there should be scientific studies done on this. It's pretty much sweet smelling sticky bee poison that people are now walking about puffing all over every surface.

It’s because of shareholder profit

Those bees know what they did

Honey bees aren’t even native to the US

I'm not a bee, you're not a bee, so it sounds like a them problem.
(On the internet, nobody knows you're a bee.)
- This post has big wasp energy.
  https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.kym-cdn.com%2Fphotos%2Fimages%2Foriginal%2F002%2F088%2F105%2Fd18.jpg
- You can say whatever you want about them in text. As long as you don't dance it, they'll be none the wiser.

make sure you retract words like bias and gender from your articles and they will come back. they are just extremely bigoted.
- I think you mean... Beegoted.
  
  nice one!
- Awww fuck... Bees are mostly colonies of females living in harmony?

Bees aren't the only arthropods having this problem, but for most of the other non-pollinators people seem to think "good less bugs to bother me. " I guess we should just give up on the survival of the food chain.
The news for insects is not entirely bad, emerald ash borers are finding the ability to survive in areas that were formerly too cold for them. This allows them to kill more trees turning them into kindling for lightning strikes and other fire starting events.
Who could have known that fucking with our habitat might have negative consequences for us?
- The news for insects is not entirely bad, emerald ash borers are finding the ability to survive in areas that were formerly too cold for them. This allows them to kill more trees turning them into kindling for lightning strikes and other fire starting events.
  Had me in the first half, not gonna lie.

I don't like this meme

Nowhere in the article does it say we lost 80% of the bee population. You are spreading misinformation
- You're correct. The quote is "If we lose 80% of our bees every year, the industry cannot survive, which means we cannot pollinate at the scale that we need to produce food in the United States."
- It does, in a quote.
  
  Not on the current scenario.

Mortified, but I am not a bee-ologist.

- Did Mark Wahlberg hate crime all the bees to death?

Old age probably.
- Winter?

It may not be related but forest fires are raging in many US states and it isn’t even summer yet

Remember when our biggest fear was killer bees? What a quaint time in our history.

Most domesticated bee species aren't native to the US. It's quite possible they are just getting bee-ported.

Specifically, honey bees (Apis mellifera). Native bees that aren’t colony dwellers may not be impacted the same by the mites.
- Who cares then, aren't they only useful for monocropping large farms? Most US bee enthusiasts would instantly cull every honey bee if they could.
  
  "Only".
  80% of crops grown in the US are pollinated by honey bees.. If you think grocery prices are bad now...
  
  Personally, I care because I love honey, farm grown food, and they are a poster child for all bees. Without them, there is certainly a lot less care for native bees. While yes they are primarily important for large monocropped farms, that’s your food. Like, so much of your food. Natuu is very bee populations aren’t sufficient or interested in pollinating our food crops, so yes we should really care.
  
  Why would the bee enthusiasts cull honey bees?
  
  Do you like food? We use bees to grow that

Trump is deporting them back to Melissa Majoria

Was it to make room to fit the 690% increase in newborns?

hello frog, that is sad to hear, have you tried calling doompost?
(how is there no !doompost??)
- In fairness, most of the news communities are doomposts by themselves.
  
  Reality has a doom bias.

Maybe if Monsanto can cross a Bee with a mosquito and release it into the wild, maybe things will be better? Maybe said mosquito will not mate with a Japanese killer wasp in an unfortunate twist of events?

Not the bees!!!!!

It's called winter.

Something about the birds and the bees ...

191 comments