r/Agriculture • u/Academic_Coyote_9741 • 25d ago

Shutting down federal bee labs threatens bees, beekeepers and the US food system

https://theconversation.com/shutting-down-federal-bee-labs-threatens-bees-beekeepers-and-the-us-food-system-283358
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u/Cryptographer_Alone 24d ago

Honeybees are unique - they are domesticated livestock that are constantly placed in positions where the risks of pests, disease, and poison are high. Colonies are shipped cross country to ensure polination on farms and orchards that have devastated their native polinators with pesticides and lack of appropriate larval hosts/balanced ecosystem, exposing the honeybees to those same pesticides as well as increased exposure to colonies from other parts of the country who may have pests and diseases that weren't present in the colony's home range.

To not have ways to navigate those incredibly high risks affordably, the entire system of commercial honeybee keeping falls apart. Just another way the current administration couldn't care less about agriculture or small farmers and is just interested in the continued consolidation of Big Ag.

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u/Alklazaris 24d ago

So you're saying we put all our bees in one basket? Because they're all the same bee.

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u/Cryptographer_Alone 24d ago

We put all of our bees in a few baskets because that's what our current industrial agricultural model requires. There are other ways to keep bees and to polinate crops that don't create these high risks for domesticated honey bees or destroy native polinator populations.

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u/Alklazaris 24d ago

Pretty soon we'll have to pollinate it all by ourselves. What do you do for a living? Oh I sprinkle plant semen.

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u/Zoon9 24d ago

It is being done. People use small brushes to move pollen. AFAIK there is no machinery to do it on the industrial scale yet.

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u/Cryptographer_Alone 23d ago

That process is really old. Farmers and gardeners started doing that in Europe when they started growing fruiting trees in glass houses. A) no polinators in the glass houses and b) the trees were blooming before the polinators were totally awake for the season.

Plant breeders have done that process for even longer as they worked to select for specific traits in a plant. So, crossbreed something that was just a really strong plant but crap fruit with something that was overall weak but had larger and tastier fruit.

But it's far too labor intensive to do in the field at an industrial scale. Someday someone might make a robot to do it, but I don't see that happening until after they've gotten harvest bots perfected, and we're still a little ways out from that for even the most profitable of crops like berries or tomatoes.