Submission + - Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees? (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Bees are back
"After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields, we were stunned to run the numbers on the new Census of Agriculture (otherwise known as that wonderful time every five years where the government counts all the llamas): America's honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high...."
Writes Andrew Van Dam in "Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees?"
"'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 bees, about 40 percent of which are vulnerable to extinction.... 'You wouldn't be like, "Hey, birds are doing great. We've got a huge biomass of chickens!" It's kind of the same thing with honeybees," she said. 'They're domesticated. They're essentially livestock.'..."
"After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields, we were stunned to run the numbers on the new Census of Agriculture (otherwise known as that wonderful time every five years where the government counts all the llamas): America's honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high...."
Writes Andrew Van Dam in "Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees?"
"'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 bees, about 40 percent of which are vulnerable to extinction.... 'You wouldn't be like, "Hey, birds are doing great. We've got a huge biomass of chickens!" It's kind of the same thing with honeybees," she said. 'They're domesticated. They're essentially livestock.'..."
