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Interesting fact of the day: Despite the misinformation in the news both Bumblebee 🐝 and Honey Bee populations are at an all time high for the last 50+ years.
there was a legitimate scare about 12 years ago, a momentary crash in numbers. But since then it has recovered very well as can be seen from the charts.
@freemo I think honeybee population have not declined for the same reason that chicken populations have not declined: they are mostly farmed and managed by humans. Wild bees are a different story: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/2/662.short
@mneme Well I'm not sure thats a bad thing. "farmed" bees are still effectively wild. They go where they please, they can swarm and create new hives off the farm, generally provide all the same advantages to biodiversity.
Also the cause of CCD was pretty much jsut as easily effecting wild bees as farmed bees. So generally the recovery is just as positive regardless of whether your assertion is true or not.
@mneme Can you actually back up the claim that the increase in numbers were due to an increase in human farmed bees vs natural bees?
The numbers I presented were calculated by setting up bee traps in various random locations and then counting the species of bees noticed. It makes no distinction on where their hive is, it simply is a measure of how many bees one would encounter inthe wild.
You seem to have a premise without any peer-reviewed source to back it up, most of what I read just state that the bee populations are booming and I have yet to find a paper to suggest otherwise(though there are some that suggest specific species need our help)
@freemo When I was surprised by your initial claim I searched on Google Scholar to see if published literature agreed. Eg Search for "bumblebee population": Of 10 results 4 mention decline, none say steady or increasing. Of particular note: "Patterns of widespread decline in North American bumble bees" published in PNAS: "We show that the relative abundances of four species have declined by up to 96% and that their surveyed geographic ranges have contracted by 23–87%, some within the last 20 y"
@freemo (Part 2/2) I've not done much research beyond varations on such searches, so I do apologise if I'm somehow missing widespread agreement amongst biologists that bee populations are fine. I'm just arguing on the basis that, your toot seemed to contradict both commonly held knowledge and my extremely rudimentary literature survey! :)
@freemo Of course. I'm not really saying that it's bad that there are farmed bees. I'm saying that I'm not convinced that the abundance of human managed bees contradicts the narrative that bees are in trouble (especially given the evidence that non-human managed bees are in sharp decline). If an ecosystem is only working because humans are propping it up, we should be worried.