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Post by castanea on Apr 11, 2012 19:04:44 GMT -5
After I posted my comments in the Disappearing Bee population thread, I started thinking about how they relate to this thread. Apis mellifera is a species introduced to North America. It would seem to be a beneficial introduction. The introduction may have come at a cost; I don't know. Nonetheless, the positive benefits of Apis mellifera are huge. I don't know if there is any way to measure whether the introduction of the honeybee to the Americas is objectively beneficial... I don't even know how one would go about defining what a benefit is... Or how we would calculate the detrimental effects they might be having on the Americas. Have the plants here changed to the detriment of wild bees? Are the honeybees taking too many resources that the wild bees depend on? I'm certain that other species are capable of pollinating the California Almond crop if they were allowed to. So I'll resort to metaphysics: More diversity is better. I agree that a huge contributor to colony collapse disorder is the commercialization of the queen rearing process which promotes weak unhealthy bees, just like the commercialization of seeds produces weak non-resilient cultivars of plants. "Benefit" is pretty much an arificial concept tied to the personal desires of human beings in a particular place at a particular time. With respect to more diversity, my default approach to situations I don't like is usually more diversity. Yet regulators who deal with plant issues they view as problematic usually take the road of less diversity which arguably was what led to the problem they think they are facing in the first place. They always want to kill the offending plant rather than increasing diversity to let nature deal with it.
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Post by steev on Apr 11, 2012 19:56:24 GMT -5
"Leave it alone" is just not acceptable when somebody can make a buck by fighting the "problem". If the "solution" to the "problem" leads to bigger "problems", so much the better, all the more need to fight them.
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Post by steev on Apr 11, 2012 20:09:06 GMT -5
Oops.
Low-cost honeybees are not what they were; the rental of a hive has doubled since the advent of CCD, while planting of almond orchards (reflecting the value of the crop and commercial growing being largely confined to California) has resulted in such demand during the window of bloom that hives have been imported from not just other states, but other countries, to service the trees.
One thing I've noticed is more orchards planted to alternating rows of three different varieties, where two was more usual, or even one. I suspect it's an effort to maintain the production while stretching the blooming period, as a way to get more benefit from fewer hives.
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Post by MikeH on Apr 13, 2012 5:02:55 GMT -5
I don't know if there is any way to measure whether the introduction of the honeybee to the Americas is objectively beneficial... I don't even know how one would go about defining what a benefit is... Or how we would calculate the detrimental effects they might be having on the Americas. Have the plants here changed to the detriment of wild bees? Are the honeybees taking too many resources that the wild bees depend on? I'm certain that other species are capable of pollinating the California Almond crop if they were allowed to. So I'll resort to metaphysics: More diversity is better. I agree that a huge contributor to colony collapse disorder is the commercialization of the queen rearing process which promotes weak unhealthy bees, just like the commercialization of seeds produces weak non-resilient cultivars of plants. For at least 6000 years honeybees have been viewed as beneficial to man: it's about the honey, honey. When they were introduced to North America in the early 1600s, it was primarily for the honey although they would have been familiar pollinators of the plants that were introduced. While I understand your metaphysical response, I think that it enables us to ignore the consequences of our actions in the Natural World. It allows us to stand outside above the Natural World rather than as part of it. The California almond crop is a logical extension of your metaphysical argument: since we can't know, let's do it. My metaphysical response to your questions is "Tread lightly on the land lest we destroy the land and thus ourselves." But then again, since we've been treading progressively more heavily perhaps your introduce-as-much diversity-as-possible might not be entirely a bad idea. But I'll modify it a bit: where I can I'll choose a native species. I'll choose Spiraea alba or Spiraea latifolia or better yet, Spiraea virginiana if it was hardy enough over Spiraea prunifolia just about everytime.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Apr 13, 2012 8:31:04 GMT -5
I'm somewhat conflicted about this topic. I definitely feel that a lot of the "invasive species" rhetoric is overblown and often abused and hijacked by pesticide corporations especially, but I'm having trouble not seeing the bad in Emerald Ash Borer. Obviously nature doesn't care if the borer decimates the North American ash population, just humans do. Likewise Chestnut Blight, clearly certain "travelling species" can cause major restructuring of ecosystems in certain cases. Over evolutionary timescales the effect is meaningless, but I will miss the Ash when its gone.
A couple of books vaguely related to this topic that I personally found fascinating reads: 1491 by Charles Mann and The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen. The second book is all about island biogeography and extinction.
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Post by castanea on Apr 13, 2012 9:15:55 GMT -5
I'm somewhat conflicted about this topic. I definitely feel that a lot of the "invasive species" rhetoric is overblown and often abused and hijacked by pesticide corporations especially, but I'm having trouble not seeing the bad in Emerald Ash Borer. Obviously nature doesn't care if the borer decimates the North American ash population, just humans do. Likewise Chestnut Blight, clearly certain "travelling species" can cause major restructuring of ecosystems in certain cases. Over evolutionary timescales the effect is meaningless, but I will miss the Ash when its gone. A couple of books vaguely related to this topic that I personally found fascinating reads: 1491 by Charles Mann and The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen. The second book is all about island biogeography and extinction. There's always "bad" from the perspective of individual humans. There are lots of species I don't like. But I disagree with people taking their idea of what is "bad" and deciding that their personal opinions should be the basis for morality. If people make a practical decision that a certain species confers many problems without many benefits to the human viewpoint of how things should be, I understand that people will want to try to preserve their idea of how they want things to be. But please stop with the moralizing and the fantasies that plants are evil. Stop using emotionally charged rhetoric like "invasive" and stop promoting the fiction that a species from 1000 miles away is inherently worse than one from down the road.
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