Bees and other things

The bees are in trouble, but the story of it illustrates the danger of listening to environmentalists for solutions rather than just diagnosis. The data on hive decline was spotty and ambiguous. When we think about how difficult it would be to measure the number of insects in a given area and then globally we see why.  Do we vacuum them out of the air and count them up? Do we try and figure out how their predators and prey are doing? What if there are just as many insects of a certain type but they moved to the other side of the river for some reason? What about good years and bad years, like squirrels and acorns?

Still, putting it all together, there does seem to be a decrease. The environmentalists assured us it was the neonicotinoids, climate change, and habitat loss, and we had better get cracking on fixing those things. All of those things did turn out to be a fairly small part of the problem.  Real, but not the main event. The main problem turned out to be a parasite killing the bees. 

There was an additional problem from bee history. The European honey be is roughly a farm animal in America now, with hives moved around to pollinate important places. There used to he a hundred types of pollinators, but now it's more of a monoculture and the many minor pollinators are even more minor. This gives us less flexibility in the event of a bee parasite taking out the main tribe. 

Environmentalists know many things and they should not be ignored. But they have this tendency to assume the problem is fossil fuels, or plastics, or habitat loss.  All of those things are real, and it never hurts to check. But it is analogous to the anti-vaxxers who assume the symptoms are from the vaccines rather than the disease, or the purveyors of supplements who claim that we don't get enough supplements in our porridge. Hammer, nail.