• @disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
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    19 days ago

    Probably the same reason we had 40+ tornadoes, huge hailstorms, floods, and drought-enabled wildfires in six adjacent states within 48 hours. Anthropogenic climate change is real, whether you believe in it or not.

    The upside is now farmers won’t have to worry about what to do with the crop surplus from trade wars, dismantled USAID, and defunded school lunch program.

    • Dharma Curious (he/him)
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      5619 days ago

      Dont forget that time the hurricane hit Tennessee and it fucking flooded the mountains

      Everything is totally normal

      • @shalafi@lemmy.world
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        1118 days ago

        Well, one would expect mountainous areas to flood because elevation focuses water flow. I’m in Florida, flattest state in the union. We never flood except in hurricanes, and those floods don’t last like they do in other places, in and out.

          • Yeather
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            218 days ago

            Hurricanes are known to travel in land and up North though. The fact a hurricane hit Tennessee isn’t odd. It was the strength and the length it lingered over the state that made it devastating.

            • @shalafi@lemmy.world
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              117 days ago

              It’s always the lingering part. What was that one that fucked Houston not long ago? Sat on top of them forever. Hurricane Ivan was like that down here. Only a CAT-3 at landfall, but I listened to that freight train sound for over 10 fucking hours.

    • @Doctor_Satan@lemmy.world
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      418 days ago

      Anthropogenic climate change is real, whether you believe in it or not.

      You know who believes in climate change? Fossil fuel companies, insurance companies, the military industrial complex, and every single politician talking about buying or taking Greenland by force. All the very same people who have spent the past half century publicly denying the existence of anthropogenic climate change. Not only do they believe in it, but they are designing their profit models around it at our expense.

  • @BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works
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    6018 days ago

    I was worried so I looked for the source of the information, it seems to be from 'Washington State University" from their website they say it concerns “Commercial honey bee colony”, so it might not be all bees (I don’t know enough to say what the difference is exactly), they say “60 to 70% losses” (not 80), and they also say “Over the past decade, annual losses have typically ranged between 40 and 50%.”, so it is probably worrying but not as much as the CBS article was making it seem.

    Source: https://news.wsu.edu/news/2025/03/25/honey-bee-colony-declines-grow-as-wsu-researchers-work-to-fight-losses/

      • @chaogomu@lemmy.world
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        918 days ago

        Part of the panicking should be wild bees. They’re dying at accelerated rates.

        We also know why, commercial bee keeping is part of it, as is hobbies bee keeping.

        And pesticides… and monoculture farming.

      • @BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works
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        218 days ago

        I don’t know whether you were satiric or not, but it feels like it, hard to tell on a text medium. No hard feelings either way 😄

        If you were “mocking my post in a satiric way”: I didn’t mean to say that nothing should be done or that it was not a reason to worry. I actually believe we should protect our ecosystems, but I think we need accurate data and this kind of posts, even if they convey the “right” message according to me, are misleading and create false information about what is going on. I truly believe we should try to avoid doing this.

    • dantheclamman
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      518 days ago

      This story is about domesticated honeybees, which have been declining for decades due to Colony Collapse Disorder and other stressors. Native North American bees are in their own long-term decline, with 1 in 4 species at risk of extinction. However, domesticated honeybees are tremendously important for the pollination and yield of many crops important to humans, and this population drop, thought to be the largest annual losses seen, should be considered in the context of the longer decline, and the possibility that we could hit a tipping point when pollination, and a crucial pillar of our food system, could fail.

  • @bitjunkie@lemmy.world
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    4718 days ago

    That’s $15 billion worth of crops.

    They just can’t break out of that frame, even when the topic is EVERY LIVING THING FUCKING STARVING TO DEATH.

  • Glifted
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    3719 days ago

    Honey bees are dying but you can help native bees in your area. Find out what they like and plant that shit. Also just letting weeds grow helps a lot of species.

    I get leafcutter bees at my place as well as a few other solitary species

    • @shalafi@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Making bee hotels for solitary bees is child’s play. Take a chunk of wood, drill holes, hang in a tree.

      Technical aspects:

      • Don’t use pressure treated lumber, anything else is fine.
      • Look up “solitary bee hotel” for your area to see what size holes to make for the locals. In any case, it’s going to be a variety of different sizes to cover all your bases. Doesn’t have to bee (heh) perfect.
      • Make the holes, especially the edges, nice and smooth. They’re not dumb enough to nest their if the hole is raggedy and might jack up their wings.

      That’s mostly it. You can research easily enough in an hour or less There’s a woman on YouTube that sells bee hotels and has solid advice for making your own. Wish I remembered her name. Anyone?

      Damned satisfying when you find the holes plugged with wax! You have new tenants! Stupid easy and basically free.

      CAVEAT: These things are single use. Chunk 'em out every season, or better, burn them. Keeps the mites out. Make another for free.

  • ✺roguetrick✺
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    19 days ago

    The running thought is these non-native European honeybees couldn’t find forage at the right times due to climate change and these massive commercial hives died of malnutrition. That’s why introduced species and monoculture agriculture don’t work out so well.

    • @conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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      19 days ago

      Okay, but European honeybees in the US aren’t exactly new afaik. That would be like if all of the sudden, 80% of wild horses up and die and the answer is “well, they’re an introduced species, so it only makes sense”.

  • @F_OFF_Reddit@lemmy.world
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    2818 days ago

    Imma go out on a limb here and blame late stage Capitalism and some sort of pesticide or whatever that could solve the problem if it costed 5 cents more but the solution is to save that money and let the bees die.

    Imma take my chances on that.

    • Phil Ociraptor
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      318 days ago

      there’s a crazy scene in the documentary More Than Honey where they compare beekeepers with US Almond Farm pollenators. It’s all about money and it’s sickening.

  • @skisnow@lemmy.ca
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    18 days ago

    Bees live less than two months, so if only 80% of bees died in the last 8 months that would suggest a sharp recent population increase. And even if you take it as read that it means bees dying and not being replaced, 8 months is still a terrible timeframe to use because it’s literally saying “there are 80% fewer bees now, at the tail end of winter, than there were at the height of bee season”.

    I’m not saying there isn’t a bee crisis, just that this factoid is very badly worded.

    • @Akrenion@slrpnk.net
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      1118 days ago

      Without looking at data it could also mean “beginning 8 months ago we noticed a downwards trend of bees compared to the prior year(s) that culminates to an 80% decline at the time of writing.”

  • @Matriks404@lemmy.world
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    2218 days ago

    The longer I live the more I see modern civilization collapse inevitable and happening in the relatively near future.

    How the fuck do you even prepare for something like that?

  • @riodoro1@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    LETS KEEP PUMPING CAPITALISM UP

    NEW IPHONE WITH AI LETS GOOOOO

    Sorry for getting all excited, it’s just we don’t have much time.

    • @Nalivai@lemmy.world
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      317 days ago

      It does, but the problem everyone’s talking about isn’t about wild bees, it’s about farming bees. Monospeecies of non-native bees pollinating monoculture of probably corn. They are dying, but only because they’re basically kept in bees analogue of factory farming conditions.
      Wild pollinators are fine (well, as fine as any wild species can be in our world, so not really, but at least not worse than others)

  • @Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    18 days ago

    Bees have been under assault for a while.

    It’s hive mites. The Varroa mite is going to wipe out all bees from the planet. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

    Source: talked to a beekeeper.

    • Phil Ociraptor
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      1518 days ago

      there’s a fungus that protects against the mites and it’s being researched. it’s genius, the bee picks up the fungus in a contraption where it has to crawl through to get to nectar and then brings it back to the hive. i read it in Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life.

    • @ceenote@lemmy.world
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      519 days ago

      You can say whatever you want about them in text. As long as you don’t dance it, they’ll be none the wiser.