Wake up North America!.............

Without bees we all die

Meltdown99 said:

Spiritual_Chaos said:

Wouldn't there be an idea to have schools have bee hives and let kids care for them? Instead of having a class pet or an aquarium. 

Gee, I wonder what could go wrong with project...

I love bees. Not harmful unless you break the rules. They are welcome here in my flat. Infact they amaze me

even flow - question mark said:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/27/eu-agrees-total-ban-on-bee-harming-pesticides

10 years ago I had heard a gal speaking about the Bee population and it's declining numbers.  She had traced it back to the GMO vegetables that were being planted.  The plants somehow had lack of nutrients in the pollen and was starving out the hives.

Thanks for posting.

Maybe change the title though?

My talk of surviving a beepocalyspe was referring to the short term, not the long term survivability of humanity on this planet.
The point I'm trying to make is that if we actually want to save our future on this planet we have to change in much more fundamental ways than which pesticides we ban or allow.
We have to so fundamentally change the way we approach food that I have no hope of it ever happening at all.
For example, an average person in Chicago in the winter shouldn't have access to probably 90% of their diet.  Fresh produce, seafood, and at least half the meat eaten should be unavailable to any but the wealthiest.  People who live in cities should either be wealthy enough to trade manufactured goods for unpreserved foods, or they should live on dried and canned staple diets that are unacceptable to our spoiled selves.  That's the way humanity survived for all but the last 50-60 years and it's our only hope for surviving the next thousand.  
These are inconvenient truths, but they are truth.  Fresh food should be extremely expensive out of season, the cost should be paid by the consumer and not the planet.  Meat should be a luxury.  Seafood should be for the coast only, and people in large cities that don't produce food should pay more for it with their increased capabilities in manufacturing and tech sectors.
Food should just generally be more expensive.  I know that's hard to hear, but if you start a garden or raise livestock you will understand how ludicrous it is to buy a dozen eggs for 0.89$ or boneless, skinless chicken breasts for 3$ a pound. I'm in a grocery store in Ohio right now looking at out of season Mexican cantaloupe for $2.50 each and navel oranges grown in the tropics for 0.30$ each, bagged apples that have been stored at 1 degree above zero for 9 months at 3 dollars!!!  Salmon from the Pacific ocean for $12.00/lb!!! That's all absolutely ludicrous.  The true cost is at least triple for each of those "deals", but that true cost is pushed onto the environment and the devastatingly poor citizens of the "third world"

Gardening on whatever scale possible should be mandatory, not by law, but by common sense.
Everything has to change, and it won't because we won't make the sacrifices necessary.  The genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back in.

There are some unsung hero wasps out there that prey on flies and other nuisance bugs, and many do pollinate, though inefficiently...but yeah, in general, fuck wasps!
I do battle with a new large colony of yellow jackets every summer. 

Hornets and Yellow Jackets are both species of Wasps.   The Hymenoptera family, Vespulas and Vespas mostly, if I remember correctly.
I'm pretty sure we only have European Hornets in America.  Most "hornets" in America are German Yellow Jackets or brown Paper Wasps that are behaving aggressively, which is a hallmark of the Hornet.
Yellow Jackets form large colonies and most of our other wasps are solitary and parasitic.
The key to distinguishing a wasp from a bee is the elongated body and lack of hair.  Paper wasps are social like yellow jackets but they always build above ground, while yellow jackets are often underground.  Yellow Jackets are more yellow than black and paper wasps are the opposite and thinner.  Yellow jackets use a side to side hovering motion to enter the nest and wasps will go straight to it.  Wasps keep to themselves much more, yellow jackets forage actively and attack aggressively.

^^^ "acetylcholine"  I love that word- good one!

I read that before white settlers came to America there were no honey bees- those were introduced.  But there were other pollinators.  In any case, we keep disrupting natures cycles and that in of itself is going to screw things up.

As for wasps and hornets- some I like, some not.  I got nailed on the top of the head by a swarm of paper wasps one time.  That was HUGELY painful.  But that all critters and plants have a roll in natures cycle and all organisms- even us-  are occasionally victims.  It's a bummer when we are a victim, but that's life- and death-  as nature means it to be.

Meltdown99 said:

Spiritual_Chaos said:

Wouldn't there be an idea to have schools have bee hives and let kids care for them? Instead of having a class pet or an aquarium. 

Gee, I wonder what could go wrong with project...

My kids school has a bee hive. They sell the honey at fundraisers and such. It’s actually pretty cool and educational.