Randy claimed:
> it's generally accepted that honeybees can disrupt
> ecosystems by pollinating exotic weeds, and by
> competing with native pollinators for resources.
"Generally accepted" by who?
Please provide us with a list, so that we may be
enlightened about these counter-intuitive claims.
The premise offered is easy to refute at even the
cursory level of examination by anyone with a basic
understanding of plants and pollinators.
"Exotic weeds", if pollinated by honey bees, clearly
are offering pollen and/or nectar of value to the
bees. By pollinating these "weeds", the honey bees
assure that there will be more of them, thus INCREASING
the total number of pollen and nectar sources for all
pollinators, both honey bees and others. It would be
a rare weed that would be useful to honey bees, but not
useful to the "alternative pollinators" claimed to be
able to pollinate many of the same plants/crops.
It follows that one cannot condemn honey bees for
pollinating "invasive weeds" unless one also notes
that native pollinators can also do the same. Sorry,
the native pollinators are also opportunists, and will
be happy to gather nectar and pollen wherever they
can, without regard to the preferences of humans.
While the example above itself results in an increase
in the number of food sources for all pollinators,
the entire concept of "competition" is a bit laughable
when one speaks of insects who visit some mix of plants
that REPLENISH their nectaries multiple times.
To go further, if honey bees could somehow be "competing
for resources" with native pollinators, the worst damage
to the native pollinator populations would have happened
in the period between the 1600s and the 1980s, when
honey bees were not themselves threatened by pests and
diseases. Since 1985, feral honey bee populations have
decreased significantly, so any "threat" would be much
less an issue now than it was for hundreds of years.
So, when was the last time you heard of a suburban
child being stung by a honey bee? Now, answer for
carpenter bees, wasps, and bumblebees. I'd be happy
to walk through any suburb and bet some serious money
what a few hours wandering would yield in this area
of inquiry.
If there was a danger of "competition" being a problem,
native pollinators would have been completely extinct
long before now, wouldn't they? Recall that "honey
bee free areas" are limited to specific islands off
the coasts of the USA, where experiments are done.
Honey bees are nearly everywhere, and have been for
hundreds of years, yet the native pollinators are
somehow still in the game. Sounds like we've had
a more than adequate time to verify that neither
seems to suffer due to the other.
And what happened to the claim that native pollinators
are somehow "more versatile"? You can't have it both
ways - either they ARE more versatile, and therefore
can hold their own against honey bees in the wild, or
they aren't, and they can't. So which is it?
And aren't "weedy patches" one of the things that one
wants to preserve if one wants to promote a robust
ecosystem that includes native pollinators?
OK, so some of the weeds are not from here, but when one
does some reading, and learns that both the prairies and
the eastern forests (with their lack of undergrowth),
assumed to be "pristine" and "natural" by European settlers
were in fact "massive public works projects" by the Native
Americans, who used fire are their primary management tool
to create both, one is forced to reconsider one's assessment
of what is "natural", if anything.
I'd go on, but addressing such leading softball questions
from someone who has made their predispositions clear from
the start is like wading through a lake of waist-deep honey
it is slow, sticky, and a "waist" of time.
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