Saving bees requires less pesticides, changing farming

Honey Bee Hive Control

There is much more to “saving the bees” than spring flowers and a golden mascot. Don’t get me wrong, honeybees have very few faults and definitely need some TLC. But we shouldn’t label one pollinator as the one to rule them all.

We need multicultural pollinator communities if we want to keep eating our favorite foods. This is where the “stop spraying and plant some flowers” campaign comes in. Is it really that simple? Well, yes. But also, no. It’s easy to point the finger at one culprit, just like it’s easy to pick out one single charismatic mini-fauna for the cause.

We now know that a lot of crops depend on multiple pollinators for optimal yields. A bunch of individual studies have shown that crops like almonds, coffee, blueberries, and sunflower seeds produce a bigger harvest when honeybees share the flowers with other wild pollinators, compared to when honeybees have flowers to themselves. Last year, a group of scientists combined data from all these studies and found that wild pollinators had a ‘universally positive’ effect on fruit production in 41 global crops, regardless of how many honeybees were around.

So, no to insecticides and yes to flowers. Reducing pesticide use, especially neonics, is a given. Insecticides kill insects. A chemical can’t tell the difference between a bee and a gluttonous aphid. Spraying at night, or waiting until after flowering, doesn’t do much either (especially if your neighbor is spraying anyway), because residue can sit around in the soil, water, or air.

The flower thing is more complicated. We often only think about pollinators in spring and summer, when flowers are out and insects are dancing in plain sight. They are still there in autumn and winter, but they are looking for places to shelter and build nests. All those piles of messy leaf litter, dead wood, and ‘weedy’ ground covers are where many insects hide over winter and feed in between crop blooms. Some build nests in soil or wall cavities, but most of them need leaves, petals, and pollen (not plastic) to line their nests with. And all of these different kinds of resources need to be within flying distance — that’s less than a mile for most insects.

Read full, original article: Serious about saving the bees? Time to rethink agriculture

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