Technology

Get outta here with your sensible, practical solutions! ;-)

Note for those passing through and not reading articles:

This is not a summary of the article, but OP's suggestion for a solution. The article talks about creating a yeast product that's lacking in bees' diet due to climate change and a lack of diversity in flowers.

OP suggests combatting the effects climate change has on biodiversity by planting your own diverse flowers. Which may work, or climate change may just kill those too.

Instead of letting fields lay fallow for crop rotation, they could plant diverse wildflower meadows to improve quality of bee health for the traveling bees that get shipped around for crop rotation.

I can see a potential problem with this suggestion. How many of those wildflowers are net nitrogen fixers? If they are net-negative this approach could be draining all the nitrogen out of the soil during off-rotation years meaning large amounts of petrochemical fertilizer would have to be used to make the field productive again for nitrogen consuming crops (like wheat and corn).

I learned during COVID about planting diverse local wildflowers to help with pollination in my small little garden I used to have. I ended up dedicating like an 8x6 planter just for wildflowers every year. Always had tons of bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies. I honestly never realized how many species of bees there were. The first year I did it I tripled my veggie yield, never looked back.

I'm sure things are different in different parts of the world, but where I'm from, pretty much none of the big crop farms let fields lay truly fallow. Most of them plant various cold season cover crops that include things like clover, brassicas, and legumes like vetch. Those all produce lots of flowers that feed the bees in the off season.

The issue with wildflower meadows, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that most of those wildflowers bloom at times when the fields would otherwise be needed for crop production. Of course, there are farmers who skip planting at all some years, but in my neck of the woods, nobody does that. They plant every year, at least once, they just rotate different crops in and out. Corn one year. Hay then soy, the next. And so on.

In a couple years we'll be saying honey "doesn't taste like it used to"

But what flowers do we let growth that will make money ?

Its simple economics. No matter how beneficial it is to the environment, people, or the economy, its bad for the economy to do anything without a direct profit motive

(god I hope the sarcasm was thick enough)

Bee do our own rezzearch

Yep, you can't charge money in perpetuity if you solve the actual problem. Not only that, but bees will eventually become reliant on the product. This is how the US Healthcare system works as well.

The GOOD news is that yeast doesn't really respect property lines. Or quarantines. Or much of anything. That shit will spread organically easily enough. It will be a while, but now that the strain exists (and is being constantly refreshed with the corpro product) it should help all bees everywhere. Maybe bees will start farming it like ants do. Would be fun

I understand the sentiment and don't generally disagree... But in most places around the world, Western honeybees (apis mellifera) are an introduced, agricultural livestock, like cattle, and don't really belong in the natural ecosystem. This is akin to farmers providing grain feed to their cows; they don't have to exclusively rely on pasture grass which didn't evolve to withstand hundreds of hungry herbivores mowing them to the ground every day. Also, honeybees are mediocre pollinators for most native plants. If native bees don't have to compete for resources with honeybees, that's a good thing for both the native bees and the plants that coevolved with them.

Something like this already happened when we traded the long-term health and fertility of the topsoil for the immediate high yield output of artificially fertilized crops.

By outsourcing the repleneshment of fertility to the relatively fragile and unreliable supply chains and social organisations of man, we assumed management over a delicate balance which previously belonged to nature.

I'm not arguing against industrial agriculture and its commodification of fertiliser by the way. If carefully managed it's possible to imagine an endpoint of equilibrium where global supply chains increase total system fertility by selectively resting soil and relying more on imports to then switch once local fertility peaks and so on. Really just sane and unmolested market forces should in theory discover such a negotiated endpoint.

Fertility alone is not descriptive enough to capture, say, the importance of biological diversity or the load bearing capacity of local environments to support ecosystems, while also producing exportable outputs suitable for maintaining population growth in humanity.

Perennial crops are also ridiculously underused in overall food supply chains. They are more difficult to monetize in existing commodity forms because their overall system value is not captured numerically.

I don't have an overall solution, but any solution will require at its core a way to assign value to the work which nature already does to replenish its own local fertility and to price that effect very cautiously in such a way that it becomes cheaper for intensive producers to rest unfertile soil until it becomes fertile than it is to compensate for unproductive soil by importing chemical fertiliser from somewhere else

I really wouldn't call nature "hardy" when an entire ecosystem can collapse when you can take one single species out of it

Let's remember that nature is what produced pandas

Though I still agree

Greed is incentivized both neurologically and economically. You cannot count on all of humanity rewiring their brain. We must destroy the economic incentives and then work on countering the neurological component.

Clover. Clover is great:

• Lush and green
• Holds down soil we
• Soft to walk on
• Needs less water than grass
• Needs less mowing
• Bees love it

Beekeepers dont harvest the Pollen which the yeast is replacing. The lack of Pollen is most likelly a result of Monocultur.

(courtesy of Murvyn)

Bees