By Lambert Strether of Corrente
Patient readers, this post will be shorter and more ill-proportioned than it should be, because I got caught by the effing time-change (which I hate and which should be abolished). I wish I could be taking a long tour of this fascinating corner of the biosphere, but here we are. So there will be two parts: The first, a collection of true facts about bees, strutured like a listicle, though hopefully with better content.
Bees immediately plummet to ground when lights turn off. I saw this go by on my Twitter timeline, and I thought “I’ll have to post on bees!” Here is the video:
Here's another video of bees falling out of the sky when the lights go out. I'm surprised it's an on/off choice for them – no graceful trying to glide to land or anything like that, they literally just stop flying and plummet. Surely that's more dangerous than keeping flying? pic.twitter.com/TotxihLywQ
— Hamish Symington (@HamishSymington) December 3, 2021
But why? It’s a mystery! From IFL Science:
So, why is this bizarre bee-haviour happening, and how could it possibly benefit the bees?
Quite frankly, scientists aren’t exactly sure. Several ideas have been put forward, but there is very little research in the area and only a few examples of it happening. A commenter on Reddit suggests it could be a “navigational locking mechanism”, which enables the hive swarm to immediately lock its position in case of sudden turns of weather. Once the weather has passed, they could then return to their hive without the risk of being blown to an unknown location by stormy conditions. This could also link to how bees use the Sun’s position to navigate back to the hive, so once the Sun dips below the horizon, they immediately stop moving.
Another theory suggests it is a prey response, with a shadow from a large predator above them resulting in the bees dropping out of the air and falling to the ground, where they would have less chance of being spotted.
Either way, the phenomenon is fascinating to look at, and a welcome comic relief for the PhD student. As [HamishSymington] states in an earlier tweet: ‘One of the funniest noises I know: the sound of a hundred bees falling out of the sky when I turn out the lights in the bee room.'”
Pesticides are very bad for bees.. We all now this, of course; what’s unfortunate is that regulators in both the US and the UK seem determined to keep poisoning them.
Bees evolved social apoptosis to protect against mites. Anybody who knows a beekeeper knows about Varroa mites and hoe they destroy colonies. From Entomology Today:
The mite Varroa destructor has been a devastating parasite and disease vector to honey bees worldwide. After being introduced to the honey bee (Apis mellifera), it has resulted in enormous bee colony deaths over the past two decades.
However, the mite’s original host, the Asian bee Apis cerana, has been able to survive mite infestations and avoid the colony collapses seen in western honey bees.
One significant difference appeared to be a social response among A. cerana called “social apoptosis.” Bee colonies exhibiting this behavior involve delayed development and eventual “intentional” death by female (worker) bees. On the colony level, social apoptosis produces resistance to Varroa. Researchers have found some resistance among stocks of western honey bees recently. Could “social apoptotic” behavior be behind this resistance and develop in western honey bees, too?
Because Varroa mites and A. cerana honey bees share a longer evolutionary history, the bee species has developed a number of defenses against the mite. Mites only reproduce in drone (male) broods of A. cerana, which are usually outnumbered by workers (females). In A. mellifera, the mites reproduce in both broods. When Varroa invades A. cerana worker broods, the bees uncap infested cells and kill and discard the infested larvae. Social apoptosis expands on this behavior to produce social immunity against the mite, sacrificing individual young (pupae) to prevent infection.
(We recently ran a link about apoptosis at the cell level, working against Covid.)
Honey bees are not the only species of bee. OK, wasps, but the state of Oregon recently updated its bee atlas to include hundreds of new species, for a total of 650:
Me, A Naive, Bee-Ignorant Child: There are 2 kinds of bees: honey bees & bumblebees!🤓
Me Today: These glittering green orchid bees, which blend scents into signature perfumes, are but one of 20K+ species w/ secret lives we may never fully comprehend🥺pic.twitter.com/zkWKJINCYA
— Ferris Jabr (@ferrisjabr) March 4, 2022
The multitude of different species explains why–
Keeping bees in cities may not be a good idea. From Phys.org:
“The key message from our results is that urban green spaces can’t keep up with the existing density of hives,” Casanelles Abella says. The researchers’ findings confirm a similar trend observed in other European cities such as Paris, Berlin or London.
According to a scientific study from Great Britain, 7.5 beehives per km2 of green space is a suitable limit for a sustainable beehive density. In Switzerland, however, only rural areas comply with this value, whereas in cities the hive distribution is much more dense and frequently exceeds the limit. Even when the researchers simulated an increase in urban green space with a model calculation, there was no significant improvement. “Increasing green spaces by 75 percent is very unrealistic anyway, but it shows that in truth there are simply not enough resources,” Casanelles Abella says.
In addition, honeybees are not the only pollinating insects in cities. “When you overcharge a system beyond its carrying capacity, you automatically exhaust all its resources. In turn, this causes the other organisms that depend on the same resources to suffer,” Casanelles Abella says. Thus, the food shortage affects all insects that feed on the same flowering plants as the managed honeybees, including wild bees. Of the approximately 600 wild bee species in Switzerland, roughly 45 percent are considered endangered. Cities can harbor a surprisingly large diversity of wild bees species, 164 in the case of Zurich, a recent WSL study showed.
If you really want to “save the bees,” it could be that the best thing for you to do is have your own garden, which both Jerri-Lynn and I can recommend. (Perhaps the simplest thing to do is buy a couple of pounds of pollinator seed — tuned to your Zone, of course — and broadcast it.)
“Bees explosively EJACULATE to death during heatwaves, with a phallus the size of their abdomen bursting from their lifeless bodies, study finds.” Best Daily Mail headline ever — it really tells the whole story. Except drones, not bees as such:
‘When drones die from shock, they spontaneously ejaculate,’ said Dr Alison McAfee, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia (UBC). ‘They have this elaborate endophallus that comes out and is about the size of their own abdomen. It’s pretty extreme.’
Usually, the inside of a honey bee colony is a stable environment that maintains a temperature of around 95°F (35°C).
[The Drones] should have been able to cope with warm weather, but the heatwave pushed them to the brink, leading to a ‘drone apocalypse’.
But there’s a silver lining!
One of the positive outcomes of the massive heatwave of 2021 is that it drew Dr McAfee’s attention to drones in the first place.
She now believes drones may be even better indicators of environmental changes than queen bees.
‘Drones have the advantage that they are very sensitive and easy to see. If drones are dying, it’s much easier to study them than to take a queen from a colony to perform tests. It’s also more conducive to citizen science efforts,’ she said.
As readers know, I stan for citizen science.`
And as these drones could be said to be performing an “ecosystem service,” however temporarily, to that topic I will now turn, for the second part of this post. I’ll first give an extended usage example, then the definition, and then point to problems with the concept.
From “Save the Bees,” in the American Bee Journal:
The number of bee colonies is actually growing in the U.S., fueled by the demand for colonies to pollinate almonds. That may change as water availability will lead to major changes in almond cultivation. Each tree needs water — a lot of water. It is estimated each almond takes 1.1 gallons of water; to grow a pound of almonds takes 1,900 gallons. Although almond water use has been singled out, other tree crops such as walnuts, hazelnuts, pistachios, and cashews all use roughly the same amount of water. Animal culture is similar. It is estimated that it takes 1700 gal/lb. of water to raise beef cattle.
While high seasonal honey bee losses are being replaced, of greater concern is an apparent loss of diversity in native (sometimes termed wild) populations of non-managed bees and other pollinators. We are justifiably concerned expanding the term ‘bees’ to include native or wild bees. Studies of native bee species, their overall abundance and distribution in general, and their ecosystem service of pollination has in some instances documented bee populations that are not as healthy or robust as they once were.
One of the challenges in documenting loss of bee diversity is a lack of records of earlier abundance. The media have picked up on declines in insect abundance and coined the term “insect apocalypse” (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html). Some readers may recall that after CCD was identified, “bee apocalypse” was used for the plight of the honey bee. The declines appear genuine even if we can’t document them precisely.
Could our food supply be in danger? A recent survey identified a mere 66 species of insects that are or could be used in planned pollination. Eighty-seven of the 107 leading crops are dependent upon insect pollination. Included are seven species of bumble bees, mainly used for greenhouse production, although commercially-propagated bumble bees may be useful in some field-grown crops like blueberries. Eight species of wild bees are used in orchard and alfalfa production.
Note the usage of “ecosystem services.” Here’s a short[1] definition of the concept from the Brittanica:
[O]utputs, conditions, or processes of natural systems that directly or indirectly benefit humans or enhance social welfare. Ecosystem services can benefit people in many ways, either directly or as inputs into the production of other goods and services. For example, the pollination of crops provided by bees and other organisms contributes to food production and is thus considered an ecosystem service.
(How enhancing “social welfare” is distinct from benefiting humans is left as an exercise for the reader.) The difficulty here is that we live under a systen where the dominant definition of “benefiting humans” is determined by profit (“because markets“). Hence the American Bee Journal’s paradigm case of California almonds. It follows, then, under actually existing conditions, that which does not generate a profit is not an “ecosystem service” (not least because only the most intreprepid and dedicated scientist is likely to study that sort of natural entity, let alone get project funding. If we think of the ecosystem in its totality as a house — I know, terrible, category error-perpetrating metaphor — then its as if we could remove everything but load-bearing components and still consider ourselves as having a home.) Notice how “ecosystem services” thus defined prevents us from even asking the question of whether the California almond monoculture is a good thing (granted, for some definition of good, but identifying the most serviceable as the most profitable is only one definition. If the California water table were a person, like Lake Erie, it probably would not agree with it.)
All I’ve done in this post is suggest a heuristic: When you see the phrase “ecosystem service,” look for who profits from the service, and look also at what parts of the ecoystem are being erased. I wish I had another model to present — one where the scientists and economists perceived themselves as part of the ecosystem, instead of somehow standing outside it.
NOTES
[1] Farber, Costanza, and Wilson give a more elaborate definition here, grounded in neoclassical economics.
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Since Anglophone American civilization-culture is highly verbose, if a concept or even a reality can’t be expressed in words, it won’t even be acknowledged to exist.
So if ecosystem-services is a profit-elevating concept, is there a way to reword that concept to apply to the whole wide unprofitized world? Something like ecosystem life-support functions?
As to honeybees, a very important benefit of honeybees to people is honey. Can the number of honeybees be kept high enough to yield meaningful amounts of honey but not high enough to threated the native bees with excess competition and nectar-pollen pre-emption? Probably planting the maximum possible beefood plants for all parts of bee season might be an indirect way to do that.
Here is a reference to an old classic book about beefood plants good for honeybees ( and probably other bees too).
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3063704-american-honey-plants
Pro-insect groups must know of other good books about beefood plants.
Beekeeper groups in particular might have good sources.
Use of information on this subject might allow a few million backyard gardeners to plant a range of plants coming into beefood production from early summer through mid-late fall.
Meadow-in-a-Bag made my backyard much more interesting, as well as providing a variety of plants for native bees. By the way, falling in response to possible predators is common, as anyone who picks off Japanese beetles can attest.
One year I had enough Japanese beetles on my Malva sylvestris plants that I had to do something about them. What I did was sneak up and put a few drops of olive oil on each one from a primitive sort of squeeze bottle. The waxophillic olive oil immediately spread out and coated the lipophyllic waxy cuticle coating on the surface of the beetles, filling their spiracles and asphyxiating them in less than a minute. I used Colavita brand extra virgin olive oil so they would die happy.
The lazy and un-alert ones were easy to drop olive oil on. This eventually left me with the ones who immediately stopped, rolled and dropped at the least physical disturbance. I had to learn to be very stealthy with those ones.
Here is a bunch of images for Malva sylvestris.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=AwrE19uNbS5i.aIAxApXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZANMT0NVSTAzNl8xBHNlYwNzYw–?p=Malva+sylvestris+image&fr=sfp
And by the way, Malva sylvestris has a long flowering season. New flowers are still blooming even as hold ex-flowers are forming seed. It attracts many pollinators, especially the little mini-bumblebee-looking bees.
“Zerbina” is the variety of Malva sylvestris most people usually see. There are two other varieties . . . Mystic Merlin and Primley Blue. Mystic Merlin is said to reach 6 feet tall sometimes and flower color ranges from pinky purple to blueish. Primley Blue is darker-on-lighter blue.
I would like to see somebody cross those two varieties enough to get a near 6 foot tall plant with all darker-on-lighter blue flowers.
Images for Mystic Merlin.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0geJaAj5y5i3iUAVp9XNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZANBMDYzNF8xBHNlYwNzYw–?p=malva+mystic+merlin+flower+image&fr=sfp
Images for Primley Blue
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0geK.hW5y5ikb8A3VpXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZANBMDYzNF8xBHNlYwNzYw–?p=malva+primley+blue+flower+image&fr=sfp
The classic: The Forgotten Pollinators by Stephen Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan. Island Press. This was written before the neonicotinoid plague, but still a great overview of the pollinators and their discontents.
I have that book. It goes into native bees. But it goes beyond that. It goes into pollinators not only forgotten, but never even known or acknowledged by many to begin with, such as birds, bats, moths, etc.
Nothing But Gifts
You talked but after your talking all the rest remains.
After your talking—poets, philosophers, contrivers of romances—everything else,
All the rest deduced inside the flesh
Which lives & knows not just what is permitted.
I am a woman held fast now in a great silence.
Not all creatures have your need for words.
Birds you killed, fish you tossed into your boat,
In what words will they find rest & in what heaven?
You received gifts from me; they were accepted.
But you don’t understand how to think about the dead.
The smell of winter apples, of hoarfrost, and of linen.
There are nothing but gifts on this poor, poor Earth.
—Czeslaw Milosz, from Unattainable Earth
A Song on the End of the World
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
Warsaw, 1944
BY CZESLAW MILOSZ
TRANSLATED BY ANTHONY MILOSZ
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49451/a-song-on-the-end-of-the-world
A Song on the End of the World
BY CZESLAW MILOSZ
TRANSLATED BY ANTHONY MILOSZ
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
Warsaw, 1944
so sorry for the double lambert
first one zipped out again and I didnt see it post for over an hour. my bad
but it’s a great poem at least
A Song on the End of the World
BY CZESLAW MILOSZ
TRANSLATED BY ANTHONY MILOSZ
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.
Warsaw, 1944
Mosquitoes do a tremendous amount of pollinating.
Where is the “save the mosquitoes” movement? When will we stop indiscriminately killing them?
When we learn that only a few species also carry diseases we don’t want to catch . . . . and we focus on keeping those few away from ourselves, one way or another.
how and what do mosquitoes pollinate?
I have read that male mosquitoes do the pollinating. Female mosquitoes live to mate, eat blood to feed their internally developing eggs, lay the eggs and then die. Male mosquitoes supposedly have feathery antennas.
Mosquitoes pollinate tomatoes.
Really? I did not know that.
I know that tomatoes are supposed to be “self-pollinating” but many are insect-pollination capable. In the Midwest, a family of bees that I believe are called halictid bees sometimes cross pollinate tomato blossoms.
Here is a bunch of images for “halictid bees” .
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0geKYoG5y9i.zUAuzxXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNiZjEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZANMT0NVSTAzNl8xBHNlYwNzYw–?p=halictid+bees+image&fr=sfp
The Maya all on their own “domesticated” a kind of stingless bee to keep it for honey. I read that when the African killer bees reached the Maya country some years ago, they put Maya stingless-beekeeping in jeopardy because the African killer bees are so much more aggressive at gathering up all the pollen and nectar to where the stingless Maya bees are starved to death by the killer bees taking all their food. I can’t find that article just now, but here is an article about Maya stingless beekeeping in general.
https://www.thoughtco.com/ancient-maya-beekeeping-169364
Several decades ago, a South Indian roomate of mine ( a Nayar from Kerala), told me about a special non-edible eye-medicine honey made by a special kind of bee . . . ” like a little sweat bee ” . . . in Ayurvedic Medicine. But this is the closest referrence I can find to it. I just don’t know how relevant this may be. ( Remember, it isn’t on the internet if no one ever put it there).
https://www.cseindia.org/role-of-honey-in-ayurvedic-treatment-2638
https://www.cseindia.org/role-of-honey-in-ayurvedic-treatment-2638
Additionally, let parts of your lot GO. Stop messing with it! Let old grass and old branches sit in a pile and rot. let that dead tree stand for a few years.
All that “ugly” forest behavior is what creates habitat for native pollinators. They want crummy, bare earth, or piles of rotting brush. They love that stuff.
This is speaking as someone who has kept bees for years and loves his native pollinators.
My uninformed, off-the-cuff pet theory that is only as old as the time it took me to read this piece is that maybe the dark=dropping behavior could be a colony level adaption to “ice out” the laggards who in being late to get home might have a higher probability of being sick.
Thanks for sharing this, even if it is painful to read. I do take comfort that even though US policy is not addressing this in an informed and satisfactory manner, that at least there are individual actions that can help.
I’ve planted rosemary on my property as a bee incentive, but haven’t seen honey bees visit those plants. I remember seeing rosemary plants in the late 80s in a location about 10-20 miles from where I am now and there was profuse bee activity, but after 5 years I haven’t seen a noticeable increase in the so far quite sparse population of honey bees(like seeing 1 a week). We do have Mason bees and bombus(bumble) bees though and it does seem like their numbers are increasing slowly. I feel like I may need to step up my game and host a hive myself.
Reading this site usually makes me think of so-called cliches such as “you reap what you sow” (saw someone else post this over the weekend) or “penny wise, pound foolish”.
This might be a good thread for people to describe their own personal experience with impressive pollinator-magnet plants, as against plants they have read about.
In my experience, fennel attracts many pollinators, more wasps than bees. And also little hoverflies.
Buckwheat in flower attracts many pollinators. My sedums in flower attract honeybees even as other nearby flowers attract more of the native bees and other insects. Goldenrod in latest August-early September attracts many bees of several kinds, wasps, some butterflies, flies, etc. Hercules club ( Aralia spinosa) attracts clouds of pollinators during its less-than-two-weeks bloom period. Japanese knotweed attracts many wasps, yellowjackets, some bees in early September, overlapping with goldenrod.
Once many years ago, on some blooming woolly apple mint, I saw a couple hundred fireflies all perched on the flowers, many appearing to be coupled up in sex.
I’m in!
Bee balm – in particular a magenta variety. The bumble bees love it! Also popular with the bumbles: hosta, cat mint, echinacea, tomatoes, and squash. Wild asters in the late summer/early fall. Rodgersia attracts lots of little polinators.
I’ve noticed that the bumble bees will camp out overnight under the bee balm and echinacea flowers.
Nominating stachys, commonly known as ‘lamb’s ear.’ It’s a perennial, with low-growing, velvety soft leaves, that produces tall spikes filled with tiny purple flowers. Pollinators love it. A bonus is that the voracious deer ignore it. It does tend to spread and get straggly and needs to be severely pruned after the blossoms fade.
This past summer, we seeded over the early potato beds, after harvest, with buckwheat. In western NY, July is optimal planting time. It germinates and grows fast, producing tiny flowers that are bee magnets. After blooms fade, turn under and you have an excellent soil conditioner. Unfortunately, the local deer love the tender green shoots; it must be fenced in to survive.
Do the deer merely ignore stachys, or do they actively dislike it? If they actively dislike it, one wonders whether whizzing up some stachys leaves in a blender and then spraying the stachys juice on some deerly beloved plants will repel the deer from those plants.
I’ve seen beaucoup bees buzzing bottle brush trees. Humming birds seem fond of it as well.
Bees, both domesticated and wild, go absolutely nuts for Lavender (Lavandula spp.). All aromatic plants seem to attract many pollinators (e.g. Basil, thyme, marjoram, origano, etc.) Bees will go great distances for flowering trees (fruit trees, black locust, chestnut, etc.). Black Locust is the source of the famed Acacia honey. Of course, unmowed wildflower fields are big draws (the springtime millefiori honey is highly prized).
My brother who is a pro beekeeper recommends White Mustard and Phacelia mix for bees. They have consecutive and long flowering periods.
Dunno nothin’ ‘but models but an interesting paradigm can be found in the Hudson Valley here:
https://www.natureinstitute.org/book/craig-holdrege/living-perreniality/about
This article’s take on ecosystem services lacks nuance. Natural capital accounting includes non-use values (e.g. the intrinsic value of any ecosystem).
The discourse over the past decades has pitted the environment versus the economy, and environmentalists are stuck making the argument that protecting the environment is worth the economic cost because of how special all life is. It’s an argument they usually don’t win, especially because working class voters can be duped by the promise of “jobs.” It’s a false dichotomy, however, because the entire economy is underpinned by all of the free stuff we get from nature. Natural capital accounting seeks to record all of this so that the economic benefits of conservation can be captured and used as an argument instead of conceding the ground on economics and claiming: “well, even if it means fewer jobs, at least we have pretty stuff to look at.” That argument might work for middle class white people with an interest in hiking, but it’s useless for much of the rest of the population. Natural capital accounting teaches the public about the relationship our species has to the ecosystems that surround us, but, more importantly, it proves to policymakers and voters that there are economic benefits to taking better care of the planet, which is, ultimately, the only way we’re going to be able to win over the support necessary to accomplish any of our goals.
> it proves to policymakers and voters that there are economic benefits to taking better care of the planet,
No, that is exactly what it does not do. “Ecosystem services prove to policy makers that there are economic benefits to taking care of whatever natural entity yields profit. You can see the mentality right there in the article I quoted.
I remain to be convinced that “Natural capital” is a thing.
First of all, an online encyclopedia probably shouldn’t be taken as the most authoritative work on a subject as contemporary as natural capital accounting. Second, here’s what the article says about “profit”:
“Two criteria distinguish ecosystem services from other ecosystem conditions or processes. First, an ecosystem service must be linked to an identifiable set of human beneficiaries. The service can be an aspect or consequence of an ecological condition and can directly or indirectly benefit or profit the beneficiaries. Second, physical and institutional access constraints must not prevent people from realizing those benefits.”
Benefit OR profit. Non-use value can be assigned ecosystem services which do not lead to any economic benefit.
Now, if your statement is that natural capital accounting only ascribes value to nature insofar as it benefits humans, that may be true. But that is a debate that we already lost. Very few people can be convinced that humans aren’t more important than all the other species on the planet, nor are they convinced that we should protect nature “just because” without there being any human benefit. Regardless, natural capital accounting doesn’t preclude us from making those arguments as well.
Natural capital accounting is simply an extra tool in our toolbox that we can use so that we no longer completely concede the argument on economics.
Now on whether or not natural capital is a thing, that would depend on your definition of ‘capital.’ For better or for worse, we already conceive of humans as capital (human capital, human resources, etc.), and I don’t see the concept of natural capital as being more outrageous than that.
If conservation-lifestylers can take over a jurisdiction so totally and comprehensively as to be able to shut the anti-conservationists out of the decision making process and out of the public square within that jurisdiction, then the conservation-lifestylers can work on creating some social-political-economic practices within that jurisdiction which benefit the poors and near-poors in ways that the poors and near-poors visibly see and feel in their own lives without any “conservation activist intellectuals” having to point it out to them.
Such visible successes in the field might inspire such efforts elsewhere and create fortresses from which pro-conservation-policy-forcers might be able to force pro-conservation pollicies into existence in other jurisdictions.
If the poors and near-poors in other jurisdictions see with their own eyes and mind the improvements for poors and near-poors in conservation jurisdictions, they may join an effort to get such policies and practices in force in their jurisdictions.
Otherwise, not.
“Perhaps the simplest thing to do is buy a couple of pounds of pollinator seed — tuned to your Zone, of course — and broadcast it.”
We live in Eugene Oregon, and every year we buy a couple of pounds of wildflower mixes from Silver Falls Seed Company in Silverton Oregon:
https://silverfallsseed.com/
We 1) put down a thin layer of a mix of soil and compost in the fall, 2) scatter the seeds, and 3) cover with leaves received for free by the city. We get a riot of wildflowers and we pay attention to which ones grow best and which ones are favored by which pollinators.
We also plant perennials that we observe the bees really liking and let any bee-favored volunteers, like fireweed and borage, do whatever they want.
Of the herbs, lavender (especially the bumblebees) and oregano (actually the MOST loved by the bees) do very well for them. Milkweed too
Territorial Seed Company sells blue orchard mason bees and nesting tubes. The bees don’t make honey, rarely sting, and are enthusiastic pollinators.
Page 150 of the Spring 2022 catalog!
Beware of mites on commercially produced Mason Bees, you might spread them in your formerly pristine locale. If you must, don’t buy tubes, get individual pupae that have been rolled in sand. Better yet, drill 5/8inch holes 5 inches deep in blocks of wood and place them places you think a bee would like (and where you can watch your pets). Hopefully local Orchard Bees will move in. Perhaps you have smaller types around too so you could try some smaller holes as well!
Oops, I meant 3/8 inch holes. 5/8th inch ones could attract Carpenter Bees which can badly damage wooden structures in just a few years.
Yeah we get “bee houses” from either Down to Earth here in town, or from Gardeners Supply Company online. Just put one up this past weekend.
https://www.gardeners.com/buy/mason-bee-house/37-481.html
The bamboo tubes can be replaced so we are picking up similarly sized bamboo stakes that we can cut and replace used tubes every year.
The year before I got my first hive I counted 17 different pollinators on the Mint in my yard, though have since learned the bigger Bumblebees may have been from the same nest but later (better fed) workers. Once I had 4 hives in my yard I had only Honey Bees and Sweat Bees. Repeat that outcome everywhere Honey Bees are kept or pastured after servicing crops.
I got my first hive just as Colony Collapse hit the news. I quickly expanded to about 20 hives spread around my rural area hoping to earn some income as a ‘sideliner’. It is a lot of work and I kept losing many hives over winter so I failed in a commercial sense though learned a ton and enjoy working a few hives. Also getting stung is very good for you in general and especially for old injuries.
Sadly, Honey Bees are an invasive exotic who are destroying America’s ecology. They are also what enables the toxic chemical laden monocultures we call agriculture. Some native plants need native Bees and Honey Bees are excellent pollinators of many invasive plants.
Without Honey Bees farmers would need to grow many crops, maintain wild areas and eschew toxics so as to ensure there is a healthy population of pollinators. More people would need to manage smaller farms. Those changes would benefit farmers (in an economy not rigged against them) as much as ecosystems.
Of course the cat is out of the bag and there are feral colonies of Honey Bees swarming across the Americas. And honey is yummy! What is one to do? The standard practice is to buy packages of bees, steal much of there food for reproducing another colony and replace their winter stores with sugar water.
What I now do is set out boxes and lures to catch as many swarms as I can in Spring (removing pressure from local native pollinators). I take as much honey as I can and combine them if I have a few in Fall so 1 lives through the Winter or dequeen them in late summer so I get all the late honey.
I don’t catch a swarm every year but get some honey most years and remove some feral energy from the wild, hopefully giving some breathing space to natives.
Non-native non-Indian people steal and destroy more matter and energy from the American ecosystem than honeybees ever did or ever will.
Nothing about honeybees intrinsically prevents mini-scale artisan farmers from planting multicrop plantings for honeybees, native bees, flies, and everything else. Petrochemical industrial agbiz plantationeers would do the same thing they are doing without honeybees.
For example, our grains ( wheat, corn, etc.) are all wind pollinated. Honeybees did not drive the industrialization of wheat growing, corn growing, etc.
One wonders what American Indian observers think about all this. Do they have ongoing tribal memories of the number/amount of pollinators in various non-farmed habitats from before the arrival of the honeybee? If so, do they offer comparisons between the state of the pollinators in, say, Great Smoky Mountains National Park today as against before the arrival of the honeybee?
A sub-thought occurred to me here. When the Spanish conquered Mayastan, they would have brought their honeybees with them, I should think. If they did, that would mean that honeybees have been in/around Mayastan for several centuries.
But we did not hear of any acute problems until the ultra-hungry hyper-foraging African killer bee displaced the Euro Happy honeybee. Then the Mayans saw their bees under competitive pressure.
If my memory is correct, it would mean that honeybees can be low-impact or even harmless to native bees in an area if they are not over-stocked and over-deployed.
As a rootless cosmopolitan, I appreciate everyone’s contributions.
Paix!
I know that it is late but here is an article that explores fairly deeply why “ecosystem services” is a b/s tell, in Lambert’s words. I hope it does some good.
https://monthlyreview.org/2022/03/01/nature-as-a-mode-of-accumulation-capitalism-and-the-financialization-of-the-earth/