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Wagamaga OP t1_iwb9siy wrote

The lifespans of honey bees living in laboratory environments has dropped about 50% over the last 50 years, hinting at possible causes for the worrisome trends across the beekeeping industry, according to new research by University of Maryland entomologists.

The study published today in the journal Scientific Reports is the first to show an overall decline in honey bee lifespan that is potentially independent of environmental stressors. The findings hint that genetics may be influencing problems like increased colony loss and reduced honey production.

Colony turnover is an accepted factor in the beekeeping business, as bee colonies naturally age and die off. But the higher rates of the past decade mean U.S. beekeepers have to replace more colonies to keep operations viable. In an effort to understand why, researchers have focused on environmental stressors, diseases, parasites, pesticide exposure and nutrition.

When scientists modeled the effect of today’s shorter lifespans independent of environmental factors on beehives, however, the results corresponded with real-world observations of U.S. beekeepers.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-21401-2?ez_cid=CLIENT_ID(AMP_ECID_EZOIC)

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Bill_Nihilist t1_iwbscn3 wrote

>“We're isolating bees from the colony life just before they emerge as adults, so whatever is reducing their lifespan is happening before that point ... This introduces the idea of a genetic component"

Or an epigenetic one? Like, for example, fetal alcohol syndrome obviously isn't a genetic difference, it's the developmental consequence of an environmental effect, but it's happening pre-adulthood. The logic presented here for the bees just doesn't hold up. I suspect the poor graduate student's viewpoint was misrepresented. No sensible scientist would jump to a genetic explanation based on these findings.

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octopusgardener0 t1_iwc1yzq wrote

I'm a backyard beekeeper, and we're recommended to replace our whole frames every two years because the wax gets full of toxins to the point it starts affecting the bees at that point. On top of that, all package bees are bred in massive farms scattered around the US (the eastern half all comes from one farm in Georgia, don't know if there's any more out there) which have dubious genetics at the best of times, plus varroa mite infection can cause developmental issues if they get into the brood cells before they cap them.

There's a lot of variables that can affect domesticated bees before adulthood, have they done any documentation regarding the states and histories of the hives they took them from?

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carlitospig t1_iwccb5k wrote

Yup, my first thought would be checking that Georgian farm too.

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GrayMatters50 t1_iwcqtym wrote

West coast & Georgia bees may have instincts that can detect other aggressive colonies in their vicinity. Look what stress does to humans!

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Tribe_of_Mexicans t1_iwcac5s wrote

Interesting. But more so, you breed octopi in your backyard and keep bee's, is that for fighting?

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Tripwiring t1_iwcf0be wrote

Bee vs Octopus 2: Octwopus

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static_moments t1_iwd7xww wrote

Octowhoopass!

( a word I didn’t think I’d be saying when I woke up this morning)

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Susan-stoHelit t1_iwcg5hn wrote

No, for breeding. A bee with 8 stingers on its tentacles! And octopus making honey!!!

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TooOldToDie81 t1_iwcmmok wrote

When you want that sweet inky flavor, nothing beats octopus honey.

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Tr8ze t1_iwcqmyw wrote

Thanks for this. Fascinating. Do you have any recommended resources for folks interested in becoming backyard beekeepers, and for those wondering what to plant in the garden to help out bees?

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Aartvaark t1_iwdm143 wrote

Screwing with nature introduces chaos. No matter how carefully bees are 'kept', they're still 'kept', not free to live their natural bee lives.

They adapt to keeping instead of nature. Of course they're going to mutate in favor of their new lifestyle.

I don't understand why this wasn't predicted and avoided.

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octopusgardener0 t1_iwdnsx0 wrote

Normally I'd agree with you, but beekeeping is actually heavily weighted in the bee's favor, they're free to leave if they feel the hive is unsafe or not comfortable (which I've had done), or if they feel it's a poor location for resources, and they've been bred through the millenia to produce more than they need. However, honeybees can actually be considered an invasive species to North America, and I recommend if you want to keep bees in your backyard and want a more naturalistic way of doing it, to look for native bee houses or plant flowers that favor native bees, like nightshades, to bring more around.

Fun fact, native bees actually have a 90% pollination rate to the honeybee's 5% rate, but native bees are more solitary so honeybees match their rate through sheer numbers.

As an aside, my bee houses are foundationless as I believe they know what kind of comb they need better than I do, and I refuse to use artificial treatments for the hive, electing for more natural ones, like formic acid (concentrated venom) pads for mites, and ultimately hope I can reach a level where my bees are healthy enough I can go treatmentless and they can keep themselves so I interrupt them less.

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Aartvaark t1_iwdq5tb wrote

This is exactly my point. I get why you're defending and I applaud your practices, but as careful as you are, you don't realize how much you're changing their natural lives and lifestyle by providing what you think is beneficial and helpful.

Your end game is honey.

Their end game is survival.

I can live without honey. Maybe the bees should live without us.

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FwibbFwibb t1_iwh314e wrote

> I don't understand why this wasn't predicted and avoided.

Apparently this wasn't a problem 50 years ago.

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Plebs-_-Placebo t1_iwcl4qw wrote

I've often wondered if the accepted practice of supplementing then with refined sugar water leaves them with a nutrient deficiency of some sort vs what they would get from flower nectar, can never seem to get a fully flushed answer with Google search, personally.

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supified t1_iwdggli wrote

You don't have to do straight sugar water though. Vitamin additives are pretty common and you can mix pollen substitute in too

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Plebs-_-Placebo t1_iwduen7 wrote

I know about the pollen pucks, but thanks for informing me about the vitamin additives, I'll check it out

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ADDeviant-again t1_iwcq0wu wrote

Epigenetics is such a new science.

I agree that it might be more like congenital than strictly genetic, though.

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[deleted] t1_iwcdxnp wrote

[deleted]

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Konkarilus t1_iwch1sb wrote

Thats not true. Epigenetics is an altered expression and regulation of genes. Genetics is the hard coded genes.

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Grammorphone t1_iwbilsq wrote

Sure, it's certainly not neo-nicotinoids..

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Alphadice t1_iwbl4r9 wrote

This happened under lab conditions though.

No chance of outside toxins.

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redcoat777 t1_iwbmp47 wrote

Bees can not fully be raised in lab conditions. pollen sub is not a full replacement for natural pollen, and with the 3-5 mile forage range it is not practical to say we can control their wild food sources.

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GrayMatters50 t1_iwcsg7f wrote

I know a lady florist that built huge attached greenhouses with bee hive access .. her bees fly in & collect pollen from acanthus to zucchini. That seemed to be successful. The plants & honey sold was used to set up more hives & greenhouses. Delicious honey.

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redcoat777 t1_iwdd1sh wrote

That works to an extent, any time i have seen it attempted seriously ended up with a lot of bees “stuck” inside the top corner of the greenhouse

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GrayMatters50 t1_iwe0vqp wrote

Of course I didnt go inside so I dont know. But the plants , flowers were magnificent & the Honey tasted great. She took videos of the hives & they were active.

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ayleidanthropologist t1_iwcf77d wrote

You can raise them on sugar water though right?

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redcoat777 t1_iwck2ig wrote

Once they are adult they can survive off pure sugar water, but they need high quality protein when they are larvea. Their carbs come from nectar (honey), and their fats and proteins come from pollen. We have artificial pollen substitutes, but it isnt as good as the real stuff.

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GrayMatters50 t1_iwcstqw wrote

Then combining hives & greenhouses could be a good thing. It would certainly protect hives from attacks.

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redcoat777 t1_iwddaj0 wrote

Yes, though it would be very hard to have enough consistent food supplies for a single hive within one greenhouse, and greenhouses seem to mess up their intenal navigation

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GrayMatters50 t1_iwe1h13 wrote

I know she was working with NY Botanical Garden & a couple of top notch Universities. There's birds living in a conservatory.

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redcoat777 t1_iwe9je9 wrote

Then i dare say they have reduced the losses to an acceptable level. it generally surprises people how many bees die every day in a healthy colony.

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Tuts36 t1_iwcjuis wrote

Yes, and it's probably as good for bees nutritionally as a lifetime of fast food would be for us.

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kevshea t1_iwcj666 wrote

And our water sources are increasingly polluted as well.

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SweetBrea t1_iwc0z4u wrote

>This happened under lab conditions though.

Forcing bees to live in an entirely unnatural setting couldn't possibly have any negative impact, right?

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DonUdo t1_iwc19cn wrote

Apparently it didn't 50 years ago

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SweetBrea t1_iwc1mye wrote

You don't think a negative impact can take generations to really start to be observable to us? You don't think generations in a lab without access to the environment that builds an immune system can eventually have large effects on the population as a whole?

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DonUdo t1_iwc29ip wrote

Why would you think they breed them exclusively in the lab instead of taking princesses from outside population?

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SweetBrea t1_iwc4z03 wrote

Because they literally claim they are "independent of environmental stressors". How could they be sure it isn't environmental if they were just repeatedly harvesting them from, ya know, the environment?

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Kangie t1_iwc84qe wrote

> [environmental] Stressors are environmental factors that cause stress. They include biotic factors such as food availability, the presence of predators, infection with pathogenic organisms or interactions with conspecifics, as well as abiotic factors such as temperature, water availability and toxicants.

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nuck_forte_dame t1_iwc3tsl wrote

It's comparing apples to apples.

They aren't comparing lifespan in a lab today with natural 50 years ago.

They are comparing to lifespan in labs 50 years ago.

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ohhmichael t1_iwc9dul wrote

And if the lab results 50 years ago and today are 25% affected by environmental conditions, then the results cannot be concluded as being independent of environmental conditions...

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Nearatree t1_iwcajs1 wrote

No see, they moved the labs beyond the environment.

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SweetBrea t1_iwc5rs7 wrote

I am saying the methods they are using to compare the apples to apples may be what is actually affecting the apples... or bees if you will.

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corporat t1_iwcolci wrote

> independent of environmental stressors

They haven't shown that they've eliminated microplastics from water as an environmental stressor. I'm sure there are many similar examples that occur inside a laboratory setting

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GrayMatters50 t1_iwcq7ms wrote

Is there any correlation to invasions by other aggressive species, like Southern killer bees or Giant Asian Hornets who feed Honey bees to their young?

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nanoatzin t1_iwfvtkt wrote

Is it possible that air quality could be a significant factor?

Carbon dioxide has increased from around 250ppm to over 400ppm during the industrial revolution, with most of that increase occurring since 1940.

Carbon dioxide becomes toxic for humans above around 750ppm, however we have a fairly efficient respiratory system with a great deal of reserve capacity.

Insects breathe through tracheae and spiracles that run directly through the body seem less efficient. For example, insects grew to the size of birds during the Carboniferous period when oxygen was 35% of air and not the current 21%. Air quality seems to drive natural selection for insect size.

It seems that an increase in carbon dioxide would induce evolutionary pressure selecting for insects with smaller size because of respiratory efficiency limits.

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