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qlistening · 4 years

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How are the Bees REALLY doing?

Anyone who knows me well--which should be all of you because I just weeded out some of the weeklings on my private story--know that under this hard outer shell I have a soft side that sort of cares about the environment. In order to maintain my douchebag persona, I pretty much only care about “cool” environmental issues at this point. Polar bears, pollution, and pollinators are just a little too kombucha girl for me under normal circumstances, but the quarantine has me unusually curious about wtfgo with the bees.

Y’all all remember when all the liberals and like, Burts Bees were getting their aerie panties and waxy chapstick in a wad about bees being like an endangered species and dying and shit? Not gonna lie, this got a pretty good grip on my attention. Partially because Anna had a really cool beehive at her house at the time. Partially because the boy who emotionally destroyed me in highschool was allergic to bees, so I wanted to make sure someone was doing something to keep their numbers up. Despite my slight concern, I did what I usually do about these lame environmental issues: not a goddamn thing. Now, with rumors circulating that the bees are doing fine now, I decided to do a little investigating on what the fuck is going on in this weird little niche.

(once again you’ll probs have to click something to keep reading)

First, I consulted my resident bee guy, Luke Davis, who I happen to know spent the summer going door to door hitting up rich liberals for bee saving cash. How much? The organization he was working for raised $100k in about a month. For fucking what, you might be wondering? Lobbying for NC to pass the Pollinator Protection Act.

If you google this act, the first thing that is probably going to come up is a Daily Tar Heel article essentially roasting this bill for how dumb it is. Gist of the article is the bill makes no sense because a) bee populations are literally fine and estimated to have increased by like 500,000 hives in the past 10 years and b) it singles out only one type of pesticide that is not even proven to be killing these suckers. What type of pesticide is it? Neonicotinoids.

Yeah, I know you all had the sudden urge to hit your quarantine juuls after seeing the word nicotine shoved in there. Your instinct was correct. Neonicotinoids are pesticides that kill bugs by fucking up the nervous system in their brain with huge doses of nicotine. Huh? Farmers have been killing bugs with nicotine since the 90s, but the government couldn’t make a fucking decision about whether or not it was bad for us until our generation was already addicted? This is a whole other conspiracy for next week.

Anyways, PBS says that neonics aren’t simply killing bees, but rather making them a little dumber so that they forget to do important shit like killing off the sick bees before they infect the rest of the colony. Can you really blame those suckers though? Just like us, they went from sharp individuals to irritable little addicts, whose primary concern became when Smoke Rings closed on a Friday night. And this bill wants to ban the use of these pesticides and force them to quit cold turkey? I don’t know about y’all, but I am genuinely afraid to live in a state full of bees who are going through nicotine withdrawals at the same time.

Who were the four horsemen of this idiot bill? You guessed it, democratic senators from Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, and Hillsborough. Real Miss Americas these four, with bills like “animal abuser registry” and “continuing education for prisoners” plastered all over their records. Probably wanted this bill as another trophy on their shelf. I guess $100k wasn’t enough to convince them to finish the job though, because this bill has been held up in the state senate for just over a year now.

Politics and conspiracy theories aside, I really did just wanna know what was up with the bees in the first place. After doing some really in depth research on the topic,

I found some real funny shit.

The first thing was this Guardian article that opened my eyes to a really weird phenomenon. Apparently the honey business is not super profitable these days, so beekeepers have been boxing up their hives and shipping them across the country to work on almond farms in California. Apparently summer camp on the almond farm is essentially the bee equivalent of Coachella, according to Arizona beekeeper Arp. He says “There can be hundreds of thousands of hives from multiple beekeepers in one staging area. It is like letting your bees go into a singles bar and then have unprotected sex.” Another beekeeper claims that they feel “disrespected” by humans after their summer of love on the almond farm. This guy says “They are in severe decline because our human relationship to them has become so destructive.” Interesting theory sir. The other guy said they just kept coming back with diseases from raw dogging it all summer in Cali, and that’s why they were dying.

Here is a pic of them arriving in their boxes to almond Coachella. I bet they’re so excited.

The European honeybees (aka the ones that do all of the work pollinating) are literally fine though. I read like three different articles that basically said it was only native species that were endangered. Sure, that is sad, but at least shit is still getting pollinated.

The story of the “bee war” between European bees and Asian bees has to be my favorite. Basically, the European bees are outcompeting the asian bees by having sexier queens. According to this article, European bees have like better pheromones or something so when the queen says she wants to get fucked and fed, her boys get on that shit immediately. Asian bee’s on the other hand don’t take that shit. If the queen is being too much of a bitch, some of the dudes will just grow some ovaries and start their own fucking colony. This lack of unity has apparently fucked them over pretty hard because European bees have taken over about 80% of their territory. But get this! Apparently the Asian bees are making a comeback because the European bees are such simps that they don’t even have the balls to form a new colony when their queen gets killed by a hornet.

Shiv sent me this this morning.

Asian bees might be on their way to the top.

TLDR: the bees are fine. Probably better shit to worry about in this day and age.

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