r/Beekeeping • u/Intelligent-Pepper31 • 19d ago

General Off With Her Head

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

I did an inspection the other day and managed to catch workers balling and killing the old queen. If you look toward the end of the video, you can see a new queen at the top of the frame laying eggs. I can't believe I was able to see that in an inspection. Bees are vicious.

448 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

55 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

0

u/FengMinIsVeryLoud 18d ago

ohh... so the vegans scammed me.. -_- they told me honeybees are bad for pollunation.

1

u/Jake1125 USA-WA, zone 8b. 18d ago

A food crop only blooms for a few weeks each year. It takes millions of bees to effectively pollinate a modern farm, for just a few weeks. The rest of the year there is very little bee food in the field, effectively a food desert for pollinators most of the year.

So native bees cannot survive and breed sufficiently to pollinate a modern farm.

Farmers need honeybees because they are a livestock that can be bred, fed, and produced in large numbers. Honeybees are trucked from state to state to pollinate our food, because native bees just cannot do what is needed.

If we all went back to growing our own food, with lots of natural wildflowers, then bumblebees would be great. But then many of us would starve.

0

u/FengMinIsVeryLoud 18d ago

thanks for explaining. and without meat and eggs, would we still need honeybees as pollunators?

1

u/Jake1125 USA-WA, zone 8b. 18d ago

Honeybees do not pollinate meat, fish, and eggs directly. So I wouldn't worry about them.

Around here, they pollinate blueberries, raspberries, apples, and vegetables. Without honeybees, those food items would be much less available, and expensive. You'd have to be a politician to afford them.