cm0002Explaining the importance of bees to an American
I’m confused. Why cows would get extinct, but the chicken eggs for the bread will still exist?
Bee no longer pollinating the cows food? I’m assuming they think cows eat only things that are pollinate, and not grass which is propagated by roots.
The only cow food I know that needs insect is clover and alfalfa. Grass, wheat and even soybeans do OK without.
Umm most white bread does not usually contain eggs; usually flour, water, yeast, oil, and salt. Wheat is apparently self pollinating.
Brave Little Hitachi WandThe standard burger bun is brioche (not very nice brioche, granted, but they still call it that)
Wheat isn’t pollinated by insects. It’s self-pollinating by wind.
On the other hand, I’m reasonably sure cows also don’t require bees to reproduce.
Lucy :3arnt potatoes propagated by thier tubers. and through flowers/pollination. things like apples, prunus genus needs bees.
Potatoes do both. Potato seeds are produced from fertilizing potato flowers, and can then grow into new plants.
But they also spread asexually via tubers, which is way more convenient for farming.
Tubers are used because the type we eat are tetraploids. Tetraploids (aka 4 copies of every chromosome) produce very little seeds. Generally less than 1/10th what a diploid version will. In potatoes it can be a low as 1/10,000th.
Using tubers transmits all sorts of nasty diseases from one crop to the next. Seeds do too but not as much.
Diploids are not used commercially because they produce smaller tubers and longer vines.
Doesn’t wheat used for the bun also need bees?
i think wheat is wind pollinated and therefore not reliant on bees
Ok but,
Cows don’t require bees. The food that cows eat (wheat, grass, soy) either pollinates by wind or spreads by root. Soybean benefits, but doesn’t rely on, insect pollination. Alfalfa is pollinated by bees, as are most forms of clover.
Cocoa trees are pollinated by midges, not bees. And the rest of the shake comes from the above mentioned cows.
Lettuce also self-pollinates, though again insects help. Commercially, they’re not really used.
Tomatoes are commercially pollinated by shaking them, because commercial tomatoes are optimized for making food and are pretty shit at being plants.
Stuff in this pic that IS pollinated by bees: the sugar beets that are potentially in everything, but not the corn you can also for sugar. Cucumber for the pickles. Some oil plants to fry in. Coconut or almond if you don’t want cow milk. Sesame seeds on the bun.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 That’s just the Lollipop Guild Union.
ThatWeirdGuy1001The bees have no more pollen for you
You should read up on the concept of the eco-system. The point is that pollination is crucial to it, not that cows require pollination.
I guess they should have added some magic marker notes as well for the slowest kids.
I guess they should have added some magic marker notes as well for the slowest kids.
Hey, fuck you too.
Wow, did that make my post any better like it did for you?
That’s a little rude. They just said they needed some magic marker notes to help them understand.
Ok, I chuckled at that.
My dude, they literally explained that the food cows eat is largely pollinated by wind.
The crucial nuance here is that they aren’t advocating against bees, they’re advocating against misinformation. Misinformation is the tools of corrupt miscreants; it cannot be used for a good cause.
This comment would make more sense if each of those individual things you explained were isolated and in a vacuum. But they’re not. They are all intricately intertwined.
Your comment would make more sense if we weren’t talking about industrial monoculture crop production. Honeybees are certainly important in a broad sense (though not to any ecosystems in the US, they are not a native species after all), but they are not involved in the production of these ingredients, and the original image is wildly misleading (though obviously made with good intentions).
Nothing on the OP is talking about honey bees. There are many species of bees. I’m a big fan of mason bees; they pollinate like 20 times more than a honeybee, iirc.
RedjardSugar beet seeds are produced via wind pollination in dedicated very compact setups. They plant strips of male and female plants with controlled distances.
As far as I can tell no pollinators are involved anywhere in the sugar beet industry.
As far as I can tell no pollinators are involved anywhere in the sugar beet industry.
Huh I remembered wrong. Thanks for the correction
I’m so glad that we have bees to pollinate the straw fields.
Also, if wheat can grow without pollination, we would still be able to feed cows.
Milkshake and cheese burger gone; bun left on plate
Bees make milk? Beef? Cheese? 🤔
afaik bees don’t pollinate grasses that cows eat.
Fuck I don’t even believe the potatoes would be affected. Those things will grow entirely on their own. They don’t even need water or dirt!
Are honey bees native to North America?
Honey bees are not native to North America. They were originally imported from Europe in the 17th century. Honey bees now help pollinate many U.S. crops like fruits and nuts. In a single year, one honey bee colony can gather about 40 pounds of pollen and 265 pounds of nectar. Honey bees increase our nation's crop values each year by more than 15 billion dollars. Critical honey bee populations in the United States have been declining in recent years due to many factors, creating concern about the future security of pollination services in the United States. USGS researchers are looking into the effects of factors like land use change and chemical use on honey bee habitat to better understand how to conserve bees on the landscape. While important in the pollination of some crops, honey bees are also significant competitors of native ...
There are other bees which are native 🐝
usgs.gov/…/how-many-species-native-bees-are-unite… (pedantic, but the post was about pollination instead of honey)
usgs.gov/…/how-many-species-native-bees-are-unite… (pedantic, but the post was about pollination instead of honey)
How many species of native bees are in the United States?
There are over 20,000 known bee species in the world, and 4,000 of them are native to the United States. They range from the tiny (2 mm) and solitary Perdita minima, known as the world’s smallest bee, to kumquat-sized species of carpenter bees. Our bees come in as many sizes, shapes, and colors as the flowers they pollinate. There is still much that we don't know about native bees—many are smaller than a grain of rice and about 10% of bees in the United States have yet to be named or described—but all of these bees have jobs as pollinators.Native bees are the primary insect pollinator of agricultural plants in most of the country. Crops that they pollinate include squash, tomatoes, cherries, blueberries, and cranberries. Native bees were here long before European honeybees were ...
I guess that means the buns are made from plastic?
CorkyskogI actually heard today on a Climate Town video that clover helps grass to grow and it’s the absence of it from lawns because of weed killers designed to kill it, that we need fertilizers designed to do the same nitrogen fixing that the clover would have done to keep the grass alive. I wonder if it could be argued that the clover needs the bees and the grass needs the clover and the cows need the grass.
The kinds of bees in the US are not native to the US. Plants were pollinated in the US long before Africanized or European honey bees were brought over.
Bigger problem is that we’re killing generalized insect populations, so the quantity of insects is on a decline.
Wild pollinators are nice for us home gardeners but they cannot sustain the high production of commercial produce farming.
If we went to a no-domestic-pollinator system it would dramatically cut food production and jack up food prices.
RememberTheApollo_That doesn’t make what’s in the original statement untrue. It’s pretty irrelevant that honeybees aren’t native because their mass pollination does make our food production work the way it does and there’s no way natives can do the job. You might as well just as effectively point out less humans would be better so we don’t need as many crops produced. You might be right, but you’re yelling at clouds.
As far as killing off too many insects in general is concerned, fuck yes that’s a problem. Our worries revolve around crops, but there’s a shitload of nature that still depends on natural pollinators and other insects to do all kinds of jobs. We kill them off and we’re screwed.
and there’s no way natives can do the job.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I’m curious if you have relevant peer reviewed information to back that statement up.
Nope. There are multiple papers citing native pollinators as “gap fillers” for crop pollination, but none suggesting they can take over completely. On top of that, honey bees can be managed like livestock and hives can be moved en masse to where pollination is needed, something that cannot be done with natives.
To be fair, the crops didn’t exist when the native pollinators were alpha, so the argument is semi-irrelevant. Again, the bigger problem is just that insect populations are failing. The focus should be fixing that, with that comes the bees. Although, that means fixing climate change. Soooo…
To be fair? You can’t just say that and remove the point of the discussion - the pollination of modern agricultural methods - and then say it’s
Irrelevant. What kind of argument is that?
So, I’m not saying this is absolutely incorrect, the point is that our food production is heavily reliant on bees which I’m fully in agreement with, but I’m a bit at a loss at how inaccurate this photo is.
The good news is, I was expecting a thread full of comments falling for this misinformation hook line and sinker, but I’m seeing some push back on the specifics, which gives me hope.
No, I don’t hate bees or hope they go extinct, but I grew up in a rural farming area of the USA and currently live in a rural farming area of the USA, so I’m aware that not everything that’s missing on the left is entirely dependent on bees.
Cantaloupe877The future looks bright!