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Brazil: 500 million bees die in 3 months.

3K views 12 replies 6 participants last post by  GregB 
#1 ·
#2 ·
This may actually affect availability of Brazilian honey in the US (and prices).
When I had no bees and used to buy organic honey - it was mostly all from Brazil.
Economically speaking, maybe good for the US beekeepers.
But the impact on Brazilian ecology is terrible - the pesticides.
 
#3 ·
Is my math wrong or is that something in the neighborhood of 8,000 to 10,000 hives, in three months, for a whole country? We lose almost a million hives a year. If you want to grab headlines, they would read: "U.S. loses 40 to 60 trillion bees last year"

The U.S. loses between 3 to 5 trillion bees a month. And that is due to colony loss, not natural attrition of an insect with a very short life-span.

I really don't know if this is a significant number or not. This could be just a few large bee farmers who got poisoned in Brazil. It would be nice if the article had put in some way to contrast against the entire amount of managed bee colonies in Brazil. 500 million bees could be a lot. Or it could be almost insignificant.
 
#10 ·
Psm1212,
I understand what you are saying. A few days ago someone asked me how many bees I have. I said, "about a million." They looked at me as though I was lying. Then I laughed, clapped them on the shoulder and said, "No, I'm just kidding, I have 26 colonies of various sizes." To them, that was not such an outlandish claim.


Alex
 
#12 ·
With the greatest respect - you guys are missing a key point. The story is NOT about the 500 million - that's just a journalist's way of creating an attention-catching headline. The story is based around Brazil lifting it's pesticide regulations and so stockpiles of pesticides banned in other countries can now find a ready market.

Even if we play the 'colony-numbers game' and reduce 500 million to 8,000 or 10,000 colonies, I find it beggars belief to talk of such losses in terms of whether these are 'significant' or not.

In Britain, to lose even one thousand colonies would be seen as a major incident, worthy of questions being asked in Parliament - and perhaps there lies the answer to our different perceptions. The number of colony losses in the US would be seen by us as being nothing short of apocalyptic, but you guys appear to have become so conditioned to such year-on-year losses that you now view these as being 'normal', and evaluate them in terms of significance by measuring losses in terms of percentages. No other branch of agriculture would tolerate annual losses of 40% of it's stock.

LJ
 
#13 ·
With the greatest respect - you guys are missing a key point. The story is NOT about the 500 million - .... The story is based around Brazil lifting it's pesticide regulations and so stockpiles of pesticides banned in other countries can now find a ready market..........

LJ
Brazil is generally a mess now that they too have a "populist", pro-business elected leader.
They are going to burn and poison all the can, so few locals down there can get rich quickly.
Nothing new.

The Amazon is burning because the world eats so much meat.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/23/americas/brazil-beef-amazon-rainforest-fire-intl/index.html

It's an idea that Finland has already floated. On Friday, the Nordic country's finance minister called for the European Union to "urgently review the possibility of banning Brazilian beef imports" over the Amazon fires.
Not just meat, "organic" honey from Brazil needs to be banned too.
Need some tariffs on Brazil maybe, along with China.
:)
 
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