[ExI] Bee Watch

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf
Of spike>...

>...When bees fight, they mean business.  They don't just wrestle: if two
bees engage, they don't give up.  At least one of those bitches is going to
die...
If we had equipment set up, perhaps a hive that was getting a lot of fights
at the entrance would signal a weaken hive, alerting the beekeeper to fetch
that one and quarantine it to a bee hospital...
The strategy would be to put your strong hives together and weaker hives
together where they would not attack each other...spike

Writing about this gave me another idea, a possible explanation for bee
decline.

We know that animal behavior can change in a few dozen generations in
response to a stimulus or change in conditions.  A few dozen generations of
bugs is not a long time, rather something easily seen in a single human
lifespan.

Imagine domestic bees are adapting to living in apiaries with a few dozen
supers.  Targets for robbing honey are right there, unlike natural hives
which generally are spaced some distance apart.  The robbers have constant
access to the weak colonies and are right there to attack it.

Perhaps we have bred bees to look around for weak hives to rob rather than
go out looking for honey.  This would lead to increased vectors for
parasites and other diseases.  Since the number of sites is limited by
various factors, such as land availability, roads and so forth.  Proles
buying honey and paying absurd prices for it encourages beekeepers to pack
more supers into the available sites, which breeds robbers, which spreads
disease and weakens hives, which encourages robbers.

Could we be causing the decline of bees by indirectly breeding uncooperative
or adversarial strains by paying crazy prices for honey?  

Stop that, forthwith! he demanded.

BillK, you know from biology, ja?  Biology hipsters, help me here por favor.


spike