[ExI] FW: bee free, honey! it's fake

[Keith Henson]

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/sep/18/hives-honeybee-boom-tuscan-island-italy-aoe

Unrelated, the Asian murder hornets eat bees.  Over the past 15 or 20
years, they have killed most of the bees in France.  When they invade
the US, no more honey or almonds.

Keith

On Sat, Sep 20, 2025 at 10:57 AM spike jones via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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> Will Steinberg and I had a pleasant and informative discourse I thought the ExI list might enjoy, even if it has nothing point nada to do with the kindsa stuff we usually discuss in this quirky forum.
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> spike
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> From: spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com>
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> From: Will Steinberg <steinberg.will at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [ExI] bee free, honey! it's fake
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> >…Honey is full of hundreds of compounds that won’t be in synthetic honey… I’m not sure I get your viewpoint.  It seems like you’re comparing the worst case for farming bees with the best cases for farming other animals… Will
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> Entirely possible I have a distorted view, since I have personal firsthand knowledge of the bee industry, and only a view from 30k overhead of the cattle industry.
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> I occasionally pass by the enormous Harris Ranch cattle feedlot, so I am vaguely aware of that side of the industry.  Oh, mercy.  Take me away, Calgon.  Far away, please.  (Californians all nod in agreement (knowing EXACTLY what I am talking about.))
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> I can go a different route besides sympathy for animals however (it’s just difficult for most normal humans to develop warm fuzzy feelings for a goddam BUG (no worries, I get that (even if one mght weakly argue that although bees are not warm, they are fuzzy, kinda.))
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> Alternative: we need healthy hives, and I know these hives would not exist at all if they didn’t participate in feeding us.  There are other insects that pollinate, but nooooothing like the way honeybees do, nothing at all.  Honeybees do the heavy lifting.  They pollinate our nut crops, the fruit of course, and we need them more than they need us.
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> After all this time, we still don’t really know for sure why bees don’t really behave the way they did in a single person’s lifespan.  I remember how they did, swarming all over the sides of their hives.  That was only half a century ago, a blink of an eye in evolutionary times, but if you have a place where you can go to see it for yourself, do they do that now?  I go around here, and can’t find bees swarming along the sides of their hives.
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> Consider how they used to do on an early spring morning, just come boiling out, jillions of them, heading out in all directions simultaneously, looking for pollen.  If one is out there at the spring dawn and gets to witness that, it is a memory which never fades.
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> But… bees don’t do that anymore.  I have local hives, and walk past there at dawn.  The bees go out, but nothing like what I remember from my own cheerfully squandered youth.
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> While looking for a video of a good old-fashioned bees going out at dawn, I found this, which is related and cool:
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> https://www.tiktok.com/@texasbeeworks/video/6962225231582842118?lang=en
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> Why was this beekeeper able to herd these bees into a hive without her bee suit?  Do you know?  Do you want to think about it before you read on?
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> Swarming bees will not sting.  You can handle them with your bare hands, bare skin, they won’t sting.  They sting to defend their hive, but if they are swarming, they don’t have a hive.  They are looking for a new home.  Evolution never programmed them to sting beekeepers and those few humans who noticed that swarming bees do not sting.
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> Another fun aside: ants and bees are related.  You have seen ant wars in the spring and summer.  I reasoned that perhaps ant wars are kinda sorta analogous to a bee swarm, and perhaps warring ants will not bite.  We know the will bite if you mess with their ant hill.
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> Figuring that if my experiment failed it would not hurt all that much, I went out, found an ant swarm, took out a credit card, swiped a pile of warring ants into my hand.  They calmly continued fighting each other.  I did that experiment several times and never did get any of them to bite.  If they are away from their home, their ant hill, evolution didn’t instruct them to bite anything other than the other ant in the territory they want.
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> Bugs are so cool.
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> spike
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