HONEY BEES have become a HUGE PROBLEM - What's really happening?

after keeping honeybees for 20 years I don't want to see them in my Orchard anymore Albert Einstein once supposedly said that if bees has appeared from the face of the Earth mankind would only have four years left to live what would happen if they were to disappear what would it be like to have a world without bees we're kind of at a Tipping Point we can't really afford to lose that many more uh in China now they're hand pollinating flowers you know with paint brushes a paint of apples Yeah in our Collective conscience in a really Primal way we know we can't afford to lose bees and it's now a global pandemic all bees in the world are infected with these viruses because when they infected honeybee for instance it visits the flower it leaves viral particles the bottom line is bees dying reflects a flourless landscape and a dysfunctional you certainly seen the headlines honeybees are in Decline colony collapse syndrome ferolamites honeybees have had their problems thankfully people like Paul stamets has come around and found an immune booster to help them get over the colony collapse but of all things it's an extract of Honey mushroom mycelium makes you wonder how come bees can't get honey mushroom naturally all by themselves honeybees are not native to North America and they actually out compete our native bees or they compete with them anyway honeybees are subsidized you think well they don't get money for them no but they're subsidized by beekeepers for their Essentials like the food they eat they're Fed so that they can survive better during the winter they're protected from predators like bears with fences you know Bears love honey maybe you've heard of Pooh Bear honeybees are kept for pollination for pollinating fruit crops and forage crops and that's important but you know that there is a lot of native bees who that is their specialty to pollinate those crops there's actually hundreds of species of native bees big ones like you've probably seen bumblebees lots and lots of species of bumblebees and a lot of smaller bees Orchard bees solitary bees all different hundreds of species of these native bees another reason why I got rid of bees was that honeybees caused over pollination you think well isn't that good don't you want a lot of pollination you want a lot but you actually just want enough a tree only needs 12 to 15 percent of its flowers to be pollinated to give you a full crop and the native bees in our Orchard were doing a perfect job of giving us that and maybe a little more and then honeybees on top of it doubled the amount so we could get 25 30 35 percent of all the flowers pollinated hey a little bit is wonderful the right amount is perfect but too much causes problems like the branches would be so weighed down they would break or especially at the top the top is thinner and it's moving with the wind it would cause the top to break under the load of fruit and that overproduction that excess load put a stress on the tree to say hey whoa I gave you two years of production this year so you know what next year I'm taking a vacation and it's called bi-annual or every two years production and we've had that pattern set up for over 10 years and it's hard to get out of because the honeybees may be the big years become excessive and the trees just kept going one year big one year vacation might be good for some people but not if you want a regular crop and so one of the last things that we did see was that because we had replanted the orchard and we had huge diversity no longer a monoculture apple orchard which is what we started with and started with bees we now had compared to the past where it was organic apples we would have a 10-day Bloom lots and lots of blooms the honeybees and the native bees had a bonanza with all this flowering now we went to apple pear Plum Cherry nitrogen fixing trees so we went from a 10-day Bloom window to a 60 days almost of Bloom in the spring and what that did was it caused the populations of honeybees and Native bees to just get so well started in the spring which is great but not if it sets up that pattern of every year don't get me wrong I loved keeping honeybees I loved working with honeybees and I love honey but our only in difficulties are they a problem or are they a symptom of something much Graver I would argue that honeybees are a symptom of an oversimplified agriculture system we've come to have such large size fields of one single crop a monoculture even in the case of orchards large size Orchards field crops even larger Fields imagine a bee having to find a flower in there and on top of it our agriculture system has become so reliant on agricultural sprays whether they're herbicides to remove weeds a lot of them which would end up flowering and those flowers would feed our native bees or it could be pass the sides which are sprayed to kill 0.1 percent of the pests but there's a lot of other insects in the field so oh well they also get hip you ever think the native bees which aren't moved around from one crop to another they're in that environment which gets sprayed with insecticide and the third group of sprays is fungicides to control disease like scab on Apple or even in field crops well a fungicide is meant to kill fungus right fungus which are mushrooms brings us back to the story of Paul stamets honey mushrooms how come native bees or honeybees they are the Canary in the coal mine how come they no longer have access to Honey mushroom well maybe all our spraying has reduced the population of mycelium the abundance of mushrooms has calmed down so much that bees look around and they can't find their own Pharmacy which Nature has gladly provided so that they can feed off of these medicines when they feel a need for it so honeybees are in have problems but they are really not the real problem they are hiding a much bigger problem and it's even worse for our native bees you want to find out more about creating habitats attracting what I call Nature's allies that are given freely to help us check out our master class at permaculture.study and the core specifically could be called Nature's allies it's not too late if you Embrace A diversity of plants you will get a diversity of bees especially native bees and that's what we all want

Channel: Stefan Sobkowiak - The Permaculture Orchard

Views: 21,613

Keywords: native bees, beekeeper, beekeepers, permaculture, miracle farms, Stefan Sobkowiak, honeybee, honeybees, honey bee, bee, permaculture orchard

Id: WpVVY8edleY

Length: 8min 13sec (493 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023