Get outta here with your sensible, practical solutions! ;-)

Note for those passing through and not reading articles:

This is not a summary of the article, but OP's suggestion for a solution. The article talks about creating a yeast product that's lacking in bees' diet due to climate change and a lack of diversity in flowers.

OP suggests combatting the effects climate change has on biodiversity by planting your own diverse flowers. Which may work, or climate change may just kill those too.

Instead of letting fields lay fallow for crop rotation, they could plant diverse wildflower meadows to improve quality of bee health for the traveling bees that get shipped around for crop rotation.

I can see a potential problem with this suggestion. How many of those wildflowers are net nitrogen fixers? If they are net-negative this approach could be draining all the nitrogen out of the soil during off-rotation years meaning large amounts of petrochemical fertilizer would have to be used to make the field productive again for nitrogen consuming crops (like wheat and corn).

I learned during COVID about planting diverse local wildflowers to help with pollination in my small little garden I used to have. I ended up dedicating like an 8x6 planter just for wildflowers every year. Always had tons of bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies. I honestly never realized how many species of bees there were. The first year I did it I tripled my veggie yield, never looked back.

I'm sure things are different in different parts of the world, but where I'm from, pretty much none of the big crop farms let fields lay truly fallow. Most of them plant various cold season cover crops that include things like clover, brassicas, and legumes like vetch. Those all produce lots of flowers that feed the bees in the off season.

The issue with wildflower meadows, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that most of those wildflowers bloom at times when the fields would otherwise be needed for crop production. Of course, there are farmers who skip planting at all some years, but in my neck of the woods, nobody does that. They plant every year, at least once, they just rotate different crops in and out. Corn one year. Hay then soy, the next. And so on.

True but at the same time bees help spread pollinating plants - it's a two way relationship. They may be commercialised for crops, but they will go to any plants in range and contribute to their spread.

So a method of increasing bee populations may also be helpful in spreading wildflowers and speeding up rewilding efforts.

In addition dramatically increasing bee populations may help resolve issues with pollination such as in some regions of China where damage is so bad that hand pollination is needed for crops. Restoring bee pollinators in those areas may increase crop yields, which in turn reduces the general pressure globally on expanding the use of fertile land for farming.

So while crop/pollen diversity is certainly very important, this kind of research still has potentially big benefits for the environment both in the fight to rewild and slow the spread of land use being moved to farming.

nah man. bees just crave brawndo.

Works for me. I only mow early spring and early autumn. During spring and summer the yard runs on it's own. Every year is different. Each year it looks different. Every year honey tast little different. But ...... that is how it's supposed to be!

"brands" hate that, taste must be 100% predictable year to year. Just like wine. Grapes are different each year too. Imagine the amount of additives required to adjust (read that as ruin) the original flavor.

the thing with diverse flowers approach is that they don't grow everywhere ... some places you will naturally only have like 1-2 types of flowers because certain flowers prefer a certain soil and some soil is maybe too meager or sth to support a wild diversity of flowers.

Do farmers still do crop rotation? Here in the Netherlands they pump the ground full of the appropriate chemicals so they can grow the same crop in the same place every year.

As for your plan, the fact that bees are getting essential nutrients from those flowers proves a fallow field with wildflowers isn't being fallow; it's extracting resources from the soil which may have needed replenishment for crop rotation to work. You can sacrifice productivity for wildflowers, but at that point you're just designating a space to be a meadow.

The solution is complicated and requires society to step away from the industrial model of agriculture entirely. Food forests are diverse and resilient permaculture, where a farmer does the labor of monitoring nutrient flows through the ecosystem so that a large population of humans can be part of that balanced ecosystem (possibly at a distance, with food being exported and feces imported). Bees are a natural part of such an ecosystem.

Don't worry. Dust bowl 2 comming in hot to teach this lesson the hard way.

In a couple years we'll be saying honey "doesn't taste like it used to"

But what flowers do we let growth that will make money ?

Its simple economics. No matter how beneficial it is to the environment, people, or the economy, its bad for the economy to do anything without a direct profit motive

(god I hope the sarcasm was thick enough)

Well, domestic bees are invasive. I wonder if they are going to try to feed this to wild bees... Probably not. Still, I want domestic bees to flourish, because I like honey, so I'm not that mad.

Cuno doesn't care. Cuno just wants cheap artificial honey.

(courtesy of Murvyn)

Though what if honey bees are only so docile because they don't have the energy to be assholes and this is the first step in a total bee world takeover?

He's going to steal the Declaration of Inbeependence

Bee do our own rezzearch

hivemind at work.

Bee Joe Rogan is going hard on ivermectin

Bees

That's the tradeoff, it's bees /s

The article suggests that if the farmed honey bees get this engineered food, that would leave more wild forrage for native bees.

I suspect native bees would also benefit from eating it too.