As always thank you for your work. When you have a moment, can you address the anti-environment claims of the otherwise fine Landman? My only experience with insect armageddon is driving from montreal to boston in 1970s and 80s and having to stop 2 or 3 times to wipe windshield. Now i can drive 1000 miles with nary an insect gut to be found. I wondered if theyve designed better windshields but it’s not that. What do the data show?
"Citizen scientists" isn't a derogatory term. Lots of science is done nowadays by pooling large amounts of data collected by volunteer citizen scientists.
What's un-falsifiable about splatted insects? Either they are there or not. It's a pretty reasonable assumption that the number of insects splatted against a car windshield is going to be related to the number of insects flying in that area.
"One swarm of bees intercepted .....or one day of grasshoppers on the move .....and you get more 'splats' than you can count !" Well yes, that's just randomness in the data. With a decent quantity of data you can easily fit those sorts of spikes and troughs into an overall model.
It's not rationalisation. It's perfectly normal for data to have outliers. That's just part of science - sometimes we have to deal with non-perfect data but that doesn't mean you can't do good science with it.
Well noticed on the name. Yes it's from greek meaning robber/bandit. It's also a genus of damselfly - emerald spreadwings. (I'd say it's a pseudonym not eponym.)
Since we've ditched the lawn and put our yard into natives plants I've been amazed at the variety of bees and insects in general that we see now. Yes, a few are mildly problematic but manageable. It's really opened my eyes to how many different bees there are out there that suburbs and farm fields don't seem to support.
Andy, I support your approach 100%. Saves water, too!
I never had a lawn on my 5 acres of mixed forest and meadows in the Pacific Northwest. But I remove non-native plants, especially invasive ones. I also create occasional areas of bare soil because some wild bees need bare soil to make their nests.
Many native plants, especially bulbs, have been patiently waiting for decades for protection from deer browse and removal of the competing non-natives.
I still have remnants of the previous garden near my house because some of the plants are really special for me, such as a dwarf fragrant daphne, Daphne cneorum, that is over six feet across and a small Japanese maple, as well as a dwarf lavender that volunteers in the gravely areas. And wooly thyme and Corsican mint that also volunteer and are less than an inch tall. Trying for a fire wise landscape overall.
This is something even Trevor and I can agree on. Dwindling bee numbers and diversity is one "environmental" problem that private, voluntary efforts can substantially mitigate. The occasional yard full of diverse native plants established around town can directly bolster populations of endangered bugs and slugs, humble but essential to ecosystem functioning; and provide critical "refugia", i.e. at least temporary food or shelter for more mobile and charismatic bees, butterflies, birds and mammals, helping them to find others of their kind in the landscape.
If you are inspired to restore native biodiversity to your property, please research native plant sources, including how local they are; and be aware that restoring their populations means open-ended hard work and some casualty rate for seeds or plants you purchase. They're not cheap, either!
I wish that Monarchs visited my island in Western Washington, just south of Canada. Apparently Eastern Washington, Eastern Oregon , and Idaho are important habitats for Monarchs:
This is is a really good lesson on how it is important to look more closely at what is really being represented in graphs and by statistics.
It also highlights causation vs correlation.
Domesticated bee farms may actually also be thriving and growing because of struggling wild bee populations since farmers will sometimes rent bees during crop flowering seasons to make sure pollination occurs. I assume this was not as often the case in the past when wild bees were doing well.
Thus, there may actually be a statistical relationship between bee farming increases and wild be demise.
Statistics are always objective. However, the messages some may try to portray with them may not be accurate.
Some politicians like to pretend that the numbers themselves are false. However, this is not actually the case. It is how stats are being presented to paint a certain picture which people need to look more closely at and watch out for.
In your example you point out that one might assume that bee populations are fine if one does not look more closely at what the stats are really showing. One who is wanting to paint a false picture for political reasons (big donor insecticide company) might suggest exactly that and that pretend the graph shows that all bee populations are fine. Bees are also susceptible to diseases and some politician my not want to fund that research that is needed to keep them thriving and may misrepresent this information.
So, always look closely when someone is using data and a graph to support a narrative. Sometimes the graph and stats are good supporting evidence, sometimes they are not.
I enjoyed the clear-eyed analysis. I have a quick question as a non-bee person - are honeybees also wild bees? In the sense that we have lots of birds come to our birdfeeder, but I still think of them as wild birds. They come and go as they please and can decide to stop using the feeder if they want. But maybe I misunderstand beekeeping so the analogy may be wrong. And a short comment - I studied amphibian populations for a long time and did a global analysis of amphibian populations in the early2000's (found they were declining). But it is clear that most natural populations of living things fluctuate dramatically from year-to-year and so short term trends can appear alarming if interpreted as long-term trends. And most academic and citizen science is done in areas where people live - usually in fairly high densities (at least that was true for amphibians). And so might not be representative of 'global' trends. These were caveats we had to consider in our week. And, in my mind, emphasized the need for large-scale (over time and space) monitoring if we were going to be reasonably confident in our trend estimates.
I appreciate these subtleties of how to get good data. Wendell Berry invokes the declining numbers of people living in rural places as a factor that likely makes us less in touch and in tune with what nature is doing. He calls this the "eyes to acres ratio," and I find this helpful to think about what you are invoking here. More and more of our human eyes are focused in urban locations As a small scale local beekeeper in a semi-urban, I balance time creating forage for my honeybees (by planting trees and native perennials), and for all bees, as I do tending my hives. As for wildness, most bee scientists say that a beehive living without a beekeeper (for example, in a tree hollow) is "feral" rather than "wild". Honeybees have been a domesticated insect for as far back into history as we can look (and also have always created feral colonies when there are enough nice hollows to support them). It's very mysterious question as to just how, way back when, humans and honeybees struck up a partnership.
I agree broadly with the post but I disagree that the number of farmed animals increasing consistently and to massive numbers is at all positive, even just for food production.
It is actively detracting from the vast number of people we could feed if that land were instead used for efficient arable agriculture, it is a massive threat in terms of disease and antibiotic resistance, and it is a major source of emissions, deforestation, soil degradation and inefficient water and land usage.
Broadly agree with your posts and appreciate the time spent researching them but you completely missed the mark there, the only coherent and consistent environmentalist view cannot be lauding farmed animals as a great thing.
I fear this is a misreading of what Hannah wrote. I couldn't find anywhere in the text where she makes the point that farmed animals are a great thing, or even a positive thing. She even added a footnote to point out that it's not good for the animals.
If we've reached the point where stating clear, objective facts becomes partisan, then we're in trouble.
Yeah, I'm about 99% sure Ms Ritchie is fully agreed here (as am I). It was a statement of fact, the problem is that as soon as you start discussing how awful factory farming is people get defensive and ignore whatever other points one is trying to make (in this case about bees).
Hannah: Thank you for this nuanced review of bees. The list of stressors they face is long—from pesticides and pollutants to fungi and habitat loss. Your careful treatment of these overlapping trends helps me feel more confident in my interpretation of the science.
The Media, TV etc, like to keep things simple so as to not confuse us with facts. I spend a lot of time outdoors and I can verify that the Mosquito population is in trouble too.
So what's the best advice for those of us with lawns. Many years I've delayed mowing, for the bees! but also because I'm busy. Is that the right thing to do?
I don't fertilize or water my lawn so it's not as nice looking as the retired neighbors around me.
If there are any flowering weeds, or by some miracle native wildflowers, growing in your lawn, then not mowing while they're blooming is absolutely the right thing to do!
I should qualify my endorsement of flowering weeds: there are aggressively competitive introduced weeds that should be prevented from flowering and setting seed if feasible! Check with your local SWCD, Native Plant Society, or other local weed experts.
Hi Hannah - flagging a typo on your OWID article - https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass. In the "Pets -How do researchers estimate the total biomass of cats, dogs, and other pets?" section, I was shocked to read that dog population is 987 Billion but turns it out it's Million.
Brilliant clarification. The livestock analogy for managed honeybees is perfect, especially the chicken example. I've seen that exact chart weaponized to dismiss biodiversity concerns more times than I can count. The irony that thriving honeybee populations might actually threaten wild bees through competition and pathogen spread is something I hadnt fully considered. Data literacy matters not just in readng numbers but understanding what populations those numbers actaully represent.
Thank you, Hannah. I've enjoyed your Substack posts quite a lot over the last couple years, and I'm happy you chose to address bee data. I posted a comment below already, so I'll just share in addition that, as a science teacher and small scale local beekeeper, I write a lot about the intersection of bees and science. I wrote an article about the question of "Who should we care about more? Honeybees, or native bees?" https://briang.substack.com/p/wondering-wednesday-q-and-a-24.
Your data matches my conclusions pretty exactly. We must have concern about both. We can't be cavalier about the need for stable food production, but we must be clear-eyed about the way we abuse animals, including bees, cows, chickens etc, to maximize production. I am reminded of the book "The Shepherds Life" by James Rebanks, in which he voices a well-informed opinion, as a 4th generation shepherd, that we must do both (ensure steady food production, while increasingly welcoming wild spaces and corridors back into and around all of our farms). His basic argument is that industrial agriculture is actually dependent on those wild spaces, and on those farmers who work at the margins raising animals and crops in ancient and more balanced ways. His perspective is helpful to me, as it reminds us that we must think of the farmers in our analysis as well. As I understand it, large scale beekeepers, like large scale farmers, are much more likely to "die from despair" (suicide or other self harming behavior) due to the pressures of razor thin margins and ever increasing production goals.
Sadly that's not my kiwi experience - although that was the case decades ago. On the upside, in NZ our wild bees are not so negatively impacted by farmed honey bees because they visit different flowers.
Yes and no. By comparison with the UK and Europe, probably. By comparison with the summers of my childhood 50 years ago, no. Even compared to 20 years ago, no.
As always thank you for your work. When you have a moment, can you address the anti-environment claims of the otherwise fine Landman? My only experience with insect armageddon is driving from montreal to boston in 1970s and 80s and having to stop 2 or 3 times to wipe windshield. Now i can drive 1000 miles with nary an insect gut to be found. I wondered if theyve designed better windshields but it’s not that. What do the data show?
Here's a study from the UK based on citizen reporting. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/360514998_The_Bugs_Matter_Citizen_Science_Survey_counting_insect_'splats'_on_vehicle_number_plates_reveals_a_585_reduction_in_the_abundance_of_actively_flying_insects_in_the_UK_between_2004_and_2021
"Citizen scientists" isn't a derogatory term. Lots of science is done nowadays by pooling large amounts of data collected by volunteer citizen scientists.
What's un-falsifiable about splatted insects? Either they are there or not. It's a pretty reasonable assumption that the number of insects splatted against a car windshield is going to be related to the number of insects flying in that area.
"One swarm of bees intercepted .....or one day of grasshoppers on the move .....and you get more 'splats' than you can count !" Well yes, that's just randomness in the data. With a decent quantity of data you can easily fit those sorts of spikes and troughs into an overall model.
It's not rationalisation. It's perfectly normal for data to have outliers. That's just part of science - sometimes we have to deal with non-perfect data but that doesn't mean you can't do good science with it.
Well noticed on the name. Yes it's from greek meaning robber/bandit. It's also a genus of damselfly - emerald spreadwings. (I'd say it's a pseudonym not eponym.)
You're so clevor, Trevor! But science has advanced since Popper, you know.
Thanks for sharing, Trevor.
U think NZ could somehow be a distinction?
Idk! But ritchie can figure it out!
Since we've ditched the lawn and put our yard into natives plants I've been amazed at the variety of bees and insects in general that we see now. Yes, a few are mildly problematic but manageable. It's really opened my eyes to how many different bees there are out there that suburbs and farm fields don't seem to support.
Andy, I support your approach 100%. Saves water, too!
I never had a lawn on my 5 acres of mixed forest and meadows in the Pacific Northwest. But I remove non-native plants, especially invasive ones. I also create occasional areas of bare soil because some wild bees need bare soil to make their nests.
Many native plants, especially bulbs, have been patiently waiting for decades for protection from deer browse and removal of the competing non-natives.
I still have remnants of the previous garden near my house because some of the plants are really special for me, such as a dwarf fragrant daphne, Daphne cneorum, that is over six feet across and a small Japanese maple, as well as a dwarf lavender that volunteers in the gravely areas. And wooly thyme and Corsican mint that also volunteer and are less than an inch tall. Trying for a fire wise landscape overall.
This is something even Trevor and I can agree on. Dwindling bee numbers and diversity is one "environmental" problem that private, voluntary efforts can substantially mitigate. The occasional yard full of diverse native plants established around town can directly bolster populations of endangered bugs and slugs, humble but essential to ecosystem functioning; and provide critical "refugia", i.e. at least temporary food or shelter for more mobile and charismatic bees, butterflies, birds and mammals, helping them to find others of their kind in the landscape.
If you are inspired to restore native biodiversity to your property, please research native plant sources, including how local they are; and be aware that restoring their populations means open-ended hard work and some casualty rate for seeds or plants you purchase. They're not cheap, either!
I wish that Monarchs visited my island in Western Washington, just south of Canada. Apparently Eastern Washington, Eastern Oregon , and Idaho are important habitats for Monarchs:
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/plantmaterials/idpmctn13560.pdf#:~:text=In%20the%20case%20of%20the%20Pacific%20Northwest%2C,butterflies%20back%20to%20California%20for%20the%20winter.
See:
PACIFIC NORTHWEST (PNW) MONARCH BUTTERFLY
WILDLIFE HABITAT EVAULATION GUIDE (WHEG)
Lots of hummingbirds visit here, though!
They are living miracles!
Thank you!
This is is a really good lesson on how it is important to look more closely at what is really being represented in graphs and by statistics.
It also highlights causation vs correlation.
Domesticated bee farms may actually also be thriving and growing because of struggling wild bee populations since farmers will sometimes rent bees during crop flowering seasons to make sure pollination occurs. I assume this was not as often the case in the past when wild bees were doing well.
Thus, there may actually be a statistical relationship between bee farming increases and wild be demise.
Statistics are always objective. However, the messages some may try to portray with them may not be accurate.
Some politicians like to pretend that the numbers themselves are false. However, this is not actually the case. It is how stats are being presented to paint a certain picture which people need to look more closely at and watch out for.
In your example you point out that one might assume that bee populations are fine if one does not look more closely at what the stats are really showing. One who is wanting to paint a false picture for political reasons (big donor insecticide company) might suggest exactly that and that pretend the graph shows that all bee populations are fine. Bees are also susceptible to diseases and some politician my not want to fund that research that is needed to keep them thriving and may misrepresent this information.
So, always look closely when someone is using data and a graph to support a narrative. Sometimes the graph and stats are good supporting evidence, sometimes they are not.
I enjoyed the clear-eyed analysis. I have a quick question as a non-bee person - are honeybees also wild bees? In the sense that we have lots of birds come to our birdfeeder, but I still think of them as wild birds. They come and go as they please and can decide to stop using the feeder if they want. But maybe I misunderstand beekeeping so the analogy may be wrong. And a short comment - I studied amphibian populations for a long time and did a global analysis of amphibian populations in the early2000's (found they were declining). But it is clear that most natural populations of living things fluctuate dramatically from year-to-year and so short term trends can appear alarming if interpreted as long-term trends. And most academic and citizen science is done in areas where people live - usually in fairly high densities (at least that was true for amphibians). And so might not be representative of 'global' trends. These were caveats we had to consider in our week. And, in my mind, emphasized the need for large-scale (over time and space) monitoring if we were going to be reasonably confident in our trend estimates.
I appreciate these subtleties of how to get good data. Wendell Berry invokes the declining numbers of people living in rural places as a factor that likely makes us less in touch and in tune with what nature is doing. He calls this the "eyes to acres ratio," and I find this helpful to think about what you are invoking here. More and more of our human eyes are focused in urban locations As a small scale local beekeeper in a semi-urban, I balance time creating forage for my honeybees (by planting trees and native perennials), and for all bees, as I do tending my hives. As for wildness, most bee scientists say that a beehive living without a beekeeper (for example, in a tree hollow) is "feral" rather than "wild". Honeybees have been a domesticated insect for as far back into history as we can look (and also have always created feral colonies when there are enough nice hollows to support them). It's very mysterious question as to just how, way back when, humans and honeybees struck up a partnership.
I agree broadly with the post but I disagree that the number of farmed animals increasing consistently and to massive numbers is at all positive, even just for food production.
It is actively detracting from the vast number of people we could feed if that land were instead used for efficient arable agriculture, it is a massive threat in terms of disease and antibiotic resistance, and it is a major source of emissions, deforestation, soil degradation and inefficient water and land usage.
Broadly agree with your posts and appreciate the time spent researching them but you completely missed the mark there, the only coherent and consistent environmentalist view cannot be lauding farmed animals as a great thing.
I fear this is a misreading of what Hannah wrote. I couldn't find anywhere in the text where she makes the point that farmed animals are a great thing, or even a positive thing. She even added a footnote to point out that it's not good for the animals.
If we've reached the point where stating clear, objective facts becomes partisan, then we're in trouble.
We reached that point long ago with politics I am afraid.
I’m positive Hannah did not miss the mark to be honest. At no point in her writing did she, or ever has, lauded farmed animals as a great thing.
It was being used as a tool to show how data can show a positive but it doesn’t mean that it is.
It really is not the point of the article.
Yeah, I'm about 99% sure Ms Ritchie is fully agreed here (as am I). It was a statement of fact, the problem is that as soon as you start discussing how awful factory farming is people get defensive and ignore whatever other points one is trying to make (in this case about bees).
The data shows a simple shareable memory peg with 4s:
per person
- 4 chickens
- 1/4 cows
- 1/100 beehives (4 x quarter)
Per 1M people
- 4M chickens
- 250k cows
- 10k beehives
Just wrote about bee conservation. Their PR is the envy of the natural world. https://www.oceanrising.co/p/who-did-the-pr-for-bees?r=1x6gj5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
Hannah: Thank you for this nuanced review of bees. The list of stressors they face is long—from pesticides and pollutants to fungi and habitat loss. Your careful treatment of these overlapping trends helps me feel more confident in my interpretation of the science.
The Media, TV etc, like to keep things simple so as to not confuse us with facts. I spend a lot of time outdoors and I can verify that the Mosquito population is in trouble too.
So what's the best advice for those of us with lawns. Many years I've delayed mowing, for the bees! but also because I'm busy. Is that the right thing to do?
I don't fertilize or water my lawn so it's not as nice looking as the retired neighbors around me.
If there are any flowering weeds, or by some miracle native wildflowers, growing in your lawn, then not mowing while they're blooming is absolutely the right thing to do!
I should qualify my endorsement of flowering weeds: there are aggressively competitive introduced weeds that should be prevented from flowering and setting seed if feasible! Check with your local SWCD, Native Plant Society, or other local weed experts.
Hi Hannah - flagging a typo on your OWID article - https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass. In the "Pets -How do researchers estimate the total biomass of cats, dogs, and other pets?" section, I was shocked to read that dog population is 987 Billion but turns it out it's Million.
Brilliant clarification. The livestock analogy for managed honeybees is perfect, especially the chicken example. I've seen that exact chart weaponized to dismiss biodiversity concerns more times than I can count. The irony that thriving honeybee populations might actually threaten wild bees through competition and pathogen spread is something I hadnt fully considered. Data literacy matters not just in readng numbers but understanding what populations those numbers actaully represent.
Thank you, Hannah. I've enjoyed your Substack posts quite a lot over the last couple years, and I'm happy you chose to address bee data. I posted a comment below already, so I'll just share in addition that, as a science teacher and small scale local beekeeper, I write a lot about the intersection of bees and science. I wrote an article about the question of "Who should we care about more? Honeybees, or native bees?" https://briang.substack.com/p/wondering-wednesday-q-and-a-24.
Your data matches my conclusions pretty exactly. We must have concern about both. We can't be cavalier about the need for stable food production, but we must be clear-eyed about the way we abuse animals, including bees, cows, chickens etc, to maximize production. I am reminded of the book "The Shepherds Life" by James Rebanks, in which he voices a well-informed opinion, as a 4th generation shepherd, that we must do both (ensure steady food production, while increasingly welcoming wild spaces and corridors back into and around all of our farms). His basic argument is that industrial agriculture is actually dependent on those wild spaces, and on those farmers who work at the margins raising animals and crops in ancient and more balanced ways. His perspective is helpful to me, as it reminds us that we must think of the farmers in our analysis as well. As I understand it, large scale beekeepers, like large scale farmers, are much more likely to "die from despair" (suicide or other self harming behavior) due to the pressures of razor thin margins and ever increasing production goals.
On large scale farming pressures, here's something I recently learned:
[Big Beautiful Bill - H.R. 1 - Subtitle C - Commodities](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/text/eas)
US Federal Gov → USDA → FSA → ARC & PLC
Agricultural Risk Coverage and Price Loss Coverage
Funded through 2030 with increased base acres for eligible farmers
From 275M to 300M covered acres (commodities)
US Federal Gov cares about farming.
Thank you, Hannah.
Oh btw, daughter in New Zealand says tons of bug guts on windhield.
Sadly that's not my kiwi experience - although that was the case decades ago. On the upside, in NZ our wild bees are not so negatively impacted by farmed honey bees because they visit different flowers.
Yes and no. By comparison with the UK and Europe, probably. By comparison with the summers of my childhood 50 years ago, no. Even compared to 20 years ago, no.
Daughter in New Zealand says plenty of bug guts on windshield there.