• 132 Posts
  • 145 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 1st, 2023
  • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyz•EUROBEEEnglish
    551·
    15 days ago

    Yep for those curious how it harms native bees:

    But scientists say competition with honey bees may also play a role. In a 2017 report in Conservation Letters, researchers calculated that during three months, honey bees in a typical 40-hive apiary collect the equivalent amount of pollen and nectar as 4 million solitary wild bees. “Brilliant foragers,” honey bees can “dominate floral resources and suppress native bee numbers,” says lead author Jim Cane, a retired federal biologist who heads the nonprofit WildBeecology.

    Honey bees also carry diseases that can infect natives, including deformed wing virus and the parasite Crithidia bombi. Researchers have found that native bees near apiaries can suffer a high incidence of such illnesses.

    Also some fun facts: most North American native bee species don’t even live in hives or produce honey for themselves at all. They also almost never sting too

    Unlike honey bees, more than 90 percent of our nearly 4,000 native bee species live not with other bees in hives but alone in nests carved into soil, wood or hollow plant stems. Often mistaken for flies, the majority are tiny and do not have queens or produce honey. Without a hive’s larvae and food supplies to defend, “native bees almost never sting,” Mizejewski say

    https://www.nwf.org/Home/Magazines/National-Wildlife/2021/June-July/Gardening/Honey-Bees

  • usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.mlOPtoMemes@lemmy.ml•The "one bad apple" claims always ignore the many many many bad apples that exist
    264·
    20 days ago

    Quite a range of things. It’s so many It’s hard to list them all. Some of these are more global than others:

    Eyestalk ablation is the removal of one (unilateral) or both (bilateral) eyestalks from a crustacean. It is routinely practiced on female shrimps (or female prawns) in almost every marine shrimp maturation or reproduction facility in the world, both research and commercial.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyestalk_ablation

    Chick culling or unwanted chick killing is the process of separating and killing unwanted (male and unhealthy female) chicks for which the intensive animal farming industry has no use. It occurs in all industrialised egg production, whether free range, organic, or battery cage.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling

    A gestation crate, also known as a sow stall, is a metal enclosure in which a farmed sow used for breeding may be kept during pregnancy.[1][2][3] A standard crate measures 6.6 ft x 2.0 ft (2 m x 60 cm).[4][5]

    […]

    There were 5.36 million breeding sows in the United States as of 2016, out of a total of 50.1 million pigs.[8] Most pregnant sows in the US are kept in gestation crates.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestation_crate

    Ventilation shutdown (VSD) is a means to kill livestock by suffocation and heat stroke in which airways to the building in which the livestock are kept are cut off. It is used for mass killing — usually to prevent the spread of diseases such as avian influenza. Animal rights organizations have called the practice unethical.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventilation_shutdown