Beekeepers in the U.S. earn about half their revenue from pollination services so even if demand for honey were reduced, commercial crop pollination would not cease (though it would probably get more expensive). I discuss ways to reduce demand for managed honey bee pollination here, including self-fertile varieties of pollinator-dependent crops, mechanical pollination, and local wild pollination.
Hmm, if everybody stopped eating honey and wild bees are not picking up the slack, then presumably farmers would instead pay for commercial beekeeping to pollinate their fields?
[Question]
How would crop pollination work without commercial beekeeping?
If everyone stopped eating honey and commercial beekeeping ceased to exist, how much would this impact crop pollination? How much would wild bees pick up the slack?
TL;DR
* GOAL 3 is a social enterprise that created IMPALA, a patient monitoring and digital platform system for low-resource settings. There is also a GOAL 3 foundation that raises funds to ensure underserved communities will be reached.
* A recently completed report from Rethink Priorities calculated IMPALA to have a cost per DALY averted of $7–17 in paediatr...
This month effective altruism has gotten lots of attention, including a cover story in The Economist. It feels pretty surreal to be on the receiving end of it. But I feel grateful these ideas have caught on, and even more grateful for the drive, earnestness, and compassion of so many people who took strange but well-argued ideas seriously and then actually acted on them....
Impressions from the 21st Annual U.S. Cluster Headache Patient Conference, organized by Clusterbusters.
On the morning of the last day of the conference, E. was hanging out with other “clusterheads” outside the conference hotel when he started having a cluster headache attack. Before he could go back to his hotel room, J. offered E. his DMT v...
Beekeepers in the U.S. earn about half their revenue from pollination services so even if demand for honey were reduced, commercial crop pollination would not cease (though it would probably get more expensive). I discuss ways to reduce demand for managed honey bee pollination here, including self-fertile varieties of pollinator-dependent crops, mechanical pollination, and local wild pollination.