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Get rid of the large swaths of green fucking grass, which completely useless when one cuts it down. Let the Dandy Lions grow like we do in Europe and plant more native flowers too.
Let the Dandy Lions grow like we do in Europe
No, Dandy Lions crowd out native North American species and result in less diverse ecosystems, which is bad.
Question from a yank: Is it 'dandy lion' or 'dents-de-leon'?
He wrote it wrong. Its dandelion, and its pronounced in English just like you do, but dependent on the country, we have different words for it. In danish its “mælkebøtte”. Which means “milk bucket”. I think because of the white liquid they have inside. Its good for mosquito bites.
Clover. Clover is great:
If and when I ever get a home first thing I'm doing is planting clover.
I spread a bunch of clover seed around my yard, and where the grass was struggling (I don’t water or fertilize at all) the clover took over, and where the grass was doing ok naturally the clover sort of let the grass have that space mostly. Now the whole yard looks nice, and the clover is just fucking loaded with bees all day. It’s great. My dog just lies in the lush clover and watches the bees buzz around.
My yard was infested with bur clover, horrible stuff when you have pets. Worse when your pets are poodle mixes.
Other clover yeah they chill.
+ a chance at 4-leaf
It's also way less ugly than dandelions that have finished blooming and started spreading seeds, as a bonus. In fact, it looks pleasing to the eye.
IIRC it also grows really easily, you can guerilla plant clover seeds around town at night if you really want to.
So they're feeding bees Vegemite now.
Several bee factions see this as a vaccine and are opting out. /s
Bee Joe Rogan is going hard on ivermectin
hivemind at work.
Bee do our own rezzearch
This method is surprisingly effective at bringing back our god damn honey. We may not have to kill Nicolas Cage after all.
He's going to steal the Declaration of Inbeependence
Soo, beekeepers thought for generations that bees (a animal too) only need sugar to live?
Beekeepers dont harvest the Pollen which the yeast is replacing. The lack of Pollen is most likelly a result of Monocultur.
No, but they do replace the honey with sugar syrup
Only during specific times of the year, it's a supplement not a main diet. If you notice your colony doesn't have enough honey for the winter, or it's a new colony, or needs medicated, then yes. Otherwise they should be eating their own stored honey made the way they like it.
Why can't they just be easy to exploit gosh darn it
And so the house of cards grows by another level. We'll just modify this to add this missing thing. Never mind why it is missing. 10 years later we are 9 layers deep on plugging holes we've created that technological advancements got us out if until they don't and whoosh the cards come crashing down. The hardiness of nature replaced by the frivolity of man.
I really wouldn't call nature "hardy" when an entire ecosystem can collapse when you can take one single species out of it
Let's remember that nature is what produced pandas
Though I still agree
What ecosystem collapses when removing a single creature? Are you talking about pre-holoscene extinction ecosystems? Or are you talking about modern ecosystems (after most of the original biodiversity has already been obliterated, and "removing one species" is actually thousands down on the list of removals)?
Fair enough. It was meant yo contrast with man's obviously fragile solutioning on the fly.
Nature is extremely resilient and adaptable. Life has survived entire mass extinctions and come back flourishing
Sure, nature writ large is resilient and adaptable.
Individual species die off all the time. Sometimes for stupid reasons.
Something like this already happened when we traded the long-term health and fertility of the topsoil for the immediate high yield output of artificially fertilized crops.
By outsourcing the repleneshment of fertility to the relatively fragile and unreliable supply chains and social organisations of man, we assumed management over a delicate balance which previously belonged to nature.
I'm not arguing against industrial agriculture and its commodification of fertiliser by the way. If carefully managed it's possible to imagine an endpoint of equilibrium where global supply chains increase total system fertility by selectively resting soil and relying more on imports to then switch once local fertility peaks and so on. Really just sane and unmolested market forces should in theory discover such a negotiated endpoint.
Fertility alone is not descriptive enough to capture, say, the importance of biological diversity or the load bearing capacity of local environments to support ecosystems, while also producing exportable outputs suitable for maintaining population growth in humanity.
Perennial crops are also ridiculously underused in overall food supply chains. They are more difficult to monetize in existing commodity forms because their overall system value is not captured numerically.
I don't have an overall solution, but any solution will require at its core a way to assign value to the work which nature already does to replenish its own local fertility and to price that effect very cautiously in such a way that it becomes cheaper for intensive producers to rest unfertile soil until it becomes fertile than it is to compensate for unproductive soil by importing chemical fertiliser from somewhere else
Perennial plants don't provide the same nutritional yields. Annuals put all their energy into making fruits/seeds that can be harvested. Things like potatoes or onions don't put all their energy into seeds, but they do put a lot into their roots and that's what's harvested.
We need more biodiversity, but we can start by not having brain dead landscaping dictated by office suits.
I understand the sentiment and don't generally disagree... But in most places around the world, Western honeybees (apis mellifera) are an introduced, agricultural livestock, like cattle, and don't really belong in the natural ecosystem. This is akin to farmers providing grain feed to their cows; they don't have to exclusively rely on pasture grass which didn't evolve to withstand hundreds of hungry herbivores mowing them to the ground every day. Also, honeybees are mediocre pollinators for most native plants. If native bees don't have to compete for resources with honeybees, that's a good thing for both the native bees and the plants that coevolved with them.
When people talk about saving the bees, the discussion almost never turns to native pollinators, including native bees.
Thanks for contributing that.
Really? Because any time I see a post about bees, there's someone saying that honeybees are an invasive species.
Maybe on Lemmy, but we represent a minority in social media. You'll tend to see more counter popular opinions on Lemmy for that reason.
Either way, saving the bees should be about saving native bees where industrial has destroyed native habitat.
Throughout history the human population has only been able to increase thanks to innovation. Irrigation, the wheel, alternating crops, crop distance, keeping disease in check, genetic engineering to increase resistance and crop yields, and this is another innovation in that line. If you want to go back to nature, by all means do.
I believe the only way forward is through science and innovation and if that means genetically altered food for the bees, then so be it. This with the in combination with limiting roundup should bring the global bee populations back from the brink.
I guess healthier hives would be less prone to winter die-off. Wonder what they feed the yeast on?
Bees
Here in Germany farmers are payed for a strip of each field to be planted with wild flowers instead. They don't lose money at all and nature keeps a bit of land. Simple and cheap.
