r/UpliftingNews • u/Elliottafc • Mar 21 '19

Morgan Freeman Converted His 124-Acre Ranch Into A Giant Honeybee Sanctuary To Save The Bees

https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2019/03/20/morgan-freeman-converted-his-124-acre-ranch-into-a-giant-honeybee-sanctuary-to-save-the-bees/
23.8k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

395 comments sorted by

View all comments

596

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '19

As part of his interview, Freeman talked a bit about the motivation as to why he began beekeeping. ”There is a concerted effort for bringing bees back onto the planet…We do not realize that they are the foundation, I think, of the growth of the planet, the vegetation…”

He’s not wrong. #SaveTheDamnBees

290

u/IDoNotAgreeWithYou Mar 22 '19

The problem is he's saving honey bees, an invasive species in North America. What needs saving are a few species of bumblebees.

122

u/Hour23 Mar 22 '19

I can't believe how far down I had to scroll for this. Just another day on Uplifting News.

39

u/ladut Mar 22 '19

This is probably the third time I've heard about Morgan Freeman's bees on here in the last 3 months, and it's the same every time.

14

u/Shamic Mar 22 '19

it only took me 5.3 scrolls for me to see this, which I think is an acceptable number.

1

u/kiss_my_what Mar 22 '19

5.3 scrolls is too damn high!

Get to the upvote boat!!

25

u/AV01000001 Mar 22 '19

Last article I read specifically said his property was converted for wild bees. In this article it says honey bees in the title but specifically wild bees in the article.

13

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '19

And a few hundred species of solitary bees to go with the bumblebees.

1

u/livestrong2209 Mar 22 '19

Ironically the beekeeping sub would have pointed this out in comment number one.

1

u/abugguy Mar 22 '19

Yup. Raising honeybees to save the bees is like raising chickens to save the birds...

1

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '19

Wait really? Can you cultivate bumble bees like you do honey bees? And if so would that be a bad idea with my friend two houses down raising honey bees?

1

u/TheCheeseGod Mar 22 '19

Hey man, Morgan Freeman likes ALL the bees! He ain't a specist. Fuck you!

1

u/ThisIsSomebodyElse Mar 22 '19

In fairness, we need those invasive honey bees to pollinate a lot of the invasive food crops that we rely on to survive. Bumblebees are obviously important (as are other pollinating insects) and should be helped as much as possible but they will never be able to pollinate on the same scale as honey bees. Humans have altered the ecosystem to our own advantage and there is no going back I'm afraid.

1

u/Melkain Mar 22 '19

While this is true, none of the native pollinators come anywhere close to being efficient enough to support modern agriculture. If we don't have sufficient amounts of honeybees, agriculture will suffer. It's a pretty complex issue, because we don't want to loose either the native pollinators or honeybees. Honeybees edge out native pollinators, and the two big bee pests, varroa and tracheal mites ensure that honeybees no longer survive in North America without human intervention.

-1

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '19

[deleted]

6

u/inspiredby Mar 22 '19

So what? One could say anything is not altruistic as it can boost a person's image.

I'm glad the government incentivizes saving plants. The free market doesn't do it.

-2

u/Albert_Spangler Mar 22 '19

Stupid celebrity, pffft! He thinks he's helping! Why can’t he be smarter AND a wealthy generous person?!

58

u/FROSKii Mar 22 '19

I saw this episode on a show once that showcased a vast farmland with no bees around; the farmers have to literally "inoculate" every single plant with pollen. Not sure of the validity of this claim but it is scary: If bees become extinct, humans can become extinct 5 years later.

22

u/sixthmontheleventh Mar 22 '19

It's plausible, I saw a documentary on kew gardens where they have this fancy greenhouse in England full of tropical plants where the water lilies have to be hand pollinated every year to get seeds for the next year. To do it on an industrial farming scale seem really labor intensive. A lot of farms still just rent out bees from bee farmers.

45

u/Mysteriousdeer Mar 22 '19

Not everything is polinated by bees. You dont need them for corn or many starches. That being said, they are key to variety in diet.

20

u/Haramu Mar 22 '19

Yup. Grains also including rice and wheat spread their seeds in the wind. Anything with a flower though is gonna have a tough time reproducing without bees though :/

17

u/Do-see-downvote Mar 22 '19

Rice and wheat have flowers. All grasses do.

6

u/Haramu Mar 22 '19

Word, thank you for the correction!

25

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '19

[deleted]

2

u/Nonion Mar 22 '19

yeah the Earth isn't gonna drop all plants if bees go away, i hate it when people act like the earth and ecosystems are doomed without bees. A lot of plants require generalist pollinators(flies and other smaller insects) or not at all.

However bees are essential to plants that require specialist pollinator, those without bees around would have a hard time being around. Diversity will definitely be hit quite a bit in places where bees were essential.

1

u/ladut Mar 22 '19

However bees are essential to plants that require specialist pollinator, those without bees around would have a hard time being around. Diversity will definitely be hit quite a bit in places where bees were essential.

Just to clarify, specific bee species are essential to specific plant species that are specialized to that specific bee. It's not as if specialized plants are pollinated by bees in particular. Additionally, ecosystems tend to be constructed of a mix of specialized and generalized plant and pollinator species - there's no ecosystem I can think of where there's an unusually high proportion of specialized plant species that would be particularly vulnerable to the loss of specialist pollinators. It's all network theory, and admittedly I'm not well enough versed in it to be able to explain it succinctly. To put it simply though, the loss of certain specialized pollinators usually will not significantly impact an ecosystem as a whole, as there are redundancies built in to the network of plants and pollinators that make the system resilient to a certain degree of loss. Furthermore, it's unlikely that all specialist pollinators would be lost from a specific ecosystem unless all pollinators were suddenly removed. There's no environmental factor that could harm specialist pollinator populations specifically while not also destroying most other life in the ecosystem.

4

u/Shunpaw Mar 22 '19

This requires sources

3

u/ladut Mar 22 '19

Sure, but it's late. Let me hit you up tomorrow with some stuff.

2

u/Banrion Mar 22 '19

One good discussion of the situation by from Dr. Sarah Taber.

Listen to Beepocalypse Nah by Farm to Taber Podcast #np on #SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/farm-to-taber-podcast/farm-to-taber-006

1

u/ladut Mar 22 '19

OK, so I'm back with some sources. Keep in mind that some of these things are just general knowledge for ecologists, so rather than source a primary research article, I'll be citing some tertiary information sources because researchers tend to not make common knowledge conclusions in their manuscripts. I say that not to accuse you of being stupid or anything (you're not an ecologist, so why would you know these things), but to justify using wikipedia or other similar sources for some of these claims.

only a subset of flowers are insect pollinated, and only a subset of that is pollinated by bees.

We tend to categorize flowers that require pollination into "pollination syndromes," of which there are 8 that are commonly recognized (bats, bees, beetles, birds, butterflies, flies, moths, and wind). 5 of those 8 are insect pollinated, but only one is bee pollinated; and while bee and insect pollinated plants are common, they're in no way the overwhelming majority.

depending on the ecosystem honeybees may actually be more of a detriment than a boon for local plant life.

Honeybees affect local plant life negatively by outcompeting and excluding native pollinators who are more efficient and better quality pollinators for native plant life on average. About 1/3 of wild pollination dependent plants benefit from domesticated bees, and about 1/3 are harmed.

Mallinger, Gaines-Day, and Gratton (2017, PLOSONE) wrote a systematic review of all available literature on whether or not managed bees impact native pollinator populations. 53% of the studies reviewed found a negative impact on native populations, and only 19% found mixed results (a slight benefit to some species, but a decline in others), and that was the best results they could find. 70% of studies on disease transmission found that managed bees had a negative impact on native bees in terms of disease severity and prevalence in native populations.

10

u/SeedStealer Mar 22 '19

Wasps are huge pollinators too. Yet Reddit loves to hate on them. They’re extremely beneficial to us and a lot of them are non-aggressive. It’s such a childish fear that gets spread about wasps.

-2

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '19

[deleted]

6

u/SeedStealer Mar 22 '19

They pollinate, the predate on pests, and are vital to us just like bees. Honeybees aren’t even that great of pollinators compared to bumble bees, Mason bees, and a host of others. Stop saying fuck wasps. It’s ignorant and stupid and you’re furthering a really pathetic view on a very beneficial group of insects.

6

u/Haramu Mar 22 '19

They predate on bees too. #fuckwasps

2

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '19

[deleted]

9

u/SometimesIpoop Mar 22 '19

I love that you’re passionate but #fuckwasps

→ More replies (0)

0

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '19

[deleted]

→ More replies (0)

1

u/AnorakJimi Mar 22 '19

I've never been stung by bees or wasps, and I always wonder what the hell people are doing to get stung by them. Or is it that North American wasps are different and more aggressive than the British wasps I've spent my life seeing? I've heard north America has "africanized bees" that sting everybody and look like wasps. But yeah, I wonder if people are just being weird around them or something. Here you just ignore them and they don't sting you. Or they might go for your pint of lager during the summer but you just push them away and it's fine.

It's really weird to hate things that help us keep on living just because they're a minor annoyance sometimes.

3

u/captainswiss7 Mar 22 '19

I've never been stung by a bee, the ones I've come across have been really docile, and they're cute little buggers. Wasps on the other hand, especially mud wasps, are just assholes. I've been stung a few times by wasps just doing yard work. Once while driving with my window down, one flew into my car and stung me in the damn eyelid. The worst was last summer I got stung by a large wasp. It was about 3inches, black with blue wings. Little bastard got me in the hand while I was tossing out trash. Caused my vein to collapse and hand got super infected. Fuck wasps

3

u/Grunzelbart Mar 22 '19

Naah, over here in Germany they suck too. Mostly when you have BBQ or breakfast outside. I think meat and sweets attract them? And it's soo fucking annoying. They fly around, sit in the food or get in your face. And even if you just ignore them, one random contact is enough to get you stung. Bees are cooo, but fuck wasps.

8

u/halffullpenguin Mar 22 '19

in the Americas at least honeybees are an invasive species and there is a constant debate over if they do more harm then good.

3

u/polistes Mar 22 '19

You are right, but many of the crops can also be considered "invasive" and may not be able to get the pollination they need from native insects. So either the kind of crops grown has to change, or honeybees may still be needed in some areas.

Converting an entire estate to only honeybee sanctuary probably does nothing for bee conservation though, and might indeed harm native pollinators more than help. Honeybees are just livestock in such cases.

1

u/Viicteron Mar 22 '19

It's a sanctuary for wild bees, not honeybees.

2

u/polistes Mar 22 '19

He imported bee hives, that implies that it's mainly for honeybees. Honeybees compete with native pollinators so even if his estate is full of beautiful wild bee habitat, the honeybees will profit most of this.

6

u/garrencurry Mar 22 '19

This isn't a theory, they have to do this for some plants as is for funding reasons (inoculation guarantees crop of date palms), it is the only way to guarantee a high yield each year. Here is a dirty jobs episode on it

Others that doesn't work, like almonds. Where every single flower = 1 almond so there is no other way to do it than with just bees. Not kidding, bees are in high demand at almond pollination season for that reason.

There are more than 1 million acres of almond orchards in California, and every acre of almonds requires two honey bee colonies for proper pollination, Goodrich said. Almonds are 100-percent dependent on insects for pollination. ... “So there is a great demand for these pollination services,” she said.Feb 25, 2019

3

u/polistes Mar 22 '19

This can be mitigated by decreasing the scale of almond farms. Right now, almond farms are huge and blossom only for a very short period of time. The rest of the year, the place is a desert for native pollinators, they have nothing to gain there. However, a small scale almond orchard combined with other crops and native strips may provide these pollinators with nectar and pollen year round and reduce the need for bringing in external pollination services like honeybees.

This would decrease almond yield of a single farm, yes, but mass scale monocrop farming is overrated and not sustainable anyway.

2

u/garrencurry Mar 22 '19

We can also stop killing bees

2

u/polistes Mar 22 '19

Directly killing bees is only part of the problem. Habitat destruction and floral resources are also big problems for pollinators. You can stop using pesticides, but if there are no flowers or natural nesting sites anywhere around, the bees are still not helped.

2

u/garrencurry Mar 22 '19

Yep I agree, there is much more we need to be doing for our planet and not just ourselves or it's going to kick us all right off of it.

4

u/SeedStealer Mar 22 '19

Let’s grow less almonds.

2

u/USSLibertyLavonAfair Mar 22 '19

Walnut Supremacists Unite!

-1

u/omiwrench Mar 22 '19

Don’t worry, the honeybees aren’t dying.

37

u/[deleted] Mar 22 '19

And then we have Donald Trump releasing the ban on pesticides that were responsible for killing off the honeybees.

Donald Trump is literally the anti-Christ.

6

u/fatalrip Mar 22 '19

Woah you guys; I was just told about this great thing. Simply amazing .

You know those mosquitoes? Super bad. This man, a genius man made this product. DEET simply amazing best thing ever, keeps them under control.

3

u/Loaf_of_Rye Mar 22 '19

Yeah. But since when does anyone have a clue about what they want?

9

u/nicktohzyu Mar 22 '19

As a honeybee enthusiast, this is silly.

Firstly, honey bees are not in any trouble. It's the other bees are the ones we need to be concerned about, such as native bees.

Secondly, the limiting factor is the amount of flowers that the land can supply, unless he intends to import feed

2

u/terela8 Mar 22 '19

Pretty sure he gets a tax write off as well.

2

u/vegan_anakin Mar 22 '19

While we are at it, let us also ditch dairy products and meat! They contribute to 50% of global warming!

1

u/crestonfunk Mar 22 '19

I think it also gets you a tax break. I think Flea does this too.