I wouldn't say that I forgot, more that I was reminded by an email:
Hi there,
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Please use the same account (emidln), title, and URL. When these match,
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The purpose is to ensure that the HN front page sees more of the many high-quality stories that get posted here. In that respect the experiment has definitely been a success.
In addition to the bit about repost invites, it's important to know that if a good article hasn't had significant attention in the last year or so, reposts are ok. That's in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.
So even if we hadn't sent an email, the repost would have been just fine.
About 10. 2 are superperformers, 3 strong, the others mediocre. The hives are at the only place in the valley which is flat enough to mow but has not been mowed so there is very rich vegetation. This is in Upstate New York near Ithaca.
For my seasonal pollen allergies here's what I do.
a) Take a spoonful of dried bee bread
b) Take 2 spoonful of local honey
c) Add 100ml warm water
d) Stir it until the bee-bread dissolves
e) Drink it. (Starts acting in 10 minutes)
It still doesn't work that way though. The GP didn't describe immunotherapy, they described "take a substance, feel better in a few minutes" like an aspirin. That is just not how immunotherapy works.
No mechanism of action I know of other than placebo effect.
You did not describe anything that resembles immunotherapy. Immunotherapy takes a very long time (months to over a year) before you start to notice an improvement in symptoms and requires year round treatment, not just during allergy season. After 3-5 years treatment is discontinued.
Can you suggest what kind of blood test can determine if my immune system is reacting to the concoction? In the past my eosonophil and neutrophil numbers were very high during seasonal allergies. Would testing for these numbers be indicative?
Unfortunately I do not have the finances to consult a specialist, and thus my trial with non-Rx treatment for hay-fever like honey, BB, and other stuff.
Anti-histamines like Allegra, Zyrtec, and Xyzal are quite the sleep inducers for me.
Allergen immunotherapy requires long-term small-dose exposures which cause an immunoglobulin class switching resulting, in effect, a "masking" of the allergen with the non-allergy-inducing globulin. It requires small doses over an extended period of time: no bolus infusion (e.g., "I'm having my big cup of pollen tea now") is going to do it, and it's not going manifest over a short period of time ("and 20 minutes later I feel better.")
Additionally, a general fault of immunotherapy for allergy is that we tend to present the allergen in a manner distinct from its biological presentation - e.g., oral presentation of inhaled allergens. Since we have different mucosa-associated lymphoid tissues throughout the body, and since they do react differently, generally you're not going to get a great response to oral administration of a non-oral allergen (e.g., something you'd normally inhale, like pollen).
How often do you do this, and how long do the effects last? Do your allergies stop bothering you entirely?
I am plagued by hayfever in the warm season and my only option seems to be to munch antihistamines each morning, or twice a day sometimes.
Flonanse is a gift from the gods for me and is now over the counter. Try it! It works immediately for me and better than anything else. Your mileage may vary.
You can also see an allergist for actual immunotherapy but you have to commit to getting regular shots (decreasing in frequency) for a few years which can be pretty inconvenient especially because you must stay at the office for a half hour afterwards to make sure there was no life threatening reaction... but it is the only thing that could actually cure you of allergies after the immunotherapy is stopped.
I do this whenever I have sneezing and itchy eyes. During peak allergy season 3 times a day is normal. I have tried honey alone and BB alone. Never worked individually. It only works if I dissolve BB + honey in warm water. Have been doing this since 2 seasons, i.e. 2 years (~3 month season April, May, June)
> Among allergy sufferers, there is a widespread belief that locally produced honey can alleviate symptoms. . .when University of Connecticut Health Center researchers did a test, they found that the honey had no such effect.
No, but that reaction time to me suggests insulin suppressing the histamine released due to the allergy. Or it could be the concoction provides a mild euphoric effect and it's adrenaline that's offsetting histamine reaction. Either way the short term effect is probably related to sugar and would happen with any sugar in this concentration, the long term effect probably is about the locally sourced honey and pollen desensitizing the reaction to air pollens, where if you used non-local bee products the efficacy would probably be less.
Bee Bread is awesome and much more nutritious and digestible than flower pollen (mistakenly called bee pollen) which the bees ferment in their hive to make bee bread. The problem I've found is that anything coming from Lithuania or Latvia (a lot on ebay), could be radioactive from Chernobyl, as radioactivity concentrates in pollen. That's my assessment of it anyway, so I won't risk it. Also, there was another accident in Lithuania in 2010.
I'd prefer that Bee Bread became more mainstream so that it could be bought from local producers who'd respond to that demand. Bee bread from the Altai mountains in Siberia is double the price of the eastern European BB.
Ideally, BB from New Zealand would be best, but I couldn't find it. Eg Manuka.
Do you have any evidence or source that proves your claims about radioactive bee bread in Latvia and Lithuania? These countries actually were not affected that much. Much less than Scandinavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#National_an...
Its strange where radioactive particles end up. In the Black Forest its in fungi that grow on trees, a favorite food of wild board. So all wild boar taken in the Black Forest must be tested with a Geiger counter before the meat can be sold! Over 500 REMS (?) and no sale.
In general, fermented products have more bioavailable products, due to pre-digestion by bacteria.
How much this actually matters, I'm personally skeptical of, but it's a boon touted loudly and widely by all fans of fermented products who feel their food choices need to be justified by more than "it tastes good."
That was a fascinating read! Who would have guessed that bees intentionally ferment food sources. I wonder if there is anything humans can learn from bee fermentation process. So cool, thanks for sharing!
I think "intentionally" might be a bit of an overstatement — it's more like their behavior patterns have evolved in response to the benefits of fermentation.
Are there any negative effects to harvesting this bee bread?
> But the bees do not consume their pollen fresh. Instead, they take it into the hive and pack the granules into empty comb cells, mixing them with nectar and digestive fluids and sealing the cell with a drop of honey. Once processed in this way, the pollen remains stable indefinitely. Beekeepers call this form of pollen ‘perga’ or ‘bee bread’.
What does this have to do with colony collapse disorder? AFAIK, we don't really understand colony collapse disorder, but I think it's safe to say it doesn't have anything to do with humans taking the bees' food.
In fact, the very first sentence of the Wikipedia articles says "Colony collapse disorder is the phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear and leave behind ... plenty of food..."
And bees have been around a lot, lot longer than that. Also, thousands of years ago, there wasn't the capability of mass production like we have today.
Actually, up until very recently (relatively speaking), it was not really "harvesting", but it was "destroying the hive while getting the honey". Modern hive design (there are a few popular ones) allows us, beekeepers, to harvest the honey without harming the bees. It also allows us to manage the hive and the colony much more productively.
In a few words: In the old middle age hives didn't have methods to keep the queen putting eggs anywhere she wanted. Thus all the larvae where distroyed when collecting the honey. Currently we know that there is a measure that permit all bees enter except the queen. You can put a metallic mesh splitting the hive in two areas that the queen can not cross. In the upper area only workers (smaller) can enter and they store honey and other products as usual, but there aren't eggs, so there is not any dead larvae in your honey. It was a big revolution.
...If I may add: And through good management (most of the time) one doesn't even need a queen excluder (which is called a "honey excluder" by some beekeepers :) ).
A beekeeper who has time to invest on his/her hives can manipulate the frames (that are in the boxes) in a way to "encourage" the queen stay away from the honey boxes.
Also there are other matters, such as swarm protection etc. that can be done thanks to modern hive design. For example, I can give my colonies more room (adding more boxes with empty frames) and/or split a colony by taking some brood frames (and nurse bees) and putting them in a brand new hive (which lets the queenless nurse bees to raise a new queen).
Beekeeping (I can only speak as a hobbyist) is lots of fun... and some stress :). Highly recommended!
All harvesting from bees is essentially stealing their food. Modern hive designs allow a beekeeper to take excess honey or pollen from a hive non-destructively. The trick is to only take it from strong hives, while leaving the bees a sufficient quantity to overwinter.
Honey is the overwinter food; beekeepers typically try to leave the bees about 80 lbs, depending on the climate. Pollen is much more important for raising new bees -- removing it will limit the growth of the hive, which in some species is actually desirable. A hive which grows too much is prone to swarming, which beekeepers typically avoid. They will instead save the pollen for the spring -- if you feed the bees pollen after it has begun to warm but before there are flowers in bloom, it will help them build their population back up earlier and they will be at full strength for the early nectar flows.
> All harvesting from bees is essentially stealing their food.
Calling this stealing speaks more about humans than it does of bees. Why do we view bees as selfish? Another, more charitable view, is that the bees willingly share with humans.
But they sting, you say. Bees only sting if you move rapidly, destroy their home or you catch them on a bad day, like right before a storm. On sunny days I have successfully harvested honey from hives, in normal street clothes, with zero stings simply by moving carefully and staying calm.
So why do we view bees as selfish creatures? Because we are selfish.
Why do some humans help a wounded or hungry/thirsty animal they come across, even when there are no other humans around to signal virtue to? Why wouldn't a bee (colony) be nice just because it can and likes to? I'm not saying that is the reason, but why can't that be the reason, or part of it?
I think it could be argued that the behavior you ascribe to humans exists for the same reason that some dogs chase after cars. That is, it is an ingrained behavior that tends to enhance our survival and is sometimes expressed or triggered in contexts where it doesn't really make sense.
In truth, I believe that life has a spiritual dimension, that my life has purpose, blah blah blah, but I find it useful on occasion to temporarily 'forget' that I believe such things.
Okay, but bees are arguable even more social than we are, so the same might apply to them. I'm not saying that's the cause, that they recognize a person they like and let them have some honey, I guess they simply don't have a good enough reason to attack (which is not "free" for bees, either), and in the long run, it turned out to be useful to play nice with humans. But I don't know.. and I also wouldn't be surprised if bees are good judges of character and/or are generous, or have pity on us confused humans and wish they could do more to help than just giving us honey.
In a general sense, liking life forms that don't actively threaten us, just enjoying there being other life, should be useful for all life, since all life kind of depends on the "tapestry of life" which sustains it as well. Doesn't mean it is so, but it wouldn't surprise me. I say this a lot but that's kind of my point, "why should this be ruled out, why would that be surprising", not so much making a positive claim as debating an implied negative one.
In this [1] thread, someone linked the concept of biophilia, and I had to think of this discussion as well: if we allow for humans liking life "just because" or "for some reason", we should allow for that in animals, too.
It doesn't really require any sophistication on the bee's part so much as a conscientious or unconscious understanding on the beekeeper's part of the bee's algorithms and their limitations.
Bees don't really have a good rule for "giant, landscape-sized creature carefully disassembling hive -> sting that asshole". It's just not something a bee needs to have a rule for. They do essentially have a rule for "giant animal destroying the hive -> sting that asshole", but that's because smashing a hive also smashes some bees, and they do have a rule for "smell a smashed bee -> go freakin' nuts". So the rules for barefoot beekeeping boil down to "be extremely careful and don't squish any bees".
Most of the bees' defenses are actually focused on other insects, especially other bees. Robbing by other bees is a much bigger threat than robbing by the landscape. A bee's sting is only fatal to the bee when it stings something like a human, and its stinger gets stuck in our skin. When a bee stings another bee or other insect, it can sting as many times as it likes. So it's more of a surprise to the bee when stinging us proves fatal, than some sort of altruistic suicide mission for the greater good of the hive.
Ownership is not a physical property of the world, it exists in the minds of people. The bees almost certainly have no notion of ownership, so saying that "we know it is not ours" speaks more about humans than it does of bees.
I hope I'm not the only hacker news reader who views the discussion/association of human social constructs and anthropomorphism such as property and consent to a colony of insects as hilariously comical...
/and my mother was an entomologist, so I'm perfectly happy with allusions between humans/insects even if most polite/modern society find such offensive...
In my experience most commercial beekeepers use cyanide gas to kill their bees after harvesting the honey; they start fresh with new queens in spring. The rare few who overwinter their bees use sugar syrup and store the bees in a cool warehouse designed to keep them dormant during winter.
From a commercial beekeeping perspective "colony collapse disorder" is nothing but a recent news fad. There are cycles of different problems for decades, but I doubt there is something extraordinary about the current state of beekeeping.
Killing the makers of your livelihood and dealing with catastrophic problems is usually known as "farming".
This was common in central Canada in the 90s, where I worked for a beekeeper. I don't know if cyanide use is still common, but the majority of the dozen or so beekeepers I knew back then all did this and I understood it was common practice in our region.
If you don't winter your bees, you have to kill them somehow. And most beekeepers with any kind of scale do not have a way to overwinter.
Overwintering has since become more popular because of diseases and queen availability, but judging by the existence of the queen industry I'd guess many are still killing their bees.
From places that sell queens, usually by mail these days. The last I heard they were only buying queens from New Zealand because American bees were getting too aggressive; not sure if that's still true.
I'm a beekeeper and I cannot disagree more... about gassing, and about the recent disorders.
I'm not old enough to talk about beekeeping in the '70s and '80s, but our losses are much more important now than 10-15 years ago.
CCD is probably a combination of various pressures such as Varroa mites, pesticides, mono-culturing, destruction of natural resources, etc. But these days, one has to work (often hard) to get one's colonies survive... unlike before, when you could let them do their thing most of the time.
I've heard this recently as well, but I've also read that the current difficulties we read about were also the case over a hundred years ago, but obviously with different causes. It's hard to know what's new and what's part of a cycle.
You aren't going to go to a wild hive and collect their food. Apiarists make their own hives, and maintain them. An increased demand for bee bread would probably work to counteract declining honeybee populations, by spawning more human-managed hives.
Yes they are. That is exactly what the Colony Collapse Disorder crisis is all about. The hives managed by beekeepers for the purpose of pollenating crops are mysteriously dying off, and they are having a hard time finding replacement swarms to manage.
I'm hardly a beekeeping expert, but I've read that human managed colonies are actually not in decline.
"The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies -- that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers -- is now the highest it's been in 20 years." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-...
The article argues that CCD has made beekeeping more expensive, which is a cost passed onto consumers in the form of more expensive honey, but beekeepers have found ways to keep their colonies from disappearing.
The way an old-timer described it to me was that CCD amounts to an increase in overwintering failures from around 10% for well-managed hives to around 25-50%.
This in turn means that you've got to do a lot more splits (where you create a new hive by splitting an old hive into two, and either inducing them to produce a queen or adding a carefully-bred queen yourself) or buying new packages of bees from someone who has already done this for you. A new hive usually needs a year to get up to full strength -- you can occasionally take a little bit off a new hive, but not much, and most beekeepers don't even risk it.
As you say, 25-50% failure rates are expensive but currently within the range of what can be replaced; new packages of bees currently cost around $100-150 on the east coast, but aren't really hard to find. I'm somewhat curious how high of a failure rate can be sustained. It pretty much depends on how many splits you can generate a year starting from a single hive, which isn't a number I'm familiar with.
If that were true, all cows would be extinct within one generation. As someone who just visited a farm and bought a quarter of a cow for the freezer, I can say I saw various calves wandering around.
Not all calves, but most. They need to keep the cows lactating, so they need to keep having calves. There is some work on selectively breeding to produce females, but even then there are more females born than are useable for milk production. They are separated from their mothers as early as 1 day after birth and are normally sold at 2 weeks of age.
Veal is meat from calves that are only weeks old, anywhere from a few weeks to about 8 months old. There's varied opinions on if this is acceptable animal welfare.
But basically, calves are a byproduct of milk production.
94 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nordicfoodlab.org
Thanks for sharing though, i had missed it the last time around. :) :)
The purpose is to ensure that the HN front page sees more of the many high-quality stories that get posted here. In that respect the experiment has definitely been a success.
So even if we hadn't sent an email, the repost would have been just fine.
Seriously though, I've never heard of the last name "Pollen", is there any chance that it's pseudonym?
http://michaelpollan.com/books/in-defense-of-food/
Anyone know why it works?
You did not describe anything that resembles immunotherapy. Immunotherapy takes a very long time (months to over a year) before you start to notice an improvement in symptoms and requires year round treatment, not just during allergy season. After 3-5 years treatment is discontinued.
Additionally, a general fault of immunotherapy for allergy is that we tend to present the allergen in a manner distinct from its biological presentation - e.g., oral presentation of inhaled allergens. Since we have different mucosa-associated lymphoid tissues throughout the body, and since they do react differently, generally you're not going to get a great response to oral administration of a non-oral allergen (e.g., something you'd normally inhale, like pollen).
You can also see an allergist for actual immunotherapy but you have to commit to getting regular shots (decreasing in frequency) for a few years which can be pretty inconvenient especially because you must stay at the office for a half hour afterwards to make sure there was no life threatening reaction... but it is the only thing that could actually cure you of allergies after the immunotherapy is stopped.
> Among allergy sufferers, there is a widespread belief that locally produced honey can alleviate symptoms. . .when University of Connecticut Health Center researchers did a test, they found that the honey had no such effect.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/health/10really.html
I'd prefer that Bee Bread became more mainstream so that it could be bought from local producers who'd respond to that demand. Bee bread from the Altai mountains in Siberia is double the price of the eastern European BB.
Ideally, BB from New Zealand would be best, but I couldn't find it. Eg Manuka.
You should actually be worried about pesticides which kills bees and poisons bee honey and bread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pesticide_toxicity_to_bees
How much this actually matters, I'm personally skeptical of, but it's a boon touted loudly and widely by all fans of fermented products who feel their food choices need to be justified by more than "it tastes good."
> But the bees do not consume their pollen fresh. Instead, they take it into the hive and pack the granules into empty comb cells, mixing them with nectar and digestive fluids and sealing the cell with a drop of honey. Once processed in this way, the pollen remains stable indefinitely. Beekeepers call this form of pollen ‘perga’ or ‘bee bread’.
This implies it's their food.
Given the recent concerns with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder, is this unusual delicacy worth the potential environmental damages? (I don't mean that rhetorically; It's an actual question.)
In fact, the very first sentence of the Wikipedia articles says "Colony collapse disorder is the phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees in a colony disappear and leave behind ... plenty of food..."
> we don't really understand colony collapse disorder
Look at the bee expert here. ;)
But really, the parent post didn't make a direct connection to the two. More of an implication of a combination of the two being pretty disastrous.
Langstroth Hive (that I use): https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Langstroth_hive
Top-bar Hive: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Horizontal_top-bar_hive
There are also less popular choices: - Warré - WBC - Long box hive
Here's a list by Wikipedia: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Beehive
Beekeeping (I can only speak as a hobbyist) is lots of fun... and some stress :). Highly recommended!
Honey is the overwinter food; beekeepers typically try to leave the bees about 80 lbs, depending on the climate. Pollen is much more important for raising new bees -- removing it will limit the growth of the hive, which in some species is actually desirable. A hive which grows too much is prone to swarming, which beekeepers typically avoid. They will instead save the pollen for the spring -- if you feed the bees pollen after it has begun to warm but before there are flowers in bloom, it will help them build their population back up earlier and they will be at full strength for the early nectar flows.
Calling this stealing speaks more about humans than it does of bees. Why do we view bees as selfish? Another, more charitable view, is that the bees willingly share with humans.
But they sting, you say. Bees only sting if you move rapidly, destroy their home or you catch them on a bad day, like right before a storm. On sunny days I have successfully harvested honey from hives, in normal street clothes, with zero stings simply by moving carefully and staying calm.
So why do we view bees as selfish creatures? Because we are selfish.
In truth, I believe that life has a spiritual dimension, that my life has purpose, blah blah blah, but I find it useful on occasion to temporarily 'forget' that I believe such things.
In a general sense, liking life forms that don't actively threaten us, just enjoying there being other life, should be useful for all life, since all life kind of depends on the "tapestry of life" which sustains it as well. Doesn't mean it is so, but it wouldn't surprise me. I say this a lot but that's kind of my point, "why should this be ruled out, why would that be surprising", not so much making a positive claim as debating an implied negative one.
In this [1] thread, someone linked the concept of biophilia, and I had to think of this discussion as well: if we allow for humans liking life "just because" or "for some reason", we should allow for that in animals, too.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12053272
Bees don't really have a good rule for "giant, landscape-sized creature carefully disassembling hive -> sting that asshole". It's just not something a bee needs to have a rule for. They do essentially have a rule for "giant animal destroying the hive -> sting that asshole", but that's because smashing a hive also smashes some bees, and they do have a rule for "smell a smashed bee -> go freakin' nuts". So the rules for barefoot beekeeping boil down to "be extremely careful and don't squish any bees".
Most of the bees' defenses are actually focused on other insects, especially other bees. Robbing by other bees is a much bigger threat than robbing by the landscape. A bee's sting is only fatal to the bee when it stings something like a human, and its stinger gets stuck in our skin. When a bee stings another bee or other insect, it can sting as many times as it likes. So it's more of a surprise to the bee when stinging us proves fatal, than some sort of altruistic suicide mission for the greater good of the hive.
Ownership is not a physical property of the world, it exists in the minds of people. The bees almost certainly have no notion of ownership, so saying that "we know it is not ours" speaks more about humans than it does of bees.
This discusses some species of bees defending mating territories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territory_(animal)
/and my mother was an entomologist, so I'm perfectly happy with allusions between humans/insects even if most polite/modern society find such offensive...
From a commercial beekeeping perspective "colony collapse disorder" is nothing but a recent news fad. There are cycles of different problems for decades, but I doubt there is something extraordinary about the current state of beekeeping.
Killing the makers of your livelihood and dealing with catastrophic problems is usually known as "farming".
If you don't winter your bees, you have to kill them somehow. And most beekeepers with any kind of scale do not have a way to overwinter.
Overwintering has since become more popular because of diseases and queen availability, but judging by the existence of the queen industry I'd guess many are still killing their bees.
I'm not old enough to talk about beekeeping in the '70s and '80s, but our losses are much more important now than 10-15 years ago.
CCD is probably a combination of various pressures such as Varroa mites, pesticides, mono-culturing, destruction of natural resources, etc. But these days, one has to work (often hard) to get one's colonies survive... unlike before, when you could let them do their thing most of the time.
"The 2014 numbers, which came out earlier this year, show that the number of managed colonies -- that is, commercial honey-producing bee colonies managed by human beekeepers -- is now the highest it's been in 20 years." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-...
The article argues that CCD has made beekeeping more expensive, which is a cost passed onto consumers in the form of more expensive honey, but beekeepers have found ways to keep their colonies from disappearing.
This in turn means that you've got to do a lot more splits (where you create a new hive by splitting an old hive into two, and either inducing them to produce a queen or adding a carefully-bred queen yourself) or buying new packages of bees from someone who has already done this for you. A new hive usually needs a year to get up to full strength -- you can occasionally take a little bit off a new hive, but not much, and most beekeepers don't even risk it.
As you say, 25-50% failure rates are expensive but currently within the range of what can be replaced; new packages of bees currently cost around $100-150 on the east coast, but aren't really hard to find. I'm somewhat curious how high of a failure rate can be sustained. It pretty much depends on how many splits you can generate a year starting from a single hive, which isn't a number I'm familiar with.
You could find this map interesting:
http://www.blereamiedesabeilles.fr/wp-content/uploads/2014/1...
Veal is meat from calves that are only weeks old, anywhere from a few weeks to about 8 months old. There's varied opinions on if this is acceptable animal welfare.
But basically, calves are a byproduct of milk production.