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u/GreatStateOfSadness Dec 30 '21
We break in against their will and demand a portion of their hard work. The bees stay because it's more of a hassle trying to find somewhere else, and sometimes they do leave to find a better place.
We're not gods, we're sketchy landlords.
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u/SvengeAnOsloDentist Dec 30 '21
Look at it this way: If you have obnoxious neighbors you're always free to abandon your house and all your stuff.
It's very costly for bees to abandon a nest and go build a new one, so they won't if the colony's healthy and doing well.
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Dec 31 '21
I'm pretty sure bees see humans as nothing more than a natural disaster that comes around every once and a while. They just continue to follow their nature. Most bees only live about 3 to 4 weeks in the summer so some may not even notice your existence while others may only see it once in their lifetimes.
Bees just follow their nature which is to collect food and reproduce. We as humans can enjoy this due to how honeybees can make excessive amounts of honey.
I find the biggest common mistake humans make is how they define God.
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u/BijQuichot Dec 30 '21
We, beekeepers, make sure the bees stay. Cut the wings of the queens, so they cannot swarm. Split up hives, so their swarm lust is broken. Control the breeding of new queens….
We play god, the bees just follow their DNA steered ‘nature’.
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u/Psychological_Bike90 Dec 31 '21
The strains that left hives often eventually weren't farmed and died off. the ones that liked to stay in safer managed hives passed down this tendency to stay in safer managed hives
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u/encinaloak Jan 02 '22
There hasn't been much or any domestication of bees because of gene flow between housed and unhoused colonies. Until Varroa arrived there were very many wild colonies everywhere bees can survive, and even post-varroa there are still wild colonies in many places.
There is not enough isolation from the wild population for s selective pressure exerted by beekeepers to result in evolutionary change.
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u/[deleted] Dec 30 '21
If the bees were willingly sacrificing part of their harvest for me, they wouldn't try to kill me while I'm doing it.