Right, it's interesting from a technical perspective, but it's a story about battery-farmed livestock, not about North American ecology. My guess is they'll figure out how to keep growing more bees. The prices of honey bee queens have been pretty stable for the past 15 years.
I think it is not a great analogy. As Jeremy Bentham wrote, “The question is not: can they reason? Nor, can they talk? But can they suffer?”
I have relatives that do or have raised bees (as a hobby). Can bees suffer? I don't know. I kind of think a bee can experience suffering in a small degree. I'm not going to run the experiments on that because I'm not a sociopath. Also arguably the hive is the basic unit of the honeybee organism, not the bee itself.
I do know for certain hogs can suffer. I'm a farm boy from Iowa. I've been around them from a young age and I hate everything about them. I hate the smell, I hate the way their meat tastes to me like they smell, I hate how if you are small enough and don't take care, they are mean enough to knock you down and eat you.
I'm probably one of the few people on HN who have actually experienced in person what a hog confinement facility looks and smells and sounds like. I wouldn't wish it on my worst hog enemy. It is a vision of hell, illegal to film in Iowa, and in no way comparable to how we treat bee hives.
Meanwhile: https://www.sciencealert.com/fish-suffer-up-to-22-minutes-of...
I am for complicated reasons unusually familiar with battery hog farms. I'm not making an ethical comparison; I'm just saying: ecologically speaking, American honey bees are an industrial product, not part of our fauna.
Yeah, that was an odd turn.