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Bee populations are in decline, and Cheerios wants to help. So far, so good. But they are sending free packets of wildflower seeds to people all over the country—and some of the flowers included are invasive species that, in some areas, you should probably not plant.
Forget-me-not (listed above but, the seed packager told me on 3/21/2017, not included in the seed mix) is banned as a noxious weed in Massachusetts and Connecticut, for example. The California poppy is nice in California, but listed as an "invasive exotic pest plant" in southeastern states. And many of the flowers on this list are not native to anywhere in the US, so they are not necessarily good matches for our local bees.
http://lifehacker.com/don-t-plant-those-bee-friendly-wildflowers-cheerios-i-1793370883
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 28 2017, @02:34AM (3 children)
AC is right, of course. Professional bee handlers load up their hives, and drag those hives all over the US, according to some schedule that only they and their customers understand. The bees might originate in Mississippi, but they are transported to central Texas, then to Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, then make a hop over to New England, and finally come home to Mississippi.
You read about them in the papers from time to time, when the truck is involved in an accident, and the bees hamper rescue and cleanup efforts.
I think it safe to say that few (if any) flowering plants are going to affect bees adversely.
Note that I've met and talked to a few bee keepers, but I don't claim any special knowledge of bees. It's possible that if they were turned loose in the wrong area at the wrong time, the bee keeper would lose all his bees. But, I've not heard anything like that.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:14AM
But the reverse is true: the presence of the bees is likely to enhance the invasiveness of noxious weeds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 28 2017, @03:17AM
> AC is right, of course.
Runaway is wrong of course.
This isn't about honeybees. They aren't in danger of starvation because beekeepers look out for them since they earn. Its all the other kinds of bees that are at risk, bumble bees, carpenter bees, etc. Those are the ones taking a hit because of a loss of flowers. If runaway had RTFA he'd know that.
(Score: 2) by tfried on Tuesday March 28 2017, @08:05AM
Yes and no. The problem with invasive species (well one of the problems, anyway), is that they tend to supplant the native ones (that's why they're called invasive, not, merely non-native). So you end up with a kind of monoculture. Now that monoculture may still make for an excellent bee feed, but only during the blooming period, which is typically going to be a few weeks or months, at most. But the bees will need food continually, from spring to autumn, which is why they depend on diversity.