The Trouble with Honey Bees

The trouble with honey bees Apis mellifera (Fr. abeilles des ruches) is that they are a bit like feedlot cattle or battery hens in terms of their impact on the environment. They are not polluting by contributing to greenhouse gases or nitrogen levels in rivers but they are intensively managed animals in enormously large numbers that are significantly and detrimentally altering their immediate environment. Yes, you read that right. Many honey bees are not the good guys, but the bad guys in their neighbourhood.

 

Honey bees drinking in a stream.

So what exactly is the problem? Surely we need all the pollinators we can get these days? -- that's what the mainstream media is telling us... The problem is that most honey bees are managed intensively, which means that there might be millions of them working over the flowers in a fifty square kilometre patch. By sheer weight of numbers they are out competing the dozens of other species of native bees who do not have the advantage of being cossetted and fussed over by a beekeeper, or the social structure which means that a honey bee colony operates like a single gigantic and voracious foraging entity. Bumble bees form modest colonies of a few hundred members at most, and all the other dozens of wild native bee species are operating as individuals, some of which do not fly more than 150 metres from where they hatched, and who simply cannot survive or reproduce on the dregs left to them if there is a group of honey bee hives placed nearby.

 

Honey Bee on lavender.

Until recently entomologists and ecologists have only suspected there might have been competition for food that was negatively affecting solitary bees, but since 2017 there have been a number of studies, most of them French, which have shown conclusively that honey bees in numbers above about two to three hives (so around a hundred and fifty thousand individuals maximum) are causing a 'halo effect', where inside a radius of 600 metres from the hives, solitary bee numbers are halved. And that effect continues to some extent for several kilometres, depending on how many hives there are.

 

A swarming Honey Bee hive.

The problem is compounded because honey bees are good at collecting pollen, but not particularly good pollinators, so both plants and solitary bees are losing out. Modern honey bees are about 20 times as draining on pollen and nectar resources as honey bees from prior to the 1950s. This is in part due to modern managed honey bees being selected and bred for honey production. In addition, one of the primary sources of pollen and nectar for bees of all sorts is wild flower rich grasslands, a habitat which has declined by about 90% since the 1970s.

 

This many hives indicates a commercial apiarist, or a serious hobbiest who has a sideline in selling honey. The position and time of year indicated that sweet chestnut trees in flower were the target. They make a premium honey.

 

It is for this reason that ecologists are starting to support the idea that hives should be banned within a 2-3 kilometre cordon around nature reserves.