The Curious Beekeeper
We’ve Met the Enemy and She’s No Honey Bee
Think about human health for a moment. Compared to 1724, or even 1824, Americans live cushy lives. We inhabit modern homes, work sedentary jobs, and get little physical exercise. In addition, we breathe nanoplastic particles, eat ultra-processed foods, drink forever chemicals, and absorb digital signals daily. Yet many so-called health experts insist salt is the true culprit, and consuming fewer milligrams per day would save us all from certain doom.
But you cannot change dozens of environmental factors, then choose just one to take the fall for negative outcomes. Perhaps you can compare one factor against another, but it’s difficult or impossible to evaluate how much damage any single change causes within an aggregate of changes. It’s a statistical nightmare.
Sorting through the reasons
Right now, beekeepers take the blame for declines in native bee diversity in wildlands, farms, gardens, and suburbs across America. Based on my work with melittologists, I agree we have declining numbers of native bees. While some species are suffering minor losses, others are in imminent danger of extinction. And some species that haven’t surfaced in years may already be gone.
However, to claim honey bees cause shrinking bee diversity is conclusory and simplistic. Like the variables in human health, including salt, the many reasons for bee decline are complex and reach far beyond an uptick in the number of honey bee colonies. Yes, I believe places exist where honey bees squeeze or displace some native bee populations. But I don’t believe overall native bee biodiversity is succumbing to honey bees in any measurable way.
Instead of pointing to honey bees as the culprit, we need to recognize ourselves as the native bees’ true nemesis. We humans are doing the damage, not a bunch of greedy honey bees with evil intent and stolen identities. If we razed every single honey bee colony from the face of the earth, we would not save other bee species if we continued to ravish their natural habitats.
Bees by any other name
Let’s pause for a moment to define some terms. I’ve been using the phrase “native bee” to mean those bees that inhabited North America before colonial times, let’s say, until the early 1600s. But do we know for sure which bees were here then? Not exactly, although we can make educated guesses based on fossil records, museum samples, and genetic profiles. But right from the git-go, many plants, animals, and pathogens came along with travelers, settlers, and conquerors — even before European exploration.
Lots of the bees Americans call “native” are certainly native somewhere, but not necessarily here. Examples include some mason bees, such as the Taurus mason bee (Osmia taurus) and the horn-faced bee (Osmia cornifrons). In addition, the common alfalfa leafcutter (Megachile rotundata) is an import, as well as the hairy-footed flower bee (Anthophora plumipes), the Asian shaggy digger bee (Anthophora villosula), and the very common Wilke’s mining bee (Andrena wilkella). The list is long, so I won’t belabor it (although I love doing so.)
Sometimes I use the phrase “solitary bee” to group non-colonial natives and non-natives together. However, that term is also not accurate because some native bees have communal arrangements that fall on a spectrum between solitary and colonial …
