It’s no secret that I’ve become frustrated over recent years by the general confusion in the media between the concerns relating to honey bee health (which are largely veterinary/husbandry problems, though pesticides may also play a role) and declines in wild pollinators, which are a wildlife conservation issue mainly due to habitat destruction, though again pesticides are probably having an impact.
That frustration came to a head last year when colleagues and I published a short letter in the influential journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution that was prompted by a throwaway remark in an earlier article stating that honey bees “are essential pollinators for the maintenance of natural biodiversity” No they are not. And you can read for yourself why we responded to that article if you follow the link above.
In a recent posting on the Adventuresinbeeland blog, Emily Heath discussed her attendance at a recent British Library event about pollinators and pesticides. I commented on the blog and in passing mentioned honey bees as being “not native” to which one respondent demurred and wrote: “I thought honey bees ARE native to Britain, although they have been bred with various breeds ……. Apis mellifera mellifera is a British native, isn’t it?”. I’ll paraphrase my response here:
The only study that I’m aware of that has addressed this question is Norman Carreck’s paper from 2008 – you can download a PDF of that article here. Norman is convinced that Apis mellifera mellifera is native to Britain but, as I interpret it, the evidence he presents is circumstantial and the earliest archaeological remains of honey bees are all associated with human settlements. Even if honey bees were originally native to Britain, the present situation, in which honey bees have been selectively bred and hybridised, is akin to using Tamworth pigs as evidence that wild boar are native.
However for me the most compelling evidence that honey bees are not native is ecological: despite their generalist nature and ability to form large colonies when managed, out in the wider countryside of Britain honey bees do not do particularly well. “Wild” honey bees are never very abundant (compared with some bumblebee species, for instance) and feral colonies in natural settings are few and far between.
This prompted a to-and-fro discussion with Emily that you can read for yourself.
Are honey bees native to Britain? The jury is out but the balance of evidence as I see it is pointing to them being a human introduction. Does it matter? In many respects, no. Honey bees are (like any other agricultural animal) a utilitarian species that provides us with a range of benefits. But in one respect it DOES matter – and that is in relation to how we formulate and put in place strategies to reverse the decline of wild pollinators such as bumblebees, hoverflies and butterflies. If honey bees become the central focus of such strategies (and funding), due to confusion in the minds of the public, MPs, policy makers, businesses, the media and other influential bodies, then wild pollinators would lose out. In my opinion that would be a great mistake. I’d be interested to know what other people think.
Prof. Jeff Ollerton - ecological scientist and author 
Very interesting post, thank you! I have been contemplating and writing about this for a while, except in an Australian context – we are one of the few continents/regions that doesn’t have a native Apis spp. of any kind. Apis mellifera are naturalised here and there are plenty of feral hives…which is great for gardeners and pollen-limited crop farmers, but not always good for native wildlife (feral bees make hives in tree hollows that some endangered birds and marsupials also would like to use for nests). This isn’t really an issue on an everyday ‘average person’ level; however, it is amazing how few members of the public realise that honeybees aren’t native and there are thousands of other native pollinator species waiting in the wings!
I agree with you, it does become an issue when you scale to a policy-level. Wild pollinators are extremely understudied and under-appreciated here in Australia – our government has jumped on the ‘pollination’ Research & Development bandwagon, but are only focusing on the honeybee industry. Considering we are the only country in the world that hasn’t got Varroa mite (and it’s generally agreed that it’s not far away) this blinkered vision could be dangerous for pollinated crop industries.
I think that the honeybee industry is essential for it’s original uses – honey and beeswax – which are important consumer and medicinal products. We have turned honeybees into pollinating machines, which then puts pressure on the honey and beeswax industries – but all of this is often forgotten in the media hype! 🙂
Thanks, glad you like it. A similar situation exists in the USA where Apis also is not native. I suspect that honey bees are seen as an easy fix to the “pollination crisis” and hence become the focus of so many campaigns. We need to work to change that perception!
I agree with you that sometimes bumble bees get forgotten about, while solitary bees nearly almost do. I think a lack of forage and habitat destruction affects all types of bees though, including honey bees, which is why providing enough forage is so important. From a husbandry perspective I could manage my bees perfectly, but that’s no help if it rains for weeks on end or every garden around me gets paved over. Sugar syrup feeding can’t replace all the vitamins in nectar and I see pollen substitute as a poor alternative to real pollen. More flowers of the right sort please, for the sake of all the bees.
Oh and thanks for linking to my blog. I read your letter in Trends in Ecology and Evolution and found it well argued.
There are many other pollinators, maybe we should not worry too much about honey bees.
Thanks for your comment Martin and on one level you’re right, there are many other pollinators. But under some circumstances, for example early, mass flowering crops where there are few, if any, native pollinators, honey bees are currently the only option. I for one would like to see that situation changed.
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for posing this provocative question. Do you think people have been aware of the way honeybees benefit crops by pollination before it was “officially” discovered by scientists?
There’s a discussion on a blog I’m following [http://www.honeybeesuite.com/take-the-pollinator-challenge/#comments] questioning why folks brought honeybees to North America–ie was it just for the honey because they would not have known about the science of pollination.
I’m studying turn of the century farming books-funny how some of them don’t mention honey bees at all, and yet in the 1870’s there was a movement to plant bee forage in North America. The interest waned and then seemed to expire sometime in the 1950’s. I supposed the obsession was with honey plants as opposed to plants that would provide nectar for pollinators, but I wonder if there were enough New World bees around at that time that they didn’t have to worry too much about lack of pollination, even with Old World plants.
I am researching the history of hedgerows and I wonder if the hunter-gatherers who left strips of uncleared land were aware of how their interventions in the landscape affected birds and insects. Pollinators have been venerated by many cultures, so there must have been some awareness of the relationships among flowers, fruits and bees, don’t you think?
Cheers,
Lori
Hi Lori – thanks for the comments. I’m sure there must have been some “folk awareness” of the role of pollinators for crop plants prior to its discovery by scientists in the 18th century, but I’ve not seen any published evidence. Wouldn’t surprise me if early Chinese or Muslim commentators wrote about it, but that would need a specialist in those texts to research it properly.
Best wishes,
Jeff
Jeff – gatherers were/are women in every part of the world, and they were/are also pharmacists. I say are because hunter gatherer peoples still exist in the world, as do matriarchal cultures which are as hugely different from patriarchal cultures as the neuroscience of the female and male brain. (for more on this read Louann Brizendine). You may also be interested to read Matriarchal Societies by Heide Goettner-Abendroth to find out about these societies in the world today – and their pharmacists. It is an amazing contemporary account and a useful model for future collectives, as women and men work together for the maintainance of the environment, decisions are made by consensus, and dualism is twinship not conflict. ALL life is sacred to these societies and the worst crime is theft – for which the thieves are exiled. The main relationship is that of brother and sister, and women choose their sexual partners freely. James DeMeo, a geographer who studies deserts, compares harsh desert patriarchies with high levels of sadism and homosexuality with egalitarian, cheerful rain forest matriarchies where these are unknown. Bee colonies are matriarchal too, as is most of Nature. Thanks for your very interesting article.
This post is very relevant to the recently published paper:
Enhancing gardens as habitats for flower-visiting aerial insects (pollinators): should we plant native or exotic species?
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12499/full
The study was carried in England. Not surprisingly, honey bees preferred the ‘near-native’ plants (not from England but other European areas).
Honeybees are not much interested in whether their target flowers are native or not but rather whether they provide accessible supplies of good quality nectar and/or pollen.. They do love rosebay willow herb!
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I’ve often wondered this: do honey bees actually pose a threat to native bumble/solitary bees and other pollinators, which are all competing for dwindling food sources (eg. fewer wildflowers in intensively farmed countryside)? They are, after all, largely domesticated, and therefore occur in unnaturally high populations…
Hi Anthony – good question. The answer is that yes, in large numbers honey bees can be a conservation problem for the reasons you suggest. There have been a few studies showing this and this story about a recent opinion piece in Science might interest you: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180125140910.htm
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In my experience the majority of beekeepers in the uk are hobbyists with a couple of hives and not bee farmers. They are likely to make and deploy solitary bee nesters with a diverse range of sizes, plant a wide range of trees shrubs and other flowers to provide pollen and nectar over as wide a seasonal timetable as possible, and advise the public how to relocate bumble bee nests and tolerate solitary bees…………. because they love bees……. All bees. Honey bees are generalist feeders only able to harvest nectar and pollen from readily accessible flowers such as crucifers and composites and do not compete with more specialist feeders, such as the long tongued bumble bees.
The sustainable population of any species in a habitat (ie its maximum carrying capacity, or stocking density, in agricultural parlance) is dependent ,among other things, on climate and microclimate, availability of resources/food/shelter, and interaction with other organisms like predation/ disease/ competition.
If the area of natural environment available to wildlife is diminishing, ………. due to expansion of agriculture, or changes in agricultural practice ( like flailing hedges to the point of obliteration), urban expansion and industrial estates, housing estates without gardens, fence panels instead of hedges, artificial ‘grass’, and block paving, and so it goes on…….. populations will decline to the level which the new environment can sustain, and some species will not survive at all. To seriously address this decline, would require an integrated approach embracing curbs on what people would be allowed to do in their own gardens, planning and enforcement, agricultural policy and perhaps taxation.
Beekeepers who love bees and are attuned to the needs of insects are a potentially valuable group of stakeholders and to try and create a division between hive bees and others by branding them as agricultural animals which are less important as pollinators is inappropriate, and liable to alienate a valuable part of the community.
Hello Martyn,
Thanks for the comment. I have a few responses, but the main one is that this blog post was written over a decade ago and things have moved on a lot since then.
But to address your main points, my aim is not to create division, but to understand and to educate. In fact over the years I’ve given many talks to beekeeping groups and most understand where I am coming from and support my position. There’s always room for discussion, however.
Beekeepers and beekeeping are important, as I point out in my 2021 book. But at the same time you paint a very rosy picture of beekeeping in Britain. Some place hives in or near nature reserves even when asked not to. Others actively kill wasp and hornet nests, despite the fact that those insects are also important pollinators.
There are still beekeepers out there who will claim (incorrectly) that Britain is losing all its honey bees, or that ‘native black bees’ are rare. They are not. Then there are the ‘rent-a-hive’ companies who state (fraudulently) that having hives in a development adds to Biodiversity Net Gain credits. It doesn’t.
Finally, I’d like to address your point that “Honey bees are generalist feeders only able to harvest nectar and pollen from readily accessible flowers such as crucifers and composites and do not compete with more specialist feeders, such as the long tongued bumble bees.”
That’s not correct. Honey bees have the potential to compete with long-tongued bumblebees early in the season when queens are visiting a wide range of different flowers, not just those with deep corollas. And of course they can compete with the other 250 or so species of solitary bees, plus the many, many flies, butterflies, moths, beetles, etc. that are also vital pollinators.
Best wishes,
Jeff