“Save the bees,” makes for a stirring rallying cry – but which bees are we saving, exactly? Is it the honeybee, suffering massive overwintering losses in recent years? Or is it the many species of native wild bee, literally losing ground to many of the same causes? Can the steps we take to help honeybees also benefit native bees? Research published this summer suggests the opposite.
Working in the bee-diverse region of southern California, ecologists measured how much pollen feral honeybees removed from three common flower species. In just two visits to a flower, they found, feral honeybees could remove 60% of the pollen. By day’s end, the number climbed to 80%.
That doesn’t leave much pollen for native bees.
The honeybees forage so efficiently for pollen that they make up 98% of the bee biomass in the study area – though there are more than 700 species of native bee competing for the same resource.
University of Oklahoma ecologist James Hung, an author on the study, likened finding so few native bees in the area to going birdwatching in the Amazon rainforest and seeing only pigeons.
Though it may stand out for the extreme dominance of honeybees that it documents, this finding isn’t the first of its kind. In fact, competition for pollen between native and domesticated bees has become so widely documented that Xerces Society director Scott Black once quipped that keeping honeybees to “save the bees” is like raising chickens to save songbirds.
Kidding aside, what’s to be done? One idea is to try to keep feral bees out of native bee biodiversity hotspots – by planting dense stands of pollen-rich plants in less diverse areas. Another would be to limit the currently common practice of large-scale commercial beekeepers parking their colonies on public lands when pollination season ends in fields and orchards.
While there may be only so much pollen to go around, there are other conservation steps that can benefit both honeybees and native bees. Pesticides harm both, so anything that helps to limit their use helps populations of all kinds of bees.
The study was published in Insect Conservation and Diversity.
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