Conor here: Time to get to work on that long-planned garden.
By Christina Grozinger, Andony Melathopolous, Clare Rittschof, Harland Patch, and Jay Evans. Grozinger is Professor of Entomology, Penn State; Melathopolous is Associate Professor of Horticulture, Oregon State University; Rittschof is Associate Professor of Entomology, University of Kentucky; Patch is Assistant Research Professor of Entomology, Penn State; and Evans is Research Entomologist, Bee Research Lab, Agricultural Research Service, USDA. Originally published at The Conversation.
North America’s bee populations are in trouble, but don’t blame the honey bees. While some people argue that an overabundance of managed honey bees – those raised to help pollinate crops and produce honey – is causing native bees to disappear, the evidence doesn’t support the claim.
What is true is that populations of many species of bees, including honey bees, are struggling.
Half of all honey bee colonies die every winter in the United States, on average. Commercial beekeepers experienced their highest losses on record – more than 60% of their colonies – in the winter of 2024-25. Overall, one-fifth of pollinators in North America are considered to be at risk for extinction due in large part to habitat loss, rising temperatures, extreme weather, diseases and pesticides.
We study bees and other vital pollinators, and we can tell you that there are good reasons to love all the bees. In fact, they’re essential.
This wild ground bee, Andrena nothoscordi, is typically found in the U.S. Midwest and Southeast and loves false garlic flowers. Sam Droege/USGS Bee Lab via Flickr
Why Care About Pollinators?
Bees help farmers grow the foods people love to eat, everything from apples to almonds.
Along with other pollinators – such as flies, butterflies and moths – bees help nearly 80% of flowering plants produce fruit and seeds, which in turn support birds and other wildlife.
About 75% of the world’s agricultural crops, including vegetables, fruits and tree nuts, benefit from pollinators. Additionally, pollinators contribute to production of feed for livestock and fiber crops, such as cotton.
In the United States, pollination by insects contributes $34 billion to the economy.
Among the pollinators, honey bees are the most important for agriculture crops. Managed honey bees, which beekeepers can move from field to field, are particularly essential in intensively farmed areas that lack the natural habitat to support wild bees.
So, Why Are People Concerned About Honey Bees?
Honey bees were introduced to North America by European settlers in the early 1600s.
Since honey bees are not a native species, the most common concern you might hear is that they will outcompete wild bees for pollen and nectar. This is typically portrayed as a numbers game: If resources are limited, the more bees present on the landscape, the less food there is to go around.
Honey bees live in large social colonies and are adept at capitalizing on high-quality patches of flowers, leading to the concern that this species in particular may have a rapid, outsized effect on native bees that share the same food.
The queen bee is marked with nontoxic green paint to make her easy to find when examining the health of this Apis mellifera European honey bee hive in Maryland. David Illig via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA
Managed bees can also carry viruses and other pathogens that may infect native bee species. Because viruses are shared among colony members, viruses can persist in managed honey bee colonies and then be spread to other bees that forage on the same flowers.
Scientists and farmers also have a concern about economic sustainability if farms are too reliant on honey bees alone for crop pollination. Threats to honey bee health and high colony mortality in the United States could put crops at risk if other pollinators aren’t in the vicinity to do the job.
Why Don’t Studies Find a Honey Bee Impact on Native Bees?
Humans actually know little about bee interactions. The U.S. has more than 4,000 native bee species, but there is enough data to estimate population sizes and ranges for less than half of them. Meaningful data examining the effects of honey bees on other species are even more scarce.
In a recent analysis, we found that only 15% of 116 published studies on resource competition involving honey bees measure how competition from honey bees affects the survival, reproductive output and long-term population trends of native species.
The majority of published studies on honey bee and wild bee competition address different versions of a narrow question: Do honey bees and native bees visit the same plants?
Because honey bees are “super generalists” that thrive worldwide well beyond their native range, most scientists would predict that the answer to this question is a resounding “yes.”
However, about half of the research suggests that honey bees don’t change the way native bees go about their day at all. From the perspective of a wild bee, the honey bees simply don’t exist in their world.
Different bee species can coexist with very little evidence of direct interaction. An analysis of bee communities measured across diverse agricultural, urban, grassland and forested environments found the abundance of honey bees and the abundance of native bees were positively associated about five times as often as they were negatively associated. In other words, rather than landscapes supporting one bee species at the expense of another, the same habitats support both.
Bees species can be found just about everywhere in the U.S., as this map, modeled from 3,158 species found in museum collections, shows. But some regions, such as the Southwest deserts, are particularly rich in bee species, with the color scale representing the estimated number of species. Paige R. Chesshire, et al., 2023, CC BY
Calls to restrict honey bees from certain locations also often miss a key reality: Native bee hot spots and urban and commercial beekeeping rarely overlap.
Beekeeping is anchored in agricultural lands. North America’s rarest bees thrive in environments like the Sonoran Desert – habitats that are poorly suited for managed colonies.
If competition occurs, it is typically the product of agriculture practices that strip the land of flowering plants that bees need.
Research that has artificially introduced hives into natural areas like the high Sierra – places beekeepers don’t typically go – has generated competition that left less pollen and nectar for the native bees. But frequently competition involves common native bees that are not under threat.
So, if Honey Bees Aren’t to Blame, What Is?
The top drivers of pollinator declines are considered to be land use – the spread of cities and agriculture, as well as the way land is managed – along with rising temperatures, extreme weather and pesticide use.
Agriculture and urbanization reduce the amount and diversity of flowering plants, and droughts can reduce plant flowering and the resources bees rely on. Pesticides can reduce bees’ ability to lay eggs and care for their offspring, or they can kill bees outright.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab tracks bee populations in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region. Studies using its data have found that urbanization and weather changes have been the major drivers of changes in wild bee abundance and diversity in that region.
As temperatures rise, wild bee populations are expected to decline there. Warmer winters mean bees active in spring emerge earlier from their nests, and increased spring rain and temperature fluctuations can limit their ability to feed their offspring, meaning fewer bees.
The western bumble bee, Bombus occidentalis, was once widespread and abundant across western North America, but it has been in decline since the late 1990s. Long-term monitoring of its populations from 1998 to 2020 shows the primary reasons are land management changes, increasing temperature, drought and pesticide use.
What Can You Do to Support Pollinators?
The biggest threat to pollinators is the disappearing variety of flowering plants.
You can help reverse this by filling your garden with more flowering plants, trees and shrubs to give bees, butterflies and other pollinators a variety of food sources.
You can also advocate for bee-friendly behavior in your community, such as creating pollinator habitats in public and private spaces and reducing the use of harsh pesticides and herbicides. Planting more flowers in parks and along roadsides, and protecting wildlands where the rarest native bees live, can help keep these wonderful species thriving.
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Thanks for posting this!
Bumble bees are the coolest thing on Earth.
As for honeybees, I keep half a dozen honeybee hives and the challenges keep increasing. Here in Portugal, the invasive yellow legged hornet has become a major problem, they devastate the honeybees. I don’t know if they have an impact on other wild bee species, maybe not, as they seem to be very specialized on the honeybee.
Bees are relaxing to listen too. I have mentioned that we have a race horse tree in our front yard and when it comes in yellow flowers, the bees go to work. You can stand under that tree and listen to their constant humming and it is kind of relaxing as they go about their business of gathering pollen. I am guessing that they are native bees here.
Both the sound and smell of the hives is therapeutic for me. I have often thought of building a honeybee house where people can seat inside and listen to them outside and smell the hives.
Thanks for this. I have often wondered if I was contributing to native bee decline by keeping a few hives…. I find there is quite a lot of received wisdom in beekeeping circles. The craft draws an eclectic group with a wide variety of worldviews and beliefs. I have heard all sorts of claims and ideas and it’s hard to know what to believe. Tom Seeley has become a go to source for science based information.
Also, honeybees have naturalized to North America and wild hives are scattered everywhere, doing just fine without any human intervention. They are part of the ecology now whether beekeepers continue to exist or not. However their natural density in New England forest is only about one hive per square mile. Think of that and then look at how many hives are stacked next to each other in a commercial apiary – it can be hundreds.
In Europe, urban beekeeping has become prevalent in some cities, and in those places it indeed seems that honeybees are crowding out wild bees.
This is because the conditions mentioned in the article are fulfilled: food sources are concentrated in not that many sizeable parks, gardens in cities being typically very small and providing few native plants with little diversity. In that environment, generalist honeybees outcompete other wild pollinators for limited resources once their presence exceeds a threshold, the impact varying from one city part to another depending on the density of urban beehives.
we have bees all over the place here – ground bees, carpenter bees and bumbles and honey bees – they are out exploring already here in lower part of the Michigan mitt – my daughter has 22 flower beds she uses to propagate her flowers and the bees and butterflies swarm – an interesting book i have yet to dive into is “The Mind of a Bee” by Lars Chittka –
Here too on the rural north coast California: all sorts of bees and bee-like insects. Last summer there was a yellow-jacket nest in the ground not too far from the house. My wife was alarmed, but they posed no harm. We let them bee and they do their bit for the ecosystem.
My neighbor keeps a few hives here in western Washington. Our plentiful Eurasian dandelions in the yard vibrate with honeybees while being ignored by most of the native pollinators. Most people around here consider dandelions a nuisance, but I like their cheerful bright yellow color and the fact that the entire plant is edible.
The article doesn’t mention another possible cause of bee population stuggle and decline: electromagnetic pollution, communication antennas and cellular communication devices. “The quickest way to destroy a bee hive, investigators have found, is to place a wireless telephone inside it.” (See Arthur Firstenburg’s “The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life”, p.341-350)
In the eastern US, Pycnanthemum, Asclepias, Phlox, Ilex verticillata, Joe-pye weed, monarda, echinacea, Itea, Clethera, Aster, Liatris, and Lobelia all are attractive and make excellent pollinators. Most are long lived and can be found at your local garden center.
I remember a study posted on NC maybe 1-2 years ago. There was an island that honey bees had taken over from the native bees, so the study transplanted many of the honey bee hives and the native bees made a dramatic comeback. This article does mention positive correlations between types of bees, but doesn’t mention if the data is a long period time series which is probably what you want to actually have better insight. I do hope the underlying premise of this article is true, there a number of additional questions or points that I don’t think it realized or reckoned with (granted, I say that a layperson).
I live in Ireland and I started with on colony of black Irish bees on my one acre of land and now have 3 colonies. No honey though.
Visiting a “bee hut” (aka bee therapy hut) is a wonderful experience; you don’t have to need therapy of any kind to enjoy this relaxing unusual event. They don’t appear to be widespread but I would guess they are easy for people to access. This one is in Newfoundland which is a refuge from bee colony diseases.
…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsteBfVHpVA
dropped the link re bee huts..
Melipona bees, native to the Americas, unlike Apis mellifera (the African and European honeybees), are stingless bees, although they do actually have a stinger, but it is atrophied. It is estimated that there are about 20,000 species of bees in the world (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(20)31596-7). Melipona honey is a true delicacy, both for its flavor and its nutritional and medicinal properties. This is mainly because, in the process of transforming flower nectar, these native bees store it in pots of resin and propolis, where the honey ferments naturally, acquiring characteristics that make it unique for its flavor, acidity, and antioxidant, antibacterial, and anti-inflammatory properties.