The 2019-2020 results of a very important survey* of beekeepers by the Bee Informed partnership came out recently. This survey is meant to help us understand what is happening year to year with the nation’s honeybee hives.
This year’s results were very interesting. In a nutshell:
· Highest summer losses (32%) since survey began in 2007
· Lower winter losses than past years but with high summer losses the overall losses still high
· 42.7% overall loss was the 2nd highest percent since 2010 (highest was 2012-2013)
42.7% overall loss is huge but in line with past years on record
In this Science Friday interview , the point was raised that these results don’t mean that 40% of our nation’s hives are lost forever, but beekeepers simply replenish their hives (of course at a high cost to them). So here’s where they didn’t have time to delve into this issue but you could ask: “So why are we concerned? I thought “bees are endangered” or “bees are in decline”!
To help us understand, let’s dive in to this a little deeper: Entire industries are now centered around queen rearing and providing nukes (nuclear colonies or starter kits for bee colonies) for beekeepers –this is how the beekeepers replenish their hives. They did not have to do this as often years ago, especially before the Varroa mite was introduced in 1987. But now beekeepers must spend a lot of money purchasing new queens and/or nukes to form new colonies to replenish what they lose each year. Honeybees face many threats, including pesticides, loss of wild flowering species in the landscape and pests and diseases, and the combination of these multiple threats has made their health and survival much more difficult in recent history.
With a native or wild species, it doesn’t work this way—you can’t buy a new long-horned bee starter kit to replenish what has been lost—nor is there really any data to show that long horned bees are in decline because their populations are so poorly understood. There are some native bees that you can actually purchase and order online like some bumblebees and mason bees but this sets up the same problems with spreading disease and pests across the country that we have caused with honeybees. Wild bees require habitat and food resources that honeybees do not because they are managed by people and live in the artificial cavities we give them.
Sometimes in the bee world the honeybee tribe (I am referring to human tribes here) and the native bee tribe can be at odds. And it is true that these species are very different beasts, which is something the general public does not quite understand as “bees” tend to get lumped together. However, honeybees are a domesticated non-native species brought to N America by European colonists. Wild bees evolved in their ecosystems over millions of years and play a crucial role in pollinating wild plants which provide food for many other species from birds to bats to bears. Honeybees play an important role in agriculture in pollinating crops especially since the increase in industrial scale monoculture farming. The switch from beekeeping for honey production to beekeeping for crop pollination occurred around the 1970’s, so it is only recently that we rely so heavily on honeybees for crop production.
All this to say, I am not anti-honeybee. I do not want honeybees gone. I understand their importance to our agricultural system and their value as living creatures matters to me. But it’s important to understand the whole story here. They are not endangered because it wouldn’t make sense to list a species in its non-native range. They are not endangered because overall on average their numbers are rising globally** albeit this depends on geographic region. They are bred by humans like livestock. They are managed and domesticated. Compare this to a species like the monarch butterfly (to give a familiar example) whose populations have been disappearing---they are part of a community and ecosystem that they evolved in over millions of years and play an important role in (sadly we are still waiting for the Monarch to be listed even with such extreme declines up to 90%). Honeybee losses are important to the agricultural sector and our food system because we rely heavily on them.
My main point: It is very important to distinguish honeybees from native bees not because one is superior to the other but because they have very different conservation needs, just as chickens have very different needs than wild songbirds or cattle from wild bison. It is concerning that honeybee colonies are experiencing such high losses and we should continue to research how to alleviate this problem for the sake of beekeepers and the agricultural system. We should also acknowledge that relying primarily on one species to pollinate crops is very risky, unsustainable and unnecessary.
*Bruckner et al. for the Bee Informed Partnership (2020) United States honey bee colony losses 2019-2020: preliminary results. https://beeinformed.org/citizen-science/loss-and-management-survey/
**Aizen, M. A., & Harder, L. D. (2009). The global stock of domesticated honey bees is growing slower than agricultural demand for pollination. Current biology, 19(11), 915-918.