Good News: We Saved the Bees. Bad News: We Saved the Wrong Ones.
2 40Despite urgent pleas to Americans to save the honeybees, "it was all based on a fallacy," writes Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. "Honeybees were never in existential trouble. And well-meaning efforts to boost their numbers have accelerated the decline of native bees that actually are." "Suppose I were to say to you, 'I'm really worried about bird decline, so I've decided to take up keeping chickens.' You'd think I was a bit of an idiot," British bee scientist Dave Goulson said in a video last year. But beekeeping, he went on, is "exactly the same with one key difference, which is that honeybee-keeping can be actively harmful to wild-bee conservation." Even from healthy hives, diseases flow "out into wild pollinator populations."
Honeybees can also outcompete native bees for pollen and nectar, Milbank points out, and promote non-native plants "at the expense of the native plants on which native bees thrive." Bee specialist T'ai Roulston at the University of Virginia's Blandy Experimental Farm here in Boyce warned that keeping honeybees would "just contribute to the difficulties that native bees are having in the world." And the Clifton Institute's Bert Harris, my regular restoration ecology consultant in Virginia, put it bluntly: "If you want to save the bees, don't keep honeybees...."
Before I stir up a hornet's nest of angry beekeepers, let me be clear: The save-the-pollinator movement has, overall, been enormously beneficial over the past two decades. It helped to get millions of people interested in pollinator gardens and wildflower meadows and native plants, and turned them against insecticides. A lot of honeybee advocacy groups promote native bees, too, and many people whose environmental awakening came from the plight of honeybees are now champions of all types of conservation...
But if your goal is to help pollinators, then the solution is simple: Don't keep honeybees... The bumblebees, sweat bees, mason bees, miner bees, leafcutters and other native bees, most of them solitary, ground-nesting and docile, need your help. Honeybees do not.
The article calls it "a cautionary tale about the unintended consequences that emerge when we intervene in nature, even with the best of intentions."
2 comments
Re:Oh look (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Saturday February 07, 2026 @05:13PM (#65975132)
The 'experts' got it all wrong again.
To be fair, I don't ever recall this issue being about protecting native bee biodiversity. It was always presented as "without bees to pollinate, you can kiss all these food crops goodbye!" As in, the threat had always been directed towards the agricultural industry (and by extension, anyone who liked eating foods that might go off the menu if the honeybees went *poof*). There was even some grocery store that attempted to raise awareness by sharing pictures on social media of empty shelves with all the produce removed that would be gone after a bee-pocalypse.
So, this is a bit revisionist to claim widespread support was for native bee biodiversity. I'd venture a guess most people were worried about what would or wouldn't be on their dinner plate and not which type of "bugs" will no longer be around to get splattered against their car's windshield.
To add to the original analogy in TFS: If you thought you might not be able to get eggs because of a "bird decline", you'd be entirely justified in your decision to start your own flock of chickens.
Update (Score: 5, Insightful)
by Retired Chemist ( 5039029 ) on Saturday February 07, 2026 @05:14PM (#65975134)
Honeybees are critical for a large part of our agriculture. Their decline has been traced to pesticide resistant mites than carry diseases that can devastate colonies. There are no other miticides approved for use in bee hives in the US. In other words, none of this has anything to do with conservation. It is all about commercial agriculture and regulatory barriers. It should be easy enough to get an emergency approval for alternative miticides, if people can get moving and file the paperwork. Then conservationists can go back to actually worrying about conservation issues.