Stop installing urban honeybee hives
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https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/business/beekeeping-companies-colony-collapse.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/19/business/beekeeping-companies-colony-collapse.html
Definitely interesting that these honey bee keepers ended up pushing back against the bee crazy. Good for them.
In the US, honey bees are not native.
Plant native plants. Re wild parts of your yard. It's sad to see our bumble bee population diminishing, especially given how they are far superior pollinators.
We've been letting some of the gardens that came with our house get wild rather than just veggies everywhere. We've gotten SO many bumblebees showing up the last 2 years. It's been great. Love those little guys. Plus, far less effort than the previous owners had with their need for constant landscaping.
Exactly. I have some natives and more going in for next spring. Seeing all the native bees this year was really thrilling!
Yes, if you want to do something positive for bees then the best thing you can do is plant native and diverse flowers. I admit, I have one honeybee hive in my backyard because of my fascination with bees sense I was a child. I have planted a bunch of different flowers around my property and it definitely is not just beneficial to the honeybee, but a whole host of different species of native bees. I enjoy seeing all the different types big and small in my garden.
Imo the craze about saving the honeybee because of colony collapse disorder is because of the commercial management of honeybee. Wild honeybee colonies have survived varroa and have/will eventually select qualities to sustain survival. Commercial beekeeping does little for natural selection and I fear that because of that we will never see the end of varroa.
Honeybees do not need us to survive. They do a pretty damn good job of doing that on their own. We just need to give honeybees and native bees a more diverse and more abundant resource of pollen and nectar.
will eventually select qualities to sustain survival. Commercial beekeeping does little for natural selection
I don't think we can consider this a guarantee for any species at this point. Climate change, habitat loss and pollution are way too fast-moving and hazardous factors, that natural selection is just guaranteed to be able to catch up in time.
Keep in mind too that the beekeeping craze has been particularly strong here in North America, where honeybees are not native.
Interesting read. While gardening isn't my passion (yet?) we're blessed to have enough space for a variety of flowers. We do have plenty of ornamentals that are non-native. The bees do like them but they literally go crazy over the native species. Lavender, rosemary, catmint, rosehip, marshmallow, you name it, the bees love it. It's fun looking at how many different species of bees and other insects visit them. We're slowly going for planting more native species in our yard and making a wildflower garden just for them.
A local pest control company will try and rehouse tree bees (or talk people in leaving them if they can't) which seems a much better activity all round. They have dozens of tree bee boxes around the region that can move them to and volunteering to have one of those in your garden seems a much better thing than a honey bee hive.
Nice article and very true! To help native pollinators you can plant native flowers, and also very important: leave the dead plants in your garden at the end of the season. The pollinators use the stems of dead plants for their overwintering. Please don't place a ton of insect hotels either, solitary bees aren't supposed to nest together and you will get mites and other pathogens that infest the baby bees (this happened in my garden and all my neighbors gardens...). If you do want an insect hotel for mason bees, clean it out every year and replace the tubes where the bees lay their eggs. Also store the tubes in an appropriate place in the winter, but be sure to put the tubes with eggs outside when it's time to hatch :)