19/07/2025
Food for thought:
Honeybees and the Cost of Good Intentions
Honeybees are often celebrated as agricultural heroes—pollinators of crops, producers of honey, and symbols of environmental stewardship. Their role in crafting honey ale and mead adds a touch of romance to their industrious image. But beneath the golden glow of the hive lies a more complicated truth. While honeybees support food production, which is significant, their presence in local ecosystems can lead to unintended and sometimes harmful consequences.
Let’s begin with a simple fact: honeybees are not endangered. They are domesticated livestock, bred and managed by humans. When people speak of “saving the bees,” they often mean honeybees—but the real crisis lies with native pollinators, many of which are in steep decline due to habitat loss, pesticide use, disease, and competition from honeybees themselves.
In recent years, well-meaning individuals have turned to backyard beekeeping as a way to “help the bees.” But this heartfelt impulse often backfires. Urban and suburban areas are increasingly saturated with hobby hives, each introducing 15,000 to 50,000 additional mouths to feed into landscapes that may already lack sufficient floral resources. A single hive can consume enough pollen over three months to support the development of 100,000 native solitary bees.
This competition has real consequences. Honeybees dominate floral resources, leaving less nectar and pollen for native bees, butterflies, and other pollinators. Studies have shown that as honeybee densities increase, native bee diversity declines. In cities like Montreal and London, researchers have documented a direct correlation between the number of hives and the disappearance of native species. The conservation group Buglife recommends five acres of habitat per hive—far more than the average residential lot.
The risks extend beyond competition. Honeybees are vectors for disease. Pathogens like deformed wing virus (DWV) and black queen cell virus (BQCV), often spread by Varroa destructor mites in managed hives, can infect wild bees through shared flowers. DWV has been observed in native bumble bees, who contract it simply by foraging where infected honeybees have been. Photos of bumble bees with crumpled, useless wings—unable to fly, slowly dying—are becoming heartbreakingly common in native plant gardens.
It’s a myth that honeybees and native bees use different flowers. Anyone who has watched a patch of bee balm or mountain mint in bloom knows better. The overlap is constant, and so is the risk of transmission.
Even as pollinators, honeybees are not always helpful. According to the Xerces Society, honeybees are often subpar pollinators compared to native bees. They groom their pollen into tidy cakes that are less likely to contact the stigma of another flower. They lack behaviors like buzz pollination, which bumble bees use to release pollen from certain native plants. And they are known “nectar robbers,” sometimes bypassing pollen entirely by biting into the base of flowers.
Worse still, honeybee pollination can promote the spread of invasive plants. Japanese knotweed, for example—a highly aggressive species that displaces native vegetation—is extremely attractive to honeybees. By enhancing its seed production, honeybees may inadvertently help it spread.
To be clear, managed hives do play a vital role in large-scale agriculture, especially in monocultures where native habitat has been stripped away. In such settings, honeybees are often the only viable pollinators left, and their presence can be essential to crop yields. But this agricultural necessity does not translate to ecological benefit in natural areas or backyard gardens.
The best way to help bees is not to raise more of them—it’s to make space for the ones already here. Plant native species. Protect wild habitat. Reduce pesticide use. And resist the seductive simplicity of the hive.
North American ecosystems thrived for millions of years without honeybees, which have only recently arrived. While their value in agriculture and honey production is undeniable, their presence in natural areas and backyard gardens often comes at a cost—one borne not by humans, but by the very pollinators we aim to protect.
Supporting native species means resisting the allure of easy fixes and comforting narratives. It demands that we think beyond the hive—toward the intricate, often fragile web of life that sustains us all. Because in tending to the health of local ecosystems, we do more than “save the bees.” We begin to distinguish agricultural necessity from ecological stewardship, reckon with the cost of good intentions, and safeguard the soil, water, and wildness that ensure our own survival.
