Honeybees aren’t native to North America [2]. The native pollinators, such as bumblebees, are outcompeted by honeybee hives [3]. Those honeybees then selectively pollinate certain plants, reducing biodiversity further [4].
Honeybees, however, unlike local pollinators, can be industrially distributed to industrial agriculture. So they get a lobby. Meanwhile, well-meaning folks put a honey beehive in their backyard and inadvertently wipe out the local bumblebee and butterfly populations.
Mason Bees are hilarious bees native to North America that don't fly very well, so they just kinda dive-bomb flowers to get pollen. This is important because that heavy slam (well, heavy for a flower) is enough to distribute pollen into the air. These bees are fat, fuzzy, and winter over by crawling into holes and sealing themselves inside with some mud-spit.
It's VERY easy to create homes for these guys - if you've ever seen someone with a large log that has lots of little holes drilled in it, they were likely prepping a Mason Bee habitat. Ideally, they burrow into hollow, dry grass stems that broke off at some point in the fall.
I try to tell people about this bee because it's so easy to make homes for them. Just make sure to move the home every year, or it becomes too easy for predators to find them.
edit: also worth mentioning this bee is so docile, it usually only stings when it's squeezed or wet, and its sting is very light, and the hook is unbarbed. Better than honey bees in so many ways.
Just to go off of this, carpenter bees are closely related to mason bees and are another kind of solitary (non-hive bee). I think carpenter bees are the greatest and I can't stop thinking about carpenter bees. They are a bee, which is cool, but also a lone wolf, also cool. In my wooden house I have several carpenter bee nests. My neighbor Mr. Grubb hates all my carpenter bees because he says all the holes they are making in his walls will make his house collapse, but he doesn't see it, he doesn't see carpenter bee magic. 10/10 please consider adopting some carpenter bees!!
This is so interesting. A while back I took an online course about native bee species in Brazil. We have more than 700 different species of stingless bees.
There's a few interesting common species whose response to being threatened are worth mentioning. The jataí (small, wasp-like bees) run away to hide when threatened; the arapuás (small, completely black bees) try to bite you. The mandaçaias have a similar behavior to the jataís.
And one thing I learned as well is that we have a native bee species called "lemon bee", which they are predatory bees that invade hives and release a substance that smells like lemon (hence the name), which intoxicates bees in their hive. The attacked bees either leave their home or die, to which the lemon bees just invade their colonies and steal all the food. They literally make a gas chamber inside the hive.
I am fascinated by the amount of bee diversity we have in Brazil. If anyone's interested to check them out, search for "melipona".
I wonder what it would be like to have a giant Mason Bee hotel in a riparian buffer strip alongside a plot. One problem would be as you point out that predators could find them easily. Another might be that pollinating one crop doesn't do enough for a mason bee all season long.
During the season we had a bunch of mason bee nests inside the hollow metal of our porch furniture. Supposedly, mason bees can sting, but the sting is barely perceptible.
I have a line of big orange flowers lining the border of my front lawn. Sometimes ill just sit in the mulch and watch a dozen kinds of bees I’ve never seen before happily moving amongst them. Green bees and all sorts. Never a lot of any species just a wild variety
You can start out simple, but you might need to be more involved if you want to prevent the spread of parasites since they are more easily spread when all the mason bee larvae are in one place.
I've got a ton of mason bee tubes. They are awesome.
To use a silicon valley analogy, nobody has figured out how to scale out mason bees. Not to the > 200sq miles of pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds owned by the Resnicks. The Resnicks funded some in-house research and apparently considred it a failure.
It's probably possible. Might not even be hard once you know the trick, but it's certainly not a slam-dunk.
Not to be confused with mining or carpenter bees that also like logs. My mom's yard has some carpenter bees that live in the ground. They are as big as bumble bees but more black and a male drone hovers around in a certain area above the females and will dive bomb other male carpenter bees. The male bees will follow you around if you go into their area but they never stung anyone.
I love native bees, I've been trying to find ways to incorporate native bee facts into my tech talks. The "Insect Crisis" book was a nice overview of issues like overuse of honeybees, plus others. Highly recommend planting native pollinator-friendly plants in garden if you want to meet adorable, hilarious, beautiful native bees!
To me, one of the most fascinating facts about pollinators in general is their interconnectedness, which spirals off into a myriad of everyday touch points for most people.
One fact a friend shared recently was that magnolia trees pre-date many modern pollinators.
>> At the time of their evolution, many common pollinators we think of today, such as bees, butterflies, and moths had not evolved yet. As a result, magnolias developed flowers for pollination by beetles and flies, which were the primary insect pollinators 100 million years ago.https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/garden-scoop/2018-05-05...
If you pay close attention in Seattle, you'll find that bumblebees are particularly fond of making nests in the hollows of the loose boulder retaining walls that are still in fashion in the region. It's hard to catch them because they have much smaller numbers per nest and thus less traffic per minute, but they do.
"The native pollinators, such as bumblebees, are outcompeted by honeybee hives"
... in urban environments, and it' still debatable. Your #2 source provides additional details.
There are a lot of other dubious claims here that the sources seemed to contradict each other.
Something you didn't bring up is that people raising honeybee can benefit other pollinators due to changes in human behavior such as planting beneficial plants and refraining from pesticide use.
It's true but honey bees are still extremely economically important. And very useful because their hives are large and portable.
The billionaire Resinick pomegranate/pistachoi/almond oligarchs put quite a bit of effort into native bees which seemed quite successful but they shut it down I think about 5 years ago. I can't find the article now. Gen X+ might remember them as owners of the 'Franklin Mint' hawkers of knickknacks you either are or soon will be throwing into a dumpster.
They are BTW also largest renters of honeybee hives in the US.
> And very useful because their hives are large and portable.
I have no proof of this, this is just my theory, but the "portable" might be the issue. I think industrial beekeepers in the US might be part of the problem. Yes you can technically move the bees, but should you? You're moving around disease, you might be overworking and stressing the bees. Meanwhile you have farmers create massive fields with nothing but corn, grass, wheat, whatever, leaving you with essentially green deserts from the pollinators perspectives.
Again just a theory of mine, but the reliance of "portable" bees is what's causing the problem. Other countries have beehives for rent, but they aren't moved constantly. Often they stay in the same location all year and the bees are allowed to follow their natural cycles.
Trucking around hundreds of hives always seems rather stupid.
Right, it's interesting from a technical perspective, but it's a story about battery-farmed livestock, not about North American ecology. My guess is they'll figure out how to keep growing more bees. The prices of honey bee queens have been pretty stable for the past 15 years.
Our farms don’t work with bumblebees. Honeybees are fine. The problem is thinking we only need honeybees. We need more bees of all kinds. And in some cases, yes, that may mean fewer honeybees.
I mean, somewhat true, but probably a touch oversold? I don't think people putting in a single beehive are doing much to impact a neighborhood. Probably less than having a house cat. Which, is not nothing, but is not ecosystem changing, either.
I'm reminded of how much we were taught that monocrops were bad things in grade school. And yet, you'd be hard pressed to name a popular food that isn't grown in giant monocrop fields.
> probably a touch oversold? I don't think people putting in a single beehive are doing much to impact a neighborhood
Probably not, especially if they’re in an urban environment. The bees being shipped to farms, on the other hand, are ecologically destructive (as well as economically invaluable).
My takeaway is not that honeybees are evil. It’s that we need more pollinators in more stripes, and that the agricultural industry has successfully confused pollinators in general with honeybees in particular.
The damage is largely already done because the non-native bees are now a feral invasive species that have out competed natives, and the invasive honey bees haven't co-evolved to pollinate native plantlife
Modern beekeeping practices are a kind of factory-farming. Tim Rowe developed a method of beekeeping that takes advantage of evolution to improve the vitality of bees. It is described succinctly in his book, The Rose Hive Method. [1]
I, unfortunately, developed a severe bee-sting allergy, and can no longer put these ideas into practice. I anticipate that commercial beekeeping cannot sustain its current practices.
I'm from shitty part of Europe and I never saw a beehive that looked different than those in the presentation. I looked up 'American beehive' and they look roughly the same. So isn't this already the used standard?
After one season of bee keeping I concluded the same thing. Its horrifying how poorly bees are treated in this industry to control parasites (forced exposure to acidic gas)
I sold my hives and will probably never buy honey again, much in the same way I avoid factory farmed meat.
As always: if those ideas are so good, why aren't they used?
If existing practices are somehow radically worse, I would expect the first entity to adopt better practices to obtain a significant advantage - and the competition to copy them eventually.
I'm incredibly skeptical of any "everyone is doing X completely wrong and you should listen to ME and BUY MY BOOK instead".
I have no idea how you could actually be confused about this.
- I can sell 100 units of product for $2. I feel good I am ethical and responsible.
- I can sell 300 units of product for $1. Everyone buys from me and I make more money, but I poison the land.
Capitalism does not account for externalities. Because businesses never have to pay the cost of poisoning water supplies or destroying ecosystems until he societal bell tolls - and because "if I don't, they will and I will go out of business" - unsustainable and unethical practices are the norm in late stage capitalism.
I mean, for real? Are you confused why mine operators encouraged taking more material at the expensive of structural integrity? Are you confused why gas barons don't like paying the cost to cap NG wells? Are you confused why big agri uses petrochemical fertilizers to grow subsidized ethanol and HFCS?
This article seems like fantasy fiction: 'We thought antibiotics were to blame, but actually, it's NO2.' (next 5G?) while it's widely recognized for the last ten years that the primary culprit is neonicotinoids: very potent and pervasive chemicals that accumulate in the biotope, killing all insects indiscriminately, contrary to the misleading claims made by the agro-industry.
> it's widely recognized for the last ten years that the primary culprit is neonicotinoids
What would be your best source to back that ?
(I'm not trolling - we've been having a vivid debates about that exact topic for the past few weeks in France, and one common counter-point is that the decrease in bee population is multifactorial, as opposed to having any "primary" culprit. So any source welcome :) )
Neonicotinoids kill all insects. They are extremely good at this. Noone contests this. CCD ("Colony Collapse Disorder") started as neonicotinoids usage raised, and so did the "windshield phenomemom" that all rural residents above 50 can tell you about.
If there were no parasite, no pathogen, and no predator, then bees would not be as much affected by pesticides for sure. But parasites and pathogens existed before, while habitat loss and monoculture farming don't explain what happens in relatively preserved areas.
All pesticides have an impact on insect populations obviously. I agree one should not focus on only one class of them, and work on an actual reduction of their usage and compensate farmers for profitability loss due to changes in pest management strategies.
You don't need to comment this. I know It won't be done and we're all screwed.
I wish the industry and governments spent an equal amount on battling the decline of wild bees. When they say "save the bees", it's not honeybees they mean. Honeybees are cattle.
North American native bees tend not to form giant eusocial colonies and are less vulnerable to pathogens; their biggest threat (after habitat loss, of course) may in fact be honey bees.
I'm not saying anyone is doing 'enough' but neonicotinoid bans in EU are perhaps the most effective and 'costly' thing done so far. In Not that costs borne by poisoners
This seems like it would be the obvious outcome? If bee keepers have been keeping bees healthy by giving them antibiotics, then stopping the antibiotics would lead to them being less healthy? Especially since the previous antibiotic use would have killed off the healthy bacteria.
Seems like they may not have realized that the fact that antibiotic use was associated with hive death could be because antibiotics are likely given primarily to unhealthy hives.
I know I’m not the only one alarmed by the fact that we used to have to clean bug splats off our windshields weekly during the summer and now don’t. The downstream and parallel effects must be massive.
This one is weird to me because lots of people claim that they don't get as many windshield bug splats as they used to, and I haven't noticed a difference. I kind of wonder if there's some form of mass misremembering a la the "mandela effect where people have splatted (heh) one or two memorable instances of a bug-covered windshield across their entire childhood's memory range.
Yes, I know there are some "studies" about this, but I find their sampling size and methods basically inconsequential.
The reduction in windshield bug splats has more to do with the decline in insect populations.
EDIT: I originally said 75% decline over 30 years. Those are the results for studies in parts of Germany. We don't have solid data on global loss in insect populations.
This is actually due to evolution. Insect populations have evolved generation by generation such that the ones who avoid flying over roadways survive more often, and in time we end up with less bugs getting killed. Because the lifecycle of insects is very short, this can happen easily over the course of decades, enough to witness in one human lifetime.
Readit News
Honeybees aren’t native to North America [2]. The native pollinators, such as bumblebees, are outcompeted by honeybee hives [3]. Those honeybees then selectively pollinate certain plants, reducing biodiversity further [4].
Honeybees, however, unlike local pollinators, can be industrially distributed to industrial agriculture. So they get a lobby. Meanwhile, well-meaning folks put a honey beehive in their backyard and inadvertently wipe out the local bumblebee and butterfly populations.
[1] https://uwnps.org/event/6-26-25/
[2] https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/are-honey-bees-native-north-americ...
[3] https://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog/em-9524-impact-bee...
[4] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002...
It's VERY easy to create homes for these guys - if you've ever seen someone with a large log that has lots of little holes drilled in it, they were likely prepping a Mason Bee habitat. Ideally, they burrow into hollow, dry grass stems that broke off at some point in the fall.
I try to tell people about this bee because it's so easy to make homes for them. Just make sure to move the home every year, or it becomes too easy for predators to find them.
edit: also worth mentioning this bee is so docile, it usually only stings when it's squeezed or wet, and its sting is very light, and the hook is unbarbed. Better than honey bees in so many ways.
There's a few interesting common species whose response to being threatened are worth mentioning. The jataí (small, wasp-like bees) run away to hide when threatened; the arapuás (small, completely black bees) try to bite you. The mandaçaias have a similar behavior to the jataís.
And one thing I learned as well is that we have a native bee species called "lemon bee", which they are predatory bees that invade hives and release a substance that smells like lemon (hence the name), which intoxicates bees in their hive. The attacked bees either leave their home or die, to which the lemon bees just invade their colonies and steal all the food. They literally make a gas chamber inside the hive.
I am fascinated by the amount of bee diversity we have in Brazil. If anyone's interested to check them out, search for "melipona".
It looks like some folks use them for berries though: https://backyardbeekeeping.iamcountryside.com/plants-pollina...
We have some of those in our wild crazy yard. I gotta build me some homes for them because you're right they are so cute.
You can start out simple, but you might need to be more involved if you want to prevent the spread of parasites since they are more easily spread when all the mason bee larvae are in one place.
To use a silicon valley analogy, nobody has figured out how to scale out mason bees. Not to the > 200sq miles of pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds owned by the Resnicks. The Resnicks funded some in-house research and apparently considred it a failure.
It's probably possible. Might not even be hard once you know the trick, but it's certainly not a slam-dunk.
My current fav is the Fine Striped Sweat Bee, where the females are 100% turquoise. Dazzling! https://bsky.app/profile/pamelafox.bsky.social/post/3lv3eycl...
One fact a friend shared recently was that magnolia trees pre-date many modern pollinators.
>> At the time of their evolution, many common pollinators we think of today, such as bees, butterflies, and moths had not evolved yet. As a result, magnolias developed flowers for pollination by beetles and flies, which were the primary insect pollinators 100 million years ago. https://extension.illinois.edu/blogs/garden-scoop/2018-05-05...
My only problem is the invasive plants which are determined to overwhelm everything.
... in urban environments, and it' still debatable. Your #2 source provides additional details.
There are a lot of other dubious claims here that the sources seemed to contradict each other.
Something you didn't bring up is that people raising honeybee can benefit other pollinators due to changes in human behavior such as planting beneficial plants and refraining from pesticide use.
In all environments.
The source argues this competition is fine in urban environments because we’ve already displaced the native pollinators there.
The billionaire Resinick pomegranate/pistachoi/almond oligarchs put quite a bit of effort into native bees which seemed quite successful but they shut it down I think about 5 years ago. I can't find the article now. Gen X+ might remember them as owners of the 'Franklin Mint' hawkers of knickknacks you either are or soon will be throwing into a dumpster.
They are BTW also largest renters of honeybee hives in the US.
I have no proof of this, this is just my theory, but the "portable" might be the issue. I think industrial beekeepers in the US might be part of the problem. Yes you can technically move the bees, but should you? You're moving around disease, you might be overworking and stressing the bees. Meanwhile you have farmers create massive fields with nothing but corn, grass, wheat, whatever, leaving you with essentially green deserts from the pollinators perspectives.
Again just a theory of mine, but the reliance of "portable" bees is what's causing the problem. Other countries have beehives for rent, but they aren't moved constantly. Often they stay in the same location all year and the bees are allowed to follow their natural cycles.
Trucking around hundreds of hives always seems rather stupid.
Our farms don’t work with bumblebees. Honeybees are fine. The problem is thinking we only need honeybees. We need more bees of all kinds. And in some cases, yes, that may mean fewer honeybees.
I'm reminded of how much we were taught that monocrops were bad things in grade school. And yet, you'd be hard pressed to name a popular food that isn't grown in giant monocrop fields.
Probably not, especially if they’re in an urban environment. The bees being shipped to farms, on the other hand, are ecologically destructive (as well as economically invaluable).
My takeaway is not that honeybees are evil. It’s that we need more pollinators in more stripes, and that the agricultural industry has successfully confused pollinators in general with honeybees in particular.
Similar to many, many other things.
I, unfortunately, developed a severe bee-sting allergy, and can no longer put these ideas into practice. I anticipate that commercial beekeeping cannot sustain its current practices.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18279124-the-rose-hive-m...
If existing practices are somehow radically worse, I would expect the first entity to adopt better practices to obtain a significant advantage - and the competition to copy them eventually.
I'm incredibly skeptical of any "everyone is doing X completely wrong and you should listen to ME and BUY MY BOOK instead".
- I can sell 100 units of product for $2. I feel good I am ethical and responsible.
- I can sell 300 units of product for $1. Everyone buys from me and I make more money, but I poison the land.
Capitalism does not account for externalities. Because businesses never have to pay the cost of poisoning water supplies or destroying ecosystems until he societal bell tolls - and because "if I don't, they will and I will go out of business" - unsustainable and unethical practices are the norm in late stage capitalism.
I mean, for real? Are you confused why mine operators encouraged taking more material at the expensive of structural integrity? Are you confused why gas barons don't like paying the cost to cap NG wells? Are you confused why big agri uses petrochemical fertilizers to grow subsidized ethanol and HFCS?
What would be your best source to back that ?
(I'm not trolling - we've been having a vivid debates about that exact topic for the past few weeks in France, and one common counter-point is that the decrease in bee population is multifactorial, as opposed to having any "primary" culprit. So any source welcome :) )
If there were no parasite, no pathogen, and no predator, then bees would not be as much affected by pesticides for sure. But parasites and pathogens existed before, while habitat loss and monoculture farming don't explain what happens in relatively preserved areas.
All pesticides have an impact on insect populations obviously. I agree one should not focus on only one class of them, and work on an actual reduction of their usage and compensate farmers for profitability loss due to changes in pest management strategies.
You don't need to comment this. I know It won't be done and we're all screwed.
https://www.ars.usda.gov/news-events/news/research-news/2025...
While widespread antibiotic use is bad for bees it's nothing compared to what the viruses transmitted by the mites do to them.
Huge increase in lightning bugs this summer.
Deleted Comment
Yes, I know there are some "studies" about this, but I find their sampling size and methods basically inconsequential.
The reduction in windshield bug splats has more to do with the decline in insect populations.
EDIT: I originally said 75% decline over 30 years. Those are the results for studies in parts of Germany. We don't have solid data on global loss in insect populations.
Dead Comment