If you are interested in ecology (and especially pollination), there’s a great piece you’ll want to read on Jeff Ollerton’s website. Dr Ollerton (University of Northampton) has just released a comprehensive paper on pollinator diversity in Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics. If you go to Jeff’s blog, you can follow his link and get a copy of his paper. I enjoyed a couple of hours of deep introspection reading his article this morning. There’s a lot to think about.
I’m not going to paraphrase Ollerton’s piece – it’s written in a clean, accessible style. You’ll have no trouble reading Pollinator Diversity and Why It’s Important. I won’t repeat his work here, but I will give you a little summary and a few extractions that are particularly interesting. (To me, anyway.)
Here’s the bottom line. For the health of our ecology – including agricultural endeavours – diversity of pollinator species is essential. Diversity of species means a wide variety of kinds of creatures. We tend to go for quantity as a solution for our problems, but throwing more honey bees into a pollination problem is not necessarily the best fix. The loss of pollinator varieties frazzles the strands of the threads holding flowers, fruits, and foragers together in the web of life. Many – perhaps most – of these pollinators are largely unseen, unstudied, and virtually unknown. For example, there are ten times as many species of moths that work as pollinators. But they work at night. Most of us have never watched a moth pollinate a flower.
We (beekeepers) usually figure that if an anonymous pollinator or two disappears, honey bees can step in and fill the void. But here are two things to think about:
1) many pollinators are specialists which effectively pollinate flowers which honey bees usually ignore (or physically can’t work); and,
2) if the world is becoming too harsh for some pollinators, then it’s probably becoming too harsh for our own favourite pollinator. What’s good for the bumblebee is likely good for the honey bee, as Marcus Aurelius never quite said.
Vase of ill-fated WannaBeeFlowers.
(Original art: Daniel Miksha)
What happens when non-mellifera pollinators disappear? Here’s a wee example to consider. Let’s say that a certain type of flower (the glorious WannaBeeFlower, for example) is well-adapted to pollination by one of those 20,000-or-so odd bee species that populate our world. That WannaBeeFlower is sometimes also visited by honey bees who just grab a little nectar and run along to more enticing clovers. But because of those other bees, the WannaBeeFlower gets pollinated and blooms nicely season after season. Then one year, a clover parasite wipes out the clover. Your honey bees might starve, but they turn to the WannaBeeFlower. If that flower’s main pollinator goes extinct, the flower might also disappear, leaving your bees hungry on the bad year. Multiple this by a thousand similar flowers and their main pollinators and you can see the problem. This is a selfish and narrow-minded reason to preserve diverse pollinators, but it gets our attention.
Of course there is more. Although honey bee keepers perform herculean tasks to keep honey bees flourishing, it’s becoming more and more expensive and frustrating. The same pollution and pesticides that are killing the “lesser” bees also affect honey bees. Conservation measures that help all of the pollinators will help your honey bees, too.
Those are only a couple of reasons that biodiversity is important. If we remind ourselves of the vast interconnected ecology of living things, we might disabuse ourselves of our narcissistic concern for our own hives.
I’m going to step off my palmolive box for a moment. If you want the facts presented without editorial comment, read Ollerton’s piece. It’s important. But before you go away, here are a few gleanings from his biodiversity paper that you can carry with you:
- We usually think of honey bees when we think of pollinators. But one in ten terrestrial animals (including humans) pollinate flowers.
- Wind plays an important role in pollination – but a whopping 87.5% of all flowering plants are visited by bees, bats, birds, butterflies, and other beasties.
- New species are being identified daily. Today’s 350,000 species of pollinators (!) which visit 352,000 species of flowering plants (!) is an underestimate.
- Heterocera (moths) are the most common pollinator species group (123,000), followed by Coleoptera (beetles, with 77,000), and Hymenoptera (bees and freinds, 70,000). Rhopelacera (butterflies) are relatively less diverse, represented by 18,500 known species that engage in pollination.
- A thousand species of birds do some pollination work as well as a couple hundred bats. But to date, only three different species of marine worms have been spotted carrying pollen. Why’s that?
- The effectiveness of pollinators varies a lot. Some rarely help flowers, but as a group, bees are the most prolific – probably because of their large hairy bodies – and because bees are almost completely dependent upon flowers for all their food.
- The diversity of pollinators varies a lot across geographic areas – flies dominate in the arctic, bumblebees are dominant almost everywhere in the world except Africa, and there are almost no birds which work as pollinators in Europe, though elsewhere in the world they are important.
Dr Ollerton also tells us that there “is also much that we do not understand about the potential effects of pollinators that have been introduced to parts of the world in which they are not native.” Honey bees (which are not native to the Americas, Oceania, and much of Asia) may impact native species of bees. Their deleterious effects seem limited, ranging from insignificant to potentially disruptive, depending on the biodiversity of the environment and the density of the managed honey bee colonies. If just a few non-native honey bee colonies are kept in areas with a variety of flowering plants, they probably are not displacing other pollinators. But we don’t really know for sure – this aspect of ecology hasn’t been thoroughly studied.
It’s possible that people who keep bees are doing more ecological good than harm. Here’s one reason. If you care about your bees, you will be more eager to support green spaces in your community and will be more likely to complain to city hall when the spray planes leave their hangars. Having more beekeepers means having more voices for initiatives that will help all the pollinators. In balance, keepers of honey bees are likely doing more to preserve wild pollinator habitat than they are to reduce foraging opportunities for other pollinators.
More good than bad?
Bad Beekeeping Blog 
Thank you, Ron, for publicizing this new research. The ecological implications of sustaining a broad diversity of pollinator species cannot be overstated.
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Ollerton’s article is a nice review on an important subject. Glad you enjoyed it.
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Thanks for the shout out Ron, that’s a nice summary of the review.
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My pleasure. You presented on an important topic and your writing is always a joy to read.
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Thanks for the article Ron. I suspect beekeepers and their bees, strategically placed, are covering for the reduction in other pollinators. But even with all the clever tricks we pull to keep their populations up, one day there will be a hiccup and it will all be apparent that we’re in pollinator trouble. IMO
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Thanks, Ron. I’ve been reading up on native pollinators lately and wondering if beekeeping my be detrimental to natives. I bet there is some impact especially with a high density of hives.
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I think you are exactly right – honey bees in moderation are likely good for the environment. High density beekeeping (often an agricultural necesssity) probably isn’t, though it’s most common in a disrupted monoculture setting anyway..
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Yes and no. There are a number of mid-sized beekeepers that raise queens, sell nucs, and do other activities with a few hundred hives. A neighbor near me, for example, is overwintering 40-50 hives in their yard. In the spring they will become nucs for sale or go back out to their apiaries. I understand the pollinator operations – likely a big impact and perhaps need for the type of farming we now do.
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Come fall, I’m always interested in the local alfalfa field, which I tend to see worked by many more butterflies and hoverflies, rather than my honeybees. This feeling is even more pronounced when I would rather have heavier hives in September, and the second-cut alfalfa seems to be the only plant around producing nectar! It seems these other pollinators don’t mind the trip-wire mechanism of the alfalfa flower? Perhaps butterflies can even work them without tripping the flower’s mechanism, but I understand it is necessary for pollination. In any case, it is interesting to think of the possibility of honeybees out-competing other pollinators during certain conditions.
I see there is a visual artist in the family as well. Very nice painting! ~Will
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Hi Will,
You make an interesting observation. Honey bees barely survive here (western Canada) if they have only native plants to forage. But we have alfalfa, sweet clover, and canola – all imports from other continents. For the edification of non-farmers, second-cut alfalfa (which you mentioned) is the short regrowth after it has been cut for hay. Some years it is only a few centimetres high but blossoms nicely. So, our main nectar sources are from imported farm crops. You have probably looked at old production records for bees in Alberta – average crops were twenty pounds a year until ranchers planted clovers and alfalfa around 1900. Now honey crops are close to 200 pounds a year. Without farmers’ crops (which you point out are possibly benefiting native pollinators), our honey bees would be competing more directly with butterflies, hoverflies, and bumblebees. (And they wouldn’t do too well.)
Thanks for noticing the gratuitous promotion of my-son-the-artist. He is our 15-year-old, Daniel. Still life arrangements are not his typical work. He usually paints landscapes, like the one below.
<img src=”https://wp.me/a6nQS6-178″ alt=”Town by the Sea” />
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Is Daniel going to pursue a career in art Ron? He’s very talented.
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Thanks, Emily.
He’s 15 and has a lot of interests and talents. This month, he was awarded a violin scholarship, but his art and music will probably remain hobbies – he typically brings home 100% marks in maths, language, and chemistry. It will be hard for him to decide what to do.
He started to paint last year and this weekend he began to set up his first website for a portfolio. If he agrees, I’ll post a link.
He’s influenced by the Impressionists – it shows in his work. By the way, I can’t quite draw an acceptable stick figure, so he didn’t inherit any ‘art’ genes from me!
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This is such a good article, thank you for writing so well. I already went through a lot if your posts and they are all such a pleasure to read with so much useful information.
I wonder though, the majority of seeds used by agricultural companies these days, are treated with insecticides before being planted, and so when the plant grows, that insecticide is already somewhere in its composition …isnt this more worrisome in the long run for these little pollinators than any competition they may have with each other?
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Thanks for the kind comments – glad you are enjoying the posts.
You are right, there are more important factors affecting native bee survival than competition from non-indigenous bees. (Including insecticides, herbicides, monoculture, climate change, and urban growth.) That’s why I suspect it’s a good thing, on balance, to have enthusiastic honey bee keepers even in areas where honey bees are not native (and maybe competing with local bees) because beekeepers generally encourage a landscape that’s good for all the bees.
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Thank you for replying so quick! and absolutely, the beekeepers and agricultural entities are doing more good than harm.
More than one source keeps stating that in the USA alone, more chemicals and pesticides are used on lawns and golf courses than on any agricultural land. (at least from what i remeber from the mysterious disappearncr of the bees documentary)
That’s is why I to do not see beekeepers as a threat to pollinators…now I cannot say the same about some the gardeners who may have beekeeping as the last thing on their minds, as they spray whatever is possible to get rid of any ‘pests’.
Once again great blog and so informative! Thank you for maintaining it!
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At a recent science in the community festival, a city counselor approached me and asked how to respond to concerns that honey bees were drawing fire, given they are not native species and might be hurting the native pollinators…there had been rumblings the city council should repeal bylaws permitting beekeeping.
I had done a bit of looking into this problem after hearing similar rumblings online. And really, the answer is in looking at what native pollinators need and when they started to decline.
Honey bees and native pollinators coexisted happily for hundreds of years following the arrival of Europeans and their bees. It is only in the last few decades that the whole idea of honey bee and native bee conflict has come to the fore, and I think that is because the whole idea of biodiversity, particularly pre-Contact biodiversity has become au courant….at the same time we noted that native pollinators are not as abundant as they used to be.
But from what I could tell, the declines in native bee populations are relatively recent, and the result of fractured landscapes (development driven), declining forage, declining forage quality, and agrisprays.
Many native pollinators have very restricted flight ranges. They cannot, as honey bees can, fly kilometres to forage. Many cannot store food against dearths, as honey bees do. So they are particularly vulnerable to the destruction of forage habitat. It is not that the honey bees are thieving all their food (because they often feed on different blossoms), it is that people are destroying the swathes of blooms the native pollinators depend on. You could take away all the honey bees but that would not fix the problem for native pollinators: they need more forage, and forage patches that are not too far from one another.
Happily, if we plant more forage patches, and create nectar/pollen trails a la the work of the Bumblebee Conservancy in England and the Xerces Society in the USA, all pollinators, wild, native and the European honey bee, will benefit. That rising tide will lift all boats. There is no need to see one pollinator as pitted against another. There is room (and need) for all, and has been in the past, before we made such vast inroads on the natural landscape and in particular created monocultures in vast, weedless fields, bare of hedgerows and sprayed six ways from Sunday.
The work or Dr. C. Morrissey in Saskatchewan in particular points a finger at neonicotinoid field sprays washing off fields and into local standing waters and waterways. The neonics appear to not only persist but to concentrate, creating a water supply that is lethal to insects of all kinds, and which Dr. Morrissey fears is behind songbird declines.
It is possible to re-establish native pollinator populations if you just plant for them. I have seen this in my own back yard, which when we moved in was heavily sprayed, devoid of flowering plants and pretty much devoid of bugs, birds and soil denizens. It took a few years of planting and improving soils (and providing clean water), but our garden is now a bee, bug, and bird magnet.
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Thanks for your comments. Lots of points to think about.
I continue to feel that honey bees may compete with native bees, especially when kept bees are at high density. It’s a research topic which hasn’t been examined enough. Regarding by-gone days, no one was really keeping track of any native bee losses until recently, so we don’t know for certain that initial contacts were entirely benign. However, as you have mentioned, modern activities (chemicals and environmental changes) are likely the main culprits in indigenous bee demise, so it is probable that in centuries past, the low densities of honey bees and lack of agribusiness were not causing significant native bee losses.
I think, on balance, beekeepers play an important role helping wild bees because beekeepers generally support initiatives such as less chemical use and more green space. In a city like mine (Calgary) with over a million folks (of whom a thousand are hobby beekeepers), there are a lot of pro-environment voices. Many, like you, are doing backyard-scale remediation that may help bring back endangered bees. Thanks for you comments!
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Ron, I am certain that honey bees and wild pollinators can co-exist…why? Because in my back yard, I see the proof. As I said, when we moved in there was no biodiversity, and a lot of lollipop shrubs. Within 5 years I had replanted and de-toxed the gardens and were mobbed by wild pollinators of all kinds (favourites are lovage, abelia, Joe Pye Weed, herbs in flower, fennel). I put in three double deep honey bee colonies as well, which are staying, given the back yard remains my best honey production area. That is a LOT of bees, and there are many more local hives tucked away in back yard gardens. I have seen no drop in wild pollinator visits. We continue to be a madly active biodiversity island in our sleekly groomed, sterile subdivision. Not every plant attracts every species, although the lovage and Joe Pye Weed (Eupatorium) tend to host all sorts. It is interesting that you will see many species foraging side by side. This is a very bee dense area, particularly during the time 100’s of pollination hives are in the nearby blueberry fields. But all that is needed is more forage, and the wild pollinators rebound.
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“… all that is needed is more forage and the wild pollinators rebound.” It sounds like you have been doing a tremendous job of making that happen!
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Can’t take the credit, the path was blazed by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and the Xerces Society!
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Daniel Miksha’s Wannabee flowers are rather beautiful.
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