I don’t know much about bees, other than they are important for the garden food production and they have been having trouble with their health from pollution. An advanced graduate school bio student I was talking with made that claim that bees will be extinct in 10 - 15 years.
Beekeepers, what do you think?
And if not extinct, then bee populations will be decreased to where they can’t do the work effectively for agriculture.
Beekeepers arent really keeping the bees we care about. Honey bees are invasive in the u.s. and do a fraction of the pollenation a native bee does.
I have not heard that theyll be extinct in 10 years, news to me and im in native plant and conservation spaces
Honey Bees will be just fine. They have a new pollen substitute to improve hive health in off season. And now Pseudo-Scorpions have been proved to be voracious predators of the terrible verroa mite plaguing hives as a vector for pathogens.
We adapt for ourselves and our critical allies.
Honeybees are domesticated and not invasive. They are a specialist pollinator other species do not fully cover. Natives often being either highly specialist or so generalist as to not be effective at all crops. Think moths, flies and walking insects.
There are many endangered species of native bees. Gardeners who plant local native flowering plants see the native bees in their yards.
No they are invasive. They actively harm native bee populations. They live outside of cultivation. Keep them if you want for honey but they are not good for the environment and they pollinate crops worse than native bees (in the u.s., no idea what its like in other areas).
There is no reason to believe that honey bees will be functionally extinct in the next 15 or so years. Nor would agriculture collapse without them.
Interestingly, many of the world’s staple foods (maize, rice, wheat, potato, cassava, sweet potato, etc) crop well without honeybees.
Many commercially significant but probably not considered to be staple crops (eg tomato, chilli, cucumber, etc) crop well without bees.
Some fruit trees rely heavily on insect pollinators. I don’t know how true this is but I have read that parts of China lack many insects and people pollinate orchards.
Roughly 1/3 of the food we eat relies on honeybees in one way or another. Do you like hamburgers? Cows eat alfalfa which honeybees pollinate. So the next time you eat a hamburger, remember that a honeybee helped produce the forage so you could have it. Due to the logistics of producing alfalfa seed, honeybees are the only reliable pollinator. Almonds? Same situation, rely on honeybees. I’m not going to keep naming plants though I could give about 25 or 30 similar examples. Here is a list that covers most of them.
But the story with native pollinators is mis-told by most of the publications that are going to be pulled into this discussion. You see, native pollinators are rarely capable of being raised in volume sufficient to be able to pollinate commercial crops. There are a few exceptions. Orchard Mason bees and some species of bumblebee can be managed and are used for specific crops where they perform much better than honeybees. But when it comes to crops like almonds, forget about it.
Thats because you wouldnt ve aiming to raise bees the same way.
First off your list is pollenared by all bees, not specifically honey bees. No one is under a delusion that you dont need some sort of bee. Instead youd be planting natives in between fields to supoort them for overwintering. Very often done in orchards for example since you can do it between rows with relative simplicity.
There are 1100 species of native need in Utah. I probably have 100 in my yard alone. It’s a large and diverse group that we largely don’t ever think about…
Tell that to my natives when wild honey bees show up on the scene at about mid-summer competing aggressively with them for sustenance until the first really hard freeze. These honeybees are nowhere to be seen when my fruit trees need them. My natives are all I need or all anyone needs not engaged in monoculture or honey production.
I guess my land has room and adequate pollen for both.
There is concern about the declining number of native species, however. It’s a problem. according to the scientists that study it… a grave one. Anyone care to contradict CHAT- The sources are listed.
This subject is a very complicated one.
The underlying threat to all bees whether they’re managed honeybee, feral honeybee (non-native), native bees is starvation due to diminished forage and lack of floral diversity. This is a result of HOA required yard management, farm and forestry practices. I’m very skeptical the chemicals are the driver. It’s starvation.
When I was a youngster back in the 70s and 80s, fields in NC were surrounded by wild plum, sumac. Sometimes these fields were left fallow and were white with aster in Oct. The forests had many black gum and wild persimmon. Fields had bobwhite quail. By 2000, farmers had removed brush which included sumac, privet, wild plum. The removal resulted in less forage and the demise of the bobwhite quail. Plantation pine growing now benefits from herbicides which prevent black gum and persimmon form emerging in cutover, as well as sourwood.
The no till method of row crop farming has benefited my bees. These fields are covered in dead nettle and other flowers in late Jan-Feb and help bees overwinter.
I have a bee yard in Dobson that is surrounded by fescue pasture. These pastures up until 2024 were carpeted with Dutch and pink clover. The landowner leased the land out to a new client. The new client sprayed the land with something to prevent clover growth and accidently sprayed mine as well. Years past, I could see up to 150 pounds of honey per hive. This year, I had zero honey and had to feed the last remaining hive 4 gallons of syrup. I moved several hives to my home in Elkin and they’re on the side porch.
Concerning commercial beekeeping, the industry tends to screw itself over and over. Much of the honeybee doomsday stuff is noise intended to sucker some rube into keeping bees to save the planet.
I have a ton of native bees. My wife is the queen of bees and keeps our many flower beds full of goodies for bees such as butterfly weed, echinacea, chives, catnip, African basil. perennial foxglove, lavender. African basil and chives see the most visitors. African basil does not quit. It’s great for the SE, drought resistant and indeterminant bloomer.
Honey Bees are not true invasives. They are managed as livestock. They pollinate the crops they are intended too. Native bees sure are not doing poorly in our area. Despite the heavy presence of dozens of hive operations. Fact is; if you want pollinators{all of them} plant pollen and nectar plants and facilitate ways to increase nesting sites period. Many bees lost habitat in the grand chase of perfect lawns.
When we built our home back in 2001… I had a (animal lover vegan cousin) that told me that honeybees were nearly extinct and in a few years would be no more.
When I seeded my yard and fields I put a little ledino clover in the mix… a little too much clover seed and for a couple years the clover really out outperformed everything else… and we had a sea of white clover flowers that covered most of 3 acres.
There were so many honey bees it was not safe to walk barefoot in the yard.
When she came out to visit she was amazed that there were still so many honey bees left.
There is no one near me that keeps honey bees… so these were all wild bees.
I have found several bee trees in my woods while hunting game and ginseng.
There are still lots of honey bees here, and 2-3 kinds of bumbles… that I see pollinating stuff here… and lots of smaller bees, some green… that I see pollinating all over.
This cluster of chive blossoms have several small bees working it… (6 or more). I see those same smallish green bees in the woods pollinating ginseng.
TNHunter
Honey bees are surprisingly abundant, research shows—but most are wild, not managed in hives
There was a massive Honeybee die off starting in 2024 due to a new a Amitraz resistant varroa. The feral bee HB populations needed to be thinned out around me since they were outcompeting managed colonies for forage.
Folks thought the world was coming to an end in 2006 during the CCD era. Didn’t happen.
Some say the irritable Black German HB bee is extinct. It isn’t.
I struggled with my bees getting mated by Black German drones when I lived in Franklin Cnty NC back in the early 2000s. Black German bees are very distinct and are very prone to American Foul Brood. Despite the fact these bees have ceaseless struggles with AFB, they’re still around not only in the wilds of Franklin Cnty NC, but also along the Mitchell River in Surry County NC.
We have lots of Red and Southern Sugar maples. Come late January the incessant buzzing of bees is inescapable. Quite loud. And the nearest hives are about 3.5 miles from here.
a huge part of protecting native bees is allowing places for them to reproduce and to overwinter. Leave your flower stems at least 18 inches, ideally fully intact, but I do live in a community so i cut to 18 inches once temps are above 50s. the plants overgrow and hide these stems. bees often take more than 1 year to reproduce in these stems so keeping them more than a season is ideal. i keep the cut stems in a pile in my back yard. Similarly, leaving wooden snags for carpenter bees, no tilling for the many burrying bee species. and of course not spraying or spraying as minimally as possible. I can often have 30+ species of bees and hoverflies visiting my yard when i sit out there, possibly more but theyre challenging to count and im still a novice at insect identification, variety of flowering plans and having plants that flower at every time of year possible is ideal.
I hate lawns.
Seems a fear of bees (native or honey) being gone is a city folks issue. I’ve got an acre of wildflowers. Walking thru there on a quiet/windless summer day is overwhelming. The buzzing/droning/activity is unreal. Pollinators of all kinds as far as you can see. Thousands of acres of woods, swamps, rowcrops, pastures around me. No lack of pollinators anywhere.
Beekeepers have hives on a section of my place about 1/2 mile from my home and wildflowers. The hives are less than 100 yards from rowcrop (corn and beans) ground. They report great yields. The bees are fed sugar water in late summer, then they’re transported to almond groves in CA. That pays the bills for the beekeepers.
People move to metropolitan areas and live in unnatural environments (IMO), then wring their hands about creating and contributing to that unnaturalness.
Exactly. Hoverflies are ridiculous here. But we keep flowering areas up too.
Bugs are numerous. It’s meaningless to say “there’s tons of 'em” when you have no IDEA what that population density looked like ten years ago, twenty years ago, one hundred years ago
That’s not science
