Randy claimed:

> it's generally accepted that honeybees can disrupt
> ecosystems by pollinating exotic weeds, and by 
> competing with native pollinators for resources.

"Generally accepted" by who?
Please provide us with a list, so that we may be
enlightened about these counter-intuitive claims.

The premise offered is easy to refute at even the 
cursory level of examination by anyone with a basic 
understanding of plants and pollinators.

"Exotic weeds", if pollinated by honey bees, clearly
are offering pollen and/or nectar of value to the
bees.  By pollinating these "weeds", the honey bees
assure that there will be more of them, thus INCREASING
the total number of pollen and nectar sources for all 
pollinators, both honey bees and others.  It would be 
a rare weed that would be useful to honey bees, but not 
useful to the "alternative pollinators" claimed to be 
able to pollinate many of the same plants/crops.

It follows that one cannot condemn honey bees for 
pollinating "invasive weeds" unless one also notes
that native pollinators can also do the same.  Sorry, 
the native pollinators are also opportunists, and will
be happy to gather nectar and pollen wherever they
can, without regard to the preferences of humans.

While the example above itself results in an increase 
in the number of food sources for all pollinators, 
the entire concept of "competition" is a bit laughable 
when one speaks of insects who visit some mix of plants
that REPLENISH their nectaries multiple times.

To go further, if honey bees could somehow be "competing
for resources" with native pollinators, the worst damage 
to the native pollinator populations would have happened
in the period between the 1600s and the 1980s, when 
honey bees were not themselves threatened by pests and 
diseases.  Since 1985, feral honey bee populations have 
decreased significantly, so any "threat" would be much 
less an issue now than it was for hundreds of years.

So, when was the last time you heard of a suburban
child being stung by a honey bee?  Now, answer for
carpenter bees, wasps, and bumblebees.  I'd be happy 
to walk through any suburb and bet some serious money 
what a few hours wandering would yield in this area
of inquiry.

If there was a danger of "competition" being a problem,
native pollinators would have been completely extinct 
long before now, wouldn't they?  Recall that "honey
bee free areas" are limited to specific islands off
the coasts of the USA, where experiments are done.
Honey bees are nearly everywhere, and have been for
hundreds of years, yet the native pollinators are
somehow still in the game.  Sounds like we've had
a more than adequate time to verify that neither
seems to suffer due to the other.

And what happened to the claim that native pollinators
are somehow "more versatile"?  You can't have it both 
ways - either they ARE more versatile, and therefore
can hold their own against honey bees in the wild, or 
they aren't, and they can't.  So which is it?

And aren't "weedy patches" one of the things that one 
wants to preserve if one wants to promote a robust 
ecosystem that includes native pollinators?  
OK, so some of the weeds are not from here, but when one 
does some reading, and learns that both the prairies and 
the eastern forests (with their lack of undergrowth), 
assumed to be "pristine" and "natural" by European settlers  
were in fact "massive public works projects" by the Native 
Americans, who used fire are their primary management tool 
to create both, one is forced to reconsider one's assessment 
of what is "natural", if anything.

I'd go on, but addressing such leading softball questions 
from someone who has made their predispositions clear from 
the start is like wading through a lake of waist-deep honey
it is slow, sticky, and a "waist" of time.






 

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