The talk by the beekeeper in the video takes aim at urban beekeeping, as if the cities were the last refuge of solitary bees. If any city is the "last refuge" of ANY insect or animal, then the wheels came off long ago, and it is only the lack of agricultural herbicides, pesticides, and toxic runoff from agriculture that allows them to seem to seem to "thrive" in cities when they cannot survive in the hinterlands. Cites are not the "native habitat" of any creature. Even I need to escape now and then, as I did this week.
The same corrosive 100% fact-free "concerns" have resulted in the comic opera of the "NYC Forever Wild" program:
https://www.nycgovparks.org/greening/nature-preserves/sites
When cornered and smiled at broadly, the responsible parties nervously stammer that this effort is out of an "abundance of caution", prompted by the same flawed studies mentioned by others in this thread.
So, community gardeners in NYC Parks "Green Thumb" community gardens are barred from having honey bees within 1.5 miles of any of the "Forever Wild" sites, which comically include "The Ramble" in Central Park - a completely artificial work of man, designed and planned by Olmstead et al to simply *appear* to be "wild", that is, if there were paved paths and bridges through the wilderness leading to a random castle where no maidens are to be found, overlooking a lake where no Lady of the Lake ever "held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water" (see Python, Monty, et al 1975).
https://www.centralparknyc.org/locations/the-ramble
The landscape architecture plans by which a flat open field was transformed into "The Ramble" are here:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/1868_Vaux_%5E_Olmstead_Map_of_Central_Park%2C_New_York_City_-_Geographicus_-_CentralPark-CentralPark-1869.jpg
https://tinyurl.com/28xa9phv
The Ramble is the "twisty maze" area on the plan just to the left of the Croton Reservoir. It is well within easy flight range of all my hives.
When I return to the USA, I welcome anyone who wants to visit for a guided tour of the (New York, NY) Central Park Conservatory Garden, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, the Bronx Botanical Garden, and any half-dozen community gardens selected at random via the "map on a dartboard" technique. At all of them, you will see honey bees and multiple species of native pollinators sharing the same plants, despite an environment that is so urban even the parks themselves were designed and built following detailed drawings like the one linked to above.
The basic premise behind the claim of "pollinator competition" is deeply flawed - there really is no such thing unless one drops a truckload of 450 colonies into a field, and this is always a temporary issue, not an extinction-level event for an entire species. Flowers not hammered by truckloads of bees that arrive in the night can be visited on subsequent days (or in mere subsequent hours) by a series of insects, as flowers are a **renewable** source of nectar.
When one thinks slowly about what happens, even if everything said in the video might somehow be true, one realizes that more honey bees, even if they are visiting the majority of the blossoms, are pollinating, and thus, creating more blossoms for all insects to utilize. There is no zero-sum game here. If there is a limited number of flowering trees, bushes, and plants, that is the fault of man, and can be corrected by man. He speaks of Berlin, and a quick Google tells me that Berlin has an average of 80 trees per kilometer of street, which seems like a decent number of trees, but what SORT of trees? Do they bloom at all? Or does Berlin suffer from the same problem as Central London, where useless Plane Trees dominate?
Early on, we were told with great authority by the Native Pollinator lobbyists things like "solitary bees are more efficient pollinators than honey bees". This siren song is how I blew roughly $25K on trying my hand at supplemental pollination of apples with Japanese Hornfaced Bees, following the very detailed and helpful mentoring of Dr. Suzanne Batra of the USDA. I will summarize the years of effort by saying that if one has a small backyard orchard of a half-dozen apple trees, these are your bees, no doubt. But don't expect them to scale up to a population large enough to allow one to serve the needs of a commercial orchard - in large numbers, and at higher densities, the populations of these very gregarious solitary bees collapse from a never-ended suite of unique and new pathogens that seem to arise whenever one gets up around 200 to 300 nesting tubes in one's core breed stock. I so desperately wanted to be able to pollinate with small, lightweight deployment units containing cocoons that would hatch out into completely stingless bees - no trucks, no nighttime work, no heavy lifting, nirvana! But no one has made this work at any scale, so beekeepers still do as I did, and place hives in snow, in mud, and in dark of night on often steep terrain served by rutted tracks.
But now, we are told that these "more efficient pollinators" are somehow not. But never are we told how all this works. Ask about specifics, get a bunch of hand-waving.
The presentation is yet another aspect of what I dubbed the "Pollinator Protection Racket" years ago.
It started with attempts to divert some of the funding meant to address the problems of honey bees and their beekeepers to "native bee research".
It has continued to the point that only native bees are permitted on the grounds of Floyd Bennett Field (a decommissioned airport, now part of the Gateway National Recreation Area) so despite the fact that decades of military and commercial aircraft have rendered the soil itself so toxic that the community garden onsite must use raised beds and import all growing soil, they must continue to camouflage their two beehives so that they escape detection, as only "native species" are permitted by a regulation that is pointedly overlooked by the local park management. (Ask us no questions, and we'll tell you no lies.)
Others have addressed some of the specifics of the very shaky basis for any statement about native bees being "driven to local extinction" by competition from managed honey bee colonies, I need not repeat.
As for the "poor design of the hive" resulting in "more foraging", and "more competition" this is as baseless claim - my urban bees do far, far more foraging than the purported "optimal" model of a tree-cavity hive in the Arnot Forest, not because their housing is substandard, but because I SUPER THE HIVES WITH DRAWN COMB, the bees work hard to fill all that comb, which I extract, and quickly return as empty drawn comb again. And again, if it is a good year. And yet again come fall.
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