> I don't have enough data to assess. 
> Any studies and thoughts?

With all due respect and admiration to Norman for his many decades of
selfless service to the beekeeping community, his book promo efforts should
strive to avoid making dramatic flat statements about forage in
uber-ultra-urban areas like NYC, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur, as they are
very different from Norman's own first-hand experience in drought-plagued
and overly-lawn-serviced California.

So, first, we need to get real - if you don't even have 3 million people in
your city, you aren't all that "urban" by modern standards.  There are
roughly 90 cities with 3 million or more people in them, and LA and NYC are
the only US cities to make that list.

What is accurate in Norman's assessment is that suburbia is a forage desert
for the most part, as the Chem-Lawn man and the popularity of lawns that
look like putting greens combine to leave bees with nothing, and the
dandelion is viewed as a mark of shame for many homeowners.  But this is
true of suburban and ex-urban areas, not at all of the actual urban core,
where "green space" is treasured.

Since I sold my Virginia operation, I have been keeping bees on a small
island just off the east coast of the United State called "Manhattan". NYC
has multiple massive parks in central locations - Central Park, Prospect
Park in Brooklyn, Van Cortland Park in the Bronx, and hundreds of smaller
parks and community gardens, plus an actual counted million street trees and
forest trees, many of them chosen specifically for their bee forage values,
at the suggestion of our scruffy ragtag band of rooftop beekeepers. (see
http://milliontreesnyc.org).  Kuala Lumpur has Lake Gardens at 230+ acres,
and 3 actual "forest reserves" ranging in size from 20 to 100 acres each
within their city limits.  Hong Kong has so many parks, one can spend
several days just visiting the "historical" ones, such as Kowloon Walled
City Park and the Nan Lian Garden.

That said, there are some locations in any large city with too much wind
turbulence for hives to make much of a living (this is easy to notice in
winter along the Hudson River shore in Riverside Park, as the wind will try
to knock you down). One cannot overstate the impact of wind turbulence on
hive placement in cities with dense clusters of skyscrapers.  DC has it
easy, as they limit building heights, and don't have the density to end up
with many "concrete jungle" areas, so they don't have to learn about
Bernoulli's Principle or about hive weights that decrease during blooms.

> "Increasing populations of bees 
> can easily 'overgraze' the resources,"

This is a self-correcting problem, in two ways.  First, more bees mean more
pollination, which means more blooms next year, and so on and so on.
Second, hives that are unproductive get moved to more productive sites, as
nearly all urban beekeepers are interested in honey crops.  (I may be the
only urban beekeeper to collect the occasional "pollination fees", as I rent
out splits for newly-installed green roofs to set seed on the sedum and
other plants, and help the planting to grow and spread between the "plugs"
installed.  It's not even beer money, but it is a way to gain access to new
roof locations, as the green roof community tends to be very "bee
friendly".)

Second, beekeepers who don't have good locations and don't move their bees
tend to not keep bees for long, as "bad" locations tend to not even make
enough honey to support the hive over winter.  There's only so many packages
one can buy every spring before realization hits.  The answer is a notebook,
and regular hive weighing of every hive with an affordable device like
"Fischer's Nectar Detector" [blatant plug].  Urban hives that don't gain
weight in spring are doomed if they are not moved, just as hives that lose
weight too quickly on winter are doomed if not fed.  (Candyboards are the
hobby beekeeper's best friend this time of year.)

> "The yield of honey per colony is 
> declining significantly in urban 
> environments,"

This decline due to "saturation of hives" has been found in specific
isolated areas where forage was lacking from day one, such as central
London.  To my knowledge, the problem has not been noticed anywhere else BUT
central London.  But their problem is systemic - they have actual
regulations that force the planting of large number "London Plame Trees" as
street trees, which have no value to bees at all.  The also lack the large
numbers of community gardens most other cities enjoy.

But there is no general trend to support this statement for most urban
locations.  I run 2 dozen rooftop colonies, and it is only my own laziness
that keeps me from doubling or tripling that number.  There is plenty of
forage - Central Park has "infinite blooms", and could easily support
several hundred colonies.  But that sounds too much like work to me, been
there, done that, still have a few scars.

As an aside, Norman's work as a "bee wrangler" on so many of the
cheaply-made 1970s disaster movies where bees were made to look like a
threat to people was the primary cause of the fear and loathing that so many
people harbored toward bees for most of our adult lives.  He has never
properly atoned for these transgressions against the truthful fact of the
peaceful harmless honey bee being a non-issue.  About all I can say in his
defense here is that the old 1970s disaster movies are mostly forgotten, as
they were such bad theater, they are now only found on reruns of "Mystery
Science Theater", where the movies are heckled in real time by the
characters sitting in the front row of the "theater" (amazingly, MST has
their own dedicated 24x7 channel on the "Pluto" service which is free on
Roku, and I assume also all the other streaming boxes).

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