> While we agree that extensive use of managed honey bees may 
> be problematic for wildlife conservation and we should control 
> the number of hives in native, protected areas

The argument above is phrased as if it were a foregone conclusion.  It is
anything but.

A rising tide raises all boats, and with more bees, there is more
pollination, and hence more blooms each year in an "unmanaged" or "natural"
area.

More blooms are a good thing for all species.  (While massive numbers of
hives can create a nectar vacuum, this is an ecologically rare event, and is
only possible with hundreds of hives per "yard", and is a self-correcting
problem, as the beekeeper realizes that his hives are best placed in
"productive" areas, where there is more than sufficient forage.)

Wild bees have much shorter ranges, many have far shorter life cycles, and
may prefer a very selective set of blooms.
Honey bees have wider foraging ranges, and stand a good chance of helping to
pollinate (and hence propagate) "everything" blooming.

So the overt introduction of honey bees can, over a few seasons, create more
forage for the wild bees, and the proof that different species of bees have
happily coexisted since well before man climbed down out of the trees to
learn from that famous black monolith is the well-known point that bees of
different species pay close attention to each other's pheromones.

Footprint pheromone is well-known to warn off "themselves, conspecifics, or
other bees, which increases their overall rate of nectar intake."
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-007-0298-z

Even alarm pheromones get attention across species boundaries.
https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fsrep25693

Prior US presidents directed both the Dept of Agriculture, which manages the
national forests, and the Dept of the Interior, which manages the National
Parks, to listen to various ad-hoc committees, who have quietly and without
fanfare, put many "at risk lands" on the path toward eliminating invasive
species within government lands without undue collateral damage or excessive
cost, and promoting the spread of ecosystems that are more sustainable at
all levels.  I was appointed to, and have served on two of these committees,
one in VA to assist with the Blue Ridge Parkway/George Washington
Forest/Jefferson Forest area where I ran my VA operation, and a second
group, helping to manage the recovery/rehab of the Gateway national
recreation area, which includes everything from Sandy Hook NJ, northward to
Jamaica Bay by JFK.  (As a result of the efforts, Elk roam the Blue Ridge
again, and what was the world-infamous massive Staten Island Landfill is now
starting to return to "natural coastal maritime forest and shrub-scrub plant
communities".)

This experience was the basis for my coining of the phrase the "Pollinator
Protection Racket".  One need look no further than the 2007 USPS
"Pollinators" Commemorative stamp issue to see the lobbying power of these
well-financed groups - the 2007 stamps included a butterfly, a bat, a
hummingbird, and a bumblebee.  The stamps were issued at the height of the
scare-stories about "colony collapse disorder", and these lobbying groups
were leveraging the attention about the plight of honey bees and their
keepers to imply that honey bees could be effectively replaced by these
"forgotten pollinators", if only enough money was thrown in the direction of
their pet projects.  At one time, there was (briefly) an actual federal
mandate in place to eliminate honey bees from all federally-managed lands.
The fight continues over at the BLM, ongoing efforts to label honey bees a
"harmful invasive". Never mind all the cattle that are freely ranged on the
same lands, let's eliminate honey bees.  Sheesh.

https://about.usps.com/postal-bulletin/2007/html/pb22207/info2.6.5.html
https://tinyurl.com/yyyvxy3c
 
But bees can and do peacefully coexist without honeybees sending the native
bees into local extinction, and one does remove seed heads from the female
Japanese Knotweed plants to prevent their spread, as seeds are how new
non-contiguous patches easily get started, while rhizomes are only how
established patches might get larger.  Despite apocryphal anecdotes, there
is no data on the impact of pigs or their grappling with each other on
Knotweed spread.

Despite the simple and practical approaches that work in the field and
follow predictable metrics well enough to become the basis for pay raises
for successful work, the propaganda just does not stop.  For example,
long-term droughts clearly hurt all wild bees, as they may lack the flight
range to find nectar and water in times of drought.   But let's blame the
"invasive" honey bee for merely being able to survive under the more
challenging drought conditions!  Sure, let's phrase things so that the honey
bees are claimed to "out-compete" the species in decline due to the drought!
And when the data don't support the advocacy, just call it an "outlier" and
toss out the data  ("For the A. mellifera data, I removed two transects for
the year 2000 where almost no A. mellifera were ever observed, because their
inclusion led to outlier values for the standard error scaled to the mean."
Quoted from the supplemental file "ele12659-sup-0001-SupInfoS1.docx")

https://doi.org/10.1111/ele.12659

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