From Randy Oliver:
"2. " Colony densities in some locations have become too high, facilitating
the spread of disease and exacerbating problems with poor nutrition. If it
was this hard to keep my honey bees healthy, I’m not sure I can bear to
think about the wild bees. "
This comes up a lot when I do public science ed type presentations...I have had to think through a balanced, fact based answer.
First and foremost: honey bees arrived on this continent nearly 500 years ago (!) and spread pretty rapidly. For centuries, there were honey bees, native pollinators and lots of other insects in abundance...the elder of us in this forum have mentioned the (vanished) insect-covered windshields/evening fields full of fireflies of our childhoods. What has changed??
What has changed is: widespread development, landscape alteration, forage degradation as well as disappearance, and ubiquitous use of agri-sprays, which have proved to be persistent in the environment.
Many of the native species that evoke concern have different forage preferences than those of honey bees, and have very limited flight ranges: if you took all the honey bees away tomorrow, it would not solve the problem native species have, which is starvation and toxicity. As Dave Goulson discussed in his book detailing efforts to support bumblebee species recovery in England, we need bigger, non-toxic patches of forage, more densely positioned across the landscape.
This debate is similar to the salmon/seal debate here in the Salish Sea area. As salmon stocks crash, the fishing industries advocate a wide spread cull of seals, who love to feed on salmon. But killing all the seals will not change what is limiting the salmon, which is: overfishing, catastrophic loss of spawning habitat (logging, development), climate change and possibly toxins in the oceans.
The salmon's challenge is....us humans and how we alter the planet. Ditto for native pollinators. Suggesting the remedy for salmon is shooting seals is knee-jerk, simplistic, and misguided. So is suggesting getting rid of honey bees will save native pollinators.
That said I agree parking huge lots of mobile bees is for many reasons a problem for all the pollinators around them. But that is an artificial (and relatively recent) situation we can address without banning honey bees as a species.
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