> and groups looking to ban honey bees from managed lands...

And that's the essential nonsense of it all.
If the lands are "managed", then they are trying to "recreate" what they
hope to be "natural conditions", and that means it becomes a Disneyfied
landscape.

Case in point - Floyd Bennett Field, down at the far south end of Brooklyn,
NYC - there's a very large raised-bed community garden there over 150
members.  It is a decommissioned airfield, it was NYC's first airport.   Now
it is part of the "Gateway National Recreation Area", all federal land.  The
"Area" includes everything from Sandy Hook in NJ to the marshlands of
Jamaica Bay at the edge of JFK airport.  Because it is an old airport, and a
former military airfield, there's tons of toxic stuff in the soil, and
digging might not be the best idea.  (The sequence goes: methane, ethane,
propane, butane, pentane, hexane, heptane, octane -  just keep stacking
those carbons!   Let's just say that the environmental "cleanup" is ongoing,
and that "Dead Horse Bay" and "Great Kills" are still extremely accurate
names.)

Back before 2010, when beekeeping was "illegal" in NYC, the Park Naturalist
at Floyd Bennett field let the "beekeeping community", (we all claimed to
keep our bees OUTSIDE the city, of course) store supers in an empty hanger
there, assemble boxes and frames using their air compressor and air nailers,
and paint them using the same compressors, she could not do enough for the
crazy gang of several hundred novice beekeepers and 2 older guys trying to
ride herd and not take casualties (the late John Howe, and I).  The Park
Naturalist even took classes with the rest, and had two hives of her own, at
the north end of Runway 19. 

But that did not last.  

Her honey bees had to go, by formal written edict of the Park Service.

The antique aircraft museum could stay, the ice-hockey and skating rink
could stay, the helipad, choppers fuel tanks, and support facilities for the
NYPD helicopters could stay, the Marines could stay, the NYC Dept of
Sanitation could still train new dump-truck drivers on the runways, people
could play paintball, and fly drones, and radio-controlled airplanes, and
launch model rockets, and camp there, the National Guard could even train
there, you name it!  

But no honey bees.  They weren't "native", and the native bee folks had
gotten the ear of the US National Park Service, who runs the place.  

And I could even stay!  Prior to Hurricane Sandy ripping my tracking solar
parabolic trough array and the roof off my hanger, and me losing everything
to the brick walls, Bee-Quick was made at Floyd Bennet Field in a small
corner of an enormous hanger I shared with a circa 1945 Boeing C-97
Stratofreighter being lovingly restored.  (The aircraft survived the storm.
Giant ratchet straps, really big D-rings on lag-bolts in the concrete, and
the inherent aerodynamics of a cinder block if the four 4,000 horsepower
Pratt & Whitney 28-cylinder(!) engines weren't running.)

The community garden also had a pair of hives, and the Park Naturalist and I
helped to camouflage them, so they got their own Tupperware garden shed with
entrance tubes run up through the roof as their "bee house". The Park
naturalist was on the community gardeners' side, and the owner of those
hives had nowhere else he could keep bees, as he lived in an apartment, so
the order was essentially ignored.

But bees were officially verboten!  

Cause they weren't a "native species".

At a decommissioned airport where the runways and hangers are still there.

Sheesh.

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