Oh Pete, talk about putting the cat amongst the pigeons!

There was a contentious debate about this issue a couple of years ago in a (highly urbanized) local municipality. They were developing a huge acreage as a mixed use community space and the council was surprised at the presentation of a lobby group objecting to the inclusion of a small demonstration apiary, claiming that honey bees were displacing/out-competing and threatening the wild and native pollinators, and were the major reason wild pollinators and bees were in decline. Ergo, get rid of honey bees and that solves the problem.

The lobby group had some facts right (honey bees forage over a much wider area than most native pollinators). But there is much more nuance to the issue than is typically presented.

As Jerry points out, honey bees have been on the continent for upwards of 400 years. But the decline in wild bee and pollinator populations is fairly recent. That suggests not just short term or honey-bee-centric observation but that something has shifted in the last 50-100 years that no longer allows the wild bees to prosper as they once did. Attention then must shift to: degrading and disappearing habitat, the ubiquity of agri-sprays in the environment, urbanization, forestry use and management, vast monocultures as an agricultural approach, "weed" control.

And many native pollinators and bees forage on specific plants. Often not plants favoured by honey bees. So they are not always in direct competition, and this is not necessarily a zero sum equation. Indeed many introduced plants are helpful as they provide new forage opportunities.

On top of the usual pressures (which honey bees survive because they are possessed of attentive beekeepers), wild bees and native pollinators often have very short flight ranges, so are much more vulnerable to forage loss, forage spacing and diminution. 

I have told the story often of our back yard. We moved in and I began expanding and renovating the garden beds, surprised to note that there was not one earthworm, bug or beetle. The very bourgeois previous homeowner had maintained low maintenance, non flowering shrub borders, and had herbicided and pesticided 6 ways from Sunday. It took three years of revitalizing the soil and planting bird and insect friendly borders...but in time we found our yard thronged with insect pollinators of all kinds: more than I had ever seen. They are especially fond of the Eupatorium (Joe Pye Weed, a NA native) and fennel (old world plant). If you plant it, they rebound. The honey bees that feed in our yard represent a small fraction of the insect foragers...in spite of there being a very high density of honey bees in our area.

Hence the success of the Bumblebee Conservancy in England, who found that bumblebees needed large and closely spaced forage patches to prosper. 

The lesson here is "a rising tide floats all boats". Provide high quality and high frequency forage in the landscape and both native bees/pollinators and honey bees prosper. They are not really in direct competition, they can coexist, and the bulk of the problems for native bees and pollinators are man-made.

Or to put it another way, removing the honey bee from these disrupted landscapes will not fix what is affecting the wild pollinators. Take the honey bee away and disregard the rest, and wild bees and pollinators will still starve and die.

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