IN 2006, beekeepers across the United States began to notice something odd. When they checked in with their colonies after the winter, they found their hives almost empty. While the queen and the brood - eggs and larvae - remained, worker bees had all but disappeared, leaving the hives unable to survive.
In the course of a normal winter, it is standard for about 15% of managed colonies to die off, but in 2006, beekeepers started seeing that number nearly double. Scientists gave the phenomenon a name - Colony Collapse Disorder - but could not identify a cause.
THE Save the Bees movement was born.
IN 2013, Time Magazine ran a cover story titled, "A World Without Bees: The Price We’ll Pay if We Don’t Figure Out What’s Killing the Honeybees.” The article described the drastic losses in honeybee populations since 2006, positing multiple causes for the mystery of Colony Collapse Disorder.
At the date of publication, Time Magazine’s readership was more than 3.3 million people. The beepocalypse reaches the mainstream.
IN 2021, Angelina Jolie posed for a highly publicized National Geographic shoot covered in hundreds of bees. They crawl up her neck, land on her cheeks, gather at her bustline. The headline, “Angelina Jolie embraces bees—and female beekeepers as environmental guardians,” centralized the figures of the honeybee and the beekeeper within a narrative of environmental conservation.
The same year, Beyoncé told Harper’s Bazaar that she had installed hives on her roof.
IN 2024, I began working on this story.
In the course of my research, I spoke to Nelson Williams, Apiary Manager at the University of Minnesota Bee Lab and he told me something surprising.
I WAS shocked. I had just spent the last few days reading twenty years of media coverage telling me the exact opposite.
“They are essentially livestock," Williams elaborated. “A managed species like cattle or pigs, whose main purpose is in pollination services of food crops. Thinking of them as you would a wild animal in danger of extinction is misleading.”
Colony Collapse Disorder is still not well defined. And in fact, there are more hives now, in 2024, than there were in 2006 when the phenomenon was first reported in the United States. Globally, the number of managed hives has increased by more than 25% in the last 10 years.
That is because, despite the losses experienced beginning in 2006 - and the losses beekeepers have endured every winter since the practice began - beekeepers are able to replace dead colonies relatively easily. They can make up casualties by splitting colonies and breeding or acquiring new queens.
Entomologists like Marla Spivak of the University of Minnesota Bee Lab, the world-renowned institution where Nelson Williams works, have spearheaded breeding programs selecting for queens with traits to promote overwintering success. These queens are hardier and more resistant to parasites and mites, suppressing disease loads within colonies. And gentle to work with as well.
JUST because overwintering losses are well managed and compensated for, however, does not mean they do not cause beekeepers financial and emotional difficulty. “But that’s an agriculture story, not a conservation story,” observes Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, in a New York Times article from 2023. “There are now more honey bees on the planet than there have ever been in human history.”
In addition to his work as the Bee Lab’s apiary manager - where he collects colony health metrics such as population, brood patterns, signs of disease, pollen stores, and honey production - Williams teaches an introductory beekeeping course to the public called Beekeeping in Northern Climates. The first thing he tells his students: “You’re not saving the bees by being here.”
“For some, beekeeping is a business, or a hobby, or a pathway through which to connect with the natural world,” he tells me. “It is not, however, inherently a force for good. Acquiring a hive might yield you some delicious honey from your backyard, but it will not transform you into a steward of the environment.”
Further, the explosion in the density of hives can actually have a detrimental impact on a much less visible population: the 20,000 other species of bees around the world. You’d be forgiven for not knowing they existed. This invisibility is part of the reason that their numbers are actually declining. The popular and academic focus on honeybees and phenomena like colony collapse disorder, while important, obfuscates the often very different issues facing wild bees.
IN ORDER to grasp how we have collectively misunderstood the “save the bees” narrative, we must make an important distinction between these two categories of bees: the domesticated, honey-producing apis mellifera and every other species of bee around the world.
WITH a more nuanced grasp of the diversity of pollinators, let’s return to the reporting above to understand how public perception renders wild bees invisible. Take this statement from the 2013 Time Magazine article:
“In June, a Whole Foods store in Rhode Island, as part of a campaign to highlight the importance of honeybees, temporarily removed from its produce section all the food that depended on pollinators. Of 453 items, 237 vanished, including apples, lemons and zucchini and other squashes. Honeybees “are the glue that holds our agricultural system together,” wrote journalist Hannah Nordhaus in her 2011 book, The Beekeeper’s Lament.”
Separate, these two sentences may be true. But placed one after another, they convey a falsity: Honeybees alone do not account for the over 50% of produce that Whole Foods removed. Pollinators as a whole do. Honeybees are important pollinators of many crops, but they do not do their work alone. And, crucially, they are much more closely studied and managed than any other species of pollinator.
That same Time article on the plight of bees focuses entirely on the honeybee until the last paragraph, where it tosses out as an afterthought, “For all the recent attention on the commercial honeybee, wild bees are in far worse shape.”
THE National Geographic article acknowledges native bees, yet focuses almost entirely on those that produce honey, which make up only 4% of all bees. In positing beekeeping as an act of environmental stewardship, the article perpetuates the narrative that beekeeping is the solution to global bee population decline.
SO, what are the causes of global bee decline? Like most wild animals, native bees are primarily experiencing drops in population due to loss of habitat, and with that, loss of plant biodiversity.
30-50% of native bees depend on the pollen of a specific plant species, so if those plants disappear from their surroundings, then the bees disappear too. And vice versa.
Over the past century, wild land of all types - forests, plains, wetlands - has disappeared due to urbanization and agricultural intensification. In a study tracking the decline in bumble bee populations in the midwestern United States over the past century, using data from the Illinois Natural History Survey to build a historical baseline, researchers discovered that half of all bumblebee species historically found in Illinois have either severely declined or disappeared altogether.
Accelerated decline occurred from 1940 to 1960, which coincided with a period of concentrated conversion of wilderness into agricultural land. Illinois represents a “worst case scenario for loss of native habitat to farming and urban development,” with the second lowest percentage of natural areas remaining out of any state in the country.
IRONICALLY, when plant biodiversity shrinks, wild bees become more susceptible to competition for food from non-native honeybees. The intensification of hives, now particularly popular in urban areas like New York City, means that wild bees often lack the floral resources necessary in order to survive.
“If you overcrowd any space with honey bees, there is a competition for natural resources, and since bees have the largest numbers, they push out other pollinators, which actually harms biodiversity,” explains Gorazd Trusnovec in the New York Times. Trusnovec operates a company that installs and manages hives for individuals or companies in Slovenia, where beekeeping is part of the country's fabric.
Trusnovec has begun to reduce the number of hives he operates, despite high demand from customers, because of the honeybee's impact on other pollinators. Not only do they create competition for available food, but also often pollinate invasive or nonnative plant species that push out the already finite native floral resources wild bees depend on. Honeybees are less particular about the types of plants they pollinate and very efficient at removing pollen from an area, leaving other pollinators at greater risk of starvation.
Further, honeybees also have the potential to spread pathogens and pests to native bee populations, who do not have beekeepers managing those factors through breeding and chemical means. Their dense hives can be breeding grounds for viruses that wild bees have no defense against.
OF COURSE, wild bees and honeybees face many of the same threats, most human-created or exacerbated. These have been crowned:
SCIENTISTS aren't yet sure how climate change will effect wild and managed bees alike. But they are already started to see that extreme fluctuations in temperature disrupt foraging patterns. Wildfires , droughts, and floods accellerate losses in habitat. And all of these factors change when and how the plants that pollinators depend on bloom. Some plants, under climate stress, have even begun to change their scents, becoming unrecognizable to their pollinators.
WHEN I asked Nelson Williams what can be done to rebuild the populations of native pollinators globally, he asked if I meant as individuals or society as a whole.
"If you, yourself, really want to help the bees, the best thing you can do is plant native plants."
Collectively, we have a much bigger project than that, however. Turning our gardens into pollinator habitats can only take us so far. We must completely rethink how we use space and what types of spaces have value.
"I have a dream of a massive rewilding of urban centers in the United States," Williams shares. "Promoting the growth of native plants, which would bring back the native pollinators, which would in turn bring back animal and plant species all the way up the food chain. A whole network of habitat corridors across the entire country so that these species could bounce back and thrive.”
Saving the bees, all of the bees, is not an isolated effort. The solution is inextricably linked to our ability to imagine a livable future for ourselves on this planet and the wholesale shifts we must make in how we move, eat, communicate and grow.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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