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The Deep Middle


Gardening & writing in the prairie echo

Honey Bees Compete With Native Bees

2/25/2019

5 Comments

 
Honey bees may harm native bees. This is the sentence that launched a thousand arguments on social. For years media has brainwashed us into beekeeping as a means to help pollinators, primarily because honey bees are so easily identified and so well studied. Just consider, as well, how much the honey bee serves as an icon for pollinators and bees in general -- most every "bee" image you see is one that's gold and black, with dripping honey and honey comb hexagons. But it's not fair or ecologically correct to equate a foreign species with 4,000 native species. As our awareness grows about how ecosystems work, we're having to think in different, uncomfortable ways as we challenge comfortable preconceptions. Honey bees are livestock, part of an agricultural machine and so are an agricultural issue; native bees are an ecological issue.

Below are resources on the above subject so that you can become empowered and educate others. In the very least it's a list and a link you can give to people when the conversation turns deeper.


1) The Bee Apocalypse Was Never Real
Honey bees are not under threat of vanishing. Colony collapse disorder isn't what we think it is.


2) Competition Between Managed Honey Bee and Wild Bumble Bees Depends On Landscape Context

This one's behind a paywall, but you'll see links to other related articles down the page to broaden the discussion. From the abstract that explored two generalist groups (honey and bumble):

Honeybees might outcompete wild bees by depleting common resources, possibly more so in simplified landscapes where flower-rich habitats have been lost....Adding honeybees suppressed bumblebee densities in field borders and road verges in homogeneous landscapes whereas no such effect was detected in heterogeneous landscapes. The proportional abundance of bumblebee species with small foraging ranges was lower at honeybee sites than at control sites in heterogeneous landscape, whereas bumblebee communities in homogeneous landscapes were dominated by a single species with long foraging range irrespective of if honeybees were added or not.


3) An Overview of the Potential Impacts of Honey Bees to Native Bees, Plant Communities, & Ecosystems...

This is from the Xerces Society. Solid summary of all the issues that focuses on working with beekeepers for the best apiary placement.


4) Massively Introduced Managed Species & Their Consequences for Plant-Pollinator Interactions

From the abstract: First, we review the impacts of major insect and plant MIMS on natural comm-unities by identifying how they affect other species through competition (direct andapparent competition) or facilitation (attraction, spillover). Second, we show how MIMScan alter the structure of plant–pollinator networks. We specifically analysed the posi-tion ofA. melliferafrom 63 published plant–pollinator webs to illustrate that MIMS canoccupy a central position in the networks, leading to functional consequences. Finally,we present the features of MIMS in sensitive environments ranging from oceanicislands to protected areas, as a basis to discuss the impacts of MIMS in urban contextand agrosystems.


5) Bees Gone Wild: Feral Honey Bees Pose a Danger to Native Bees and the Ecosystems That Depend on Them

A professor of entomology looks at what happens when honey bees go rogue: "It’s these feral honeybees, especially, that pose a challenge to nearly all native pollinators since honeybees forage throughout the growing season for nectar and pollen from a wide array of flowers, building up vast numbers. When honeybee competition reduces the number and diversity of native pollinators, native plants also can suffer since they may receive less efficient pollination."


6) You're Worrying About the Wrong Bees

Another intro for those dipping their toes into the topic, complete with source material cited at the end.


7) Foreign Bees Monopolize Prized Resources in Biodiversity Hotspot

Here's a study that focuses on southern California -- as you may know, California is one of if not the richest state in native plant diversity. For this study keep in mind that many native bees have evolved to uses specific native plants for pollen to feed their young. "New research from the same team found that honey bees focus their foraging on the most abundantly flowering native plant species, where they often account for more than 90 percent of pollinators observed visiting flowers."


8) The Role of Honey Bees in Natural Areas

A recoreded video webinar with The Xerces Society and Pollinator Partnership.
Non-native managed and feral honey bees negatively affect native plant communities by disrupting the co-evolved pollinator networks, and reducing seed set in native plants. They also preferentially forage on non-native plants (which they likely co-evolved with in countries of their origin) and thereby encourage invasiveness. Honey bee interference with native plant communities and their pollinators are found to therefore have compounding ecosystem effects.


9) Native Bees Increase Crop Production, Flowers Near Apiaries Carry More Bee Viruses


"One of the most important studies looked at 41 farms on six continents that grew almonds, blueberries, buckwheat, cherries, coffee, cotton, kiwi, mango, passionfruit, pumpkins, strawberries and watermelon. The results blew up the conventional wisdom. Wild insects increased fruiting in every single farm where they were present, but honeybees only produced a significant increase in fruiting 14% of the time. There wasn’t a single crop for which increased fruiting caused by honeybees outperformed that of wild bees. On average, wild bees delivered twice the bump of honeybees."


10) Focus on Native Bees, Not Honey Bees

Compelling summary by an ecologist on how native bees can engage the public's imagination -- and empathy -- even more so than honey bees, and how that will spur greater ecological awareness as we rewild urban and rural areas.  Don't raise more turkeys to save birds = don't raise more honey bees to save pollinators.


11) Will Putting Honey Bees on Public Lands Threaten Native Bees?

This thorough and long piece puts into context the issues of honey bee agriculture and our dependence on them for pollination services, as well as the threats they may pose to some of our last wild places -- including threats to both native bees and plant communities. Here's a study on how honey bees displace native bees and reduce wildflower reproduction in wild areas.


12) Buzz Kill -- A Short Video

Native bees are at risk across the United States. “Buzz Kill” — winner of the 2020 Yale Environment 360 Video Contest — depicts the beauty and key ecological role played by these bees and shows how industrialized agriculture threatens endemic bee species.


13) Honey Bee Hives Decrease Wild Bee Abundance, Species Richness, and Fruit Count Regardless of Wildflower Strips

"
Wild bee abundance decreased by 48%, species richness by 20%, and strawberry fruit count by 18% across all farms with honey bee hives regardless of wildflower strip presence, and winter squash fruit count was consistently lower on farms with wildflower strips with hives as well."


14) Beyond the Honey Bee: How Many Bee Species Does a Meadow Need?

"Our work shows that things that are rare in general, like infrequent visitors to a meadow, can still serve really important functions, like pollinating plants no one else pollinates." Less common bees visit plants other bees don't -- the more plants you have, the more bee species you need. These rarer bees provide critical pollination services and are also the most at risk of extinction due to habitat loss, climate disruption, etc.


5 Comments

Our Gardens Are at the Center of Vanishing Bees and Butterflies — and in Saving Nature.

2/8/2019

2 Comments

 
I can’t remember the last summer when I had to clean off my windshield with a squeegee at the gas station. It seems like a decade since I had to make an emergency pit stop, making the seven hour drive to my folks two states away every July 4, to clean bug guts off the front of my car. Perhaps worse, as an avid gardener with over 5,000 square feet of lush beds filled with dozens of flower varieties, I’ve noticed a steady decline in buzzing visitors — especially since 2012 when my area received roughly half an inch of rain over the summer.
Undoubtedly, you’ve seen the articles about monarch butterfly populations dropping and the insect apocalypse, and maybe you’ve added more blooms to whatever small spit of land you have. While the issues we face are much larger than what’s happening in our urban and suburban gardens, the insect die off starts with the cultural mentality of human supremacism made evident just on your drive to work or the grocery store.

Every city looks pretty much the same. We start our day in homes where lawn makes up the vast majority of landscaping, then make our way past businesses and schools and churches where lawn makes up the vast majority of landscaping. And snug tight against the walls of most structures is a thin line of defense — scattered shrubs and a few flowers marooned in unnatural oceans of wood mulch. If you were a pollinator all of this habitat would be useless. It fact, it’d be lethal — there’s almost no source of food or a place to raise your young.

Humans are superb colonizers — we’ve made urban landscapes efficient for our uses. But we’ve left out the nature that pollinators need, and without pollinators we’d soon find ourselves without blueberries, squash, melons, apples, oranges, strawberries, almonds, and a seemingly unending list of food. We’d also find ourselves without many flowers we enjoy in parks or right out the front door.
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There are some 4,000 species of native bee in the U.S. and a significant portion are specialists who time their emergence from nests to coincide with the bloom appearance of specific flowers. These bees forage for pollen from native plants they evolved with over millennia, caching egg-filled holes in the ground or in old wood with pollen for their future progeny. Without specialist bees — who depend on specific plants just as those plants depend on these specific bees to reproduce — ecosystems begin to falter. As flowers don’t receive pollination they set less seed, and entire fields lose diversity and gaps open up, potentially paving the way for invasive weeds to move in or for less beneficial flowers to take over.

The case of bees is only one example of tens of thousands of insects that invisibly swarm our world. We know of monarchs — how they require milkweed since their caterpillars can only eat this one plant. As farm fields have grown and as prairie has been plowed away, milkweed and the grassland habitat monarchs and a plethora of other insects rely on has helped clean up our windshields but also starved the environment. Just take songbirds. While their young are in the nest for roughly two weeks the parents are feeding the chicks a steady diet of spiders, beetles, moths, butterflies, bees, caterpillars, and more. Some bird species may require hundreds of insects a day while they are growing up. If you haven’t noticed, our cities are becoming quieter — the spring songs once so loud and diverse just a decade or two ago have become muted and more subtle.

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What do home gardens or business landscapes have to do with any of this? In a time when wildlife is vanishing in perceptible fashion every spit of land matters, just as every plant matters. Native plants support many times more insect biomass than exotic plants imported from Asia or Europe because native plants have a shared evolutionary history with insects and other wildlife. Further, when we use lawn as default landscape mode we might as well be paving over everything with asphalt, because lawn has no flowers — and it certainly has no shrubs or small trees which create hedgerows, perhaps some of the best bee nesting habitat around.

In my neighborhood front yards are small and most families kick a ball around in the back, so that front lawn goes unused. Every week someone mows it down, making sure not a dandelion blooms or a milkweed takes root. What if we took even half of these small spaces and made our garden beds twice as large? What if we had drifts of short meadow flowers and grasses? What if instead of street after street of monochrome flat green, we created networks of wildlife refuges, islands of habitat and freeways of food and shelter? Our smallest native bees can travel only a few blocks before needing to refuel on nectar — and where can they find it when the landscape is lawn or hosta or wood mulch?

If we can’t provide for the nature that literally sustains us at home, how can we ever hope to steward that nature beyond our front door into parks and farm fields and marshes and deserts and forests and prairies? Our urban gardens matter — maybe not because they can prevent an “insectageddon,” but because our gardens reflect what we think of our natural world and how we see ourselves either as a part of the wild web, or as a near-sighted species who lacks compassion for the smallest among us.

My son is six months old and every day I think about the world I’m giving to him. While he’s smiling at me, rattle in hand, I’m apologizing to him in words he can’t yet understand but that, unfortunately, he will one day comprehend in more ways than my heart can bear. But soon enough we’ll walk the garden and identify as many insects as we can, learning about the plants they need for pollen or to lay their eggs upon. We’ll plant the flowers. We’ll listen to whatever birds we can, naming them and singing back. We’ll understand together that conservation, compassion, activism, and faith begin at home and quickly spill out on the backs and legs of insects making their way home, too. We choose the world we want to live in, and for better or worse, each choice affects every other human and non human life around us. I don’t know about you, but as much as my heart breaks under that sense of responsibility, it also feels amazingly liberating and empowering — especially when I’m down on my knees watching a butterfly dance around the center of an aster bloom.

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    Benjamin Vogt's thoughts on prairie gardening in Nebraska. With a healthy dose of landscape ethics, ecophilosophy, climate change,  and social justice.

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Monarch Gardens is a prairie-inspired design firm. We specialize in lawn to meadow conversions as well as urban shade gardens.

Employing 95% native plants, our designs are climate resilient, adaptable, and provide numerous ecological benefits while artistically reflecting wilder landscapes.
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