How much should we care about honeybee losses?

Recent media stories have focused on honeybees, raising doubts about whether bees need our help. Examples: The bees are fine,  Honeybees are not in decline, and Honeybees invaded my house.

One might infer from the articles (or minimally the headlines) that bee problems are overblown. But are they?

There’s a two-part answer to this.

One, honeybees have seen big die-offs that have made farming much harder, but despite this, honeybees are ok. They’re domesticated, and they’re not endangered. A colleague of mine once put it this way: “Honeybees are sort of like tractors; they’re really important for our food production, but they’re not native bees.”

Two, there is indeed a big problem with native bees. The U.S. has 4,000 native bees, and many are hurting. For instance, 25% of bumblebees are experiencing big population drops. The rusty-patched bumblebee is already on the endangered species list, and the American bumblebee and Southern plains bumblebee may soon join it.

Some solutions are good for all bees

Should we fret about this bee v. bee conundrum? No, but there are couple of things to keep in mind going forward:

There’s a pesticide that kills them all. A class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, or “neonics” for short, threatens wild bees and honeybees alike. Restricting neonics is good the all bees, period.

Bees need habitat. Small patches can help, as bees can easily flit from yard to yard, garden to garden. This gives us all a role we can play; here are some planting tips.

If you want dig deeper (a bad pun, since some bees burrow), here’s my letter (scroll to the very last one) printed in the New York Times, and here’s a past bee article on this site.

Let’s save the bees.