There are too many honey bees in the garden

The front garden of a good friend and neighbour of ours was recently commended by a passer-by for the pollinator-friendliness of his Michaelmas daisies. “So many bees. It’s wonderful”, was the observation. “Well done!” Yet Ivor disagreed. Like us, he sees Apis mellifera, the honey bee, not as a sign of thriving insect biodiversity but as a pillager that, in great numbers, is a livestock. He said that he thought of them as miniature battery hens or cows, grazing on his flowers against his wishes. My reading on the subject, which I detail at the end of this post, helps me appreciate his perspective. What follows is an attempt to explain why we’re viewing the honey bee with blinkers firmly in place.

Our relationship with the honey bee

Man’s relationship with this insect reaches back into antiquity. Traces of beeswax dating back to the seventh millennium BC have been found in Neolithic pottery vessels in Anatolia. Honey shows up repeatedly in the Bible, amongst which there is the fabled Promised Land of milk and honey. Ancient Egyptians had the bee as an insignia of kingship. Roman armies marched into battle with honey available for dressing wounds, so proven was the product’s antibacterial and antibiotic properties. The Merovingian royal emblem of the honey bee signified immortality and resurrection. Napoleon III’s revival of this resulted in his imperial standard being emblazoned with these golden creatures. The association between the Church and bees, honey, beeswax and candles remains undimmed even today; in some circles bees are considered sacred. And, of course, what’s a breakfast without honey?

Honey bees appear in art, ancient and modern. Take the example of the exquisite gold pendant from the Chrysolakkos necropolis in Malia, Crete, made between 1800 and 1700 BC, centrepiece of the antiquity exhibits in the Museum of Archaeology in Heraklion, Crete, which I had the fortune to see earlier this year. Two bees are imagined depositing a drop of honey in their honeycomb, the exhibition label explained. On their heads, a filigree cage contains a gold bead; small discs hang from their wings and from their stings. That it was made of gold speaks volumes.

We would be hard-pressed to find a museum of antiquity that does not have at least one exhibit related to honey bees, or an abbey (or cathedral) whose shop does not sell mead. The honey bee is ubiquitous. It is as if it is coeval with us, and deeply embedded within our culture. It is capable of exerting a chthonic tug on us, its Greek associations with the underworld endowing it with half-understood properties. Or it is at least liminal. This exploited agricultural asset still remains freighted with history, garnering respect, even awe. Our relationship with the honeybee, I’m arguing, is not simply transactional.

Honey bees are, of course, inescapable symbols of organisation and industry. They are symbolic stand-ins for man as a social animal. They demonstrate hierarchy, delegation and loyalty. They help explain us in our own gregarious body politic. In Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, Seneca, Shakespeare and Tolstoy there is admiration for their diligence. Learn from them, is the consensus. Manchunians know this well, their city having adopted the worker bee as a motif during the industrial revolution. The destroyer HMS Manchester was nicknamed the Busy Bee, the insect decorating its crest. Drinkers of the local Boddingtons beer had bee logos to accompany their bevie. Greater Manchester’s new fleet of electric buses run under the moniker of the Bee Network, with every face of each vehicle bearing a stylised bee inside a hexagon.

This very ubiquity has led us to consider the honey bee to be unquestionably ‘a good thing’. They are above reproach. If one is not allergic to their sting, what’s not to like about them and their honey? They practically symbolise a benign deity’s gift to mankind. Who would dare traduce that?

To seal this knot, the honey bee is the go-to insect for helping unveil the mysteries of nature for children. What better demonstration can one have of nature’s bounty than the flower-pollen-bee-hive-honey sequence? It is almost magical and certainly thrillingly fascinating. Few young minds can resist the spell these insects cast. Indeed, when an image of a bee is required, it is the smiley-faced, spear-tipped honey bee that we see, sometimes with stripy yellow-and-black hooped attire and a swag bag of honey slung over a jaunty shoulder. This infantilizing allure is so much less complicated than a black Megachile or a blood/leaf-cutter/mason/mining/nomad/plasterer/sweat or yellow-faced bee, each of which would introduce variety that would risk bafflement. Complexity is often problematic, isn’t it?

So when the cry went up that our pollinators were struggling in the face of habitat loss, pesticide/herbicide/fertiliser use, plus climate change, it was almost axiomatic that a helping hand was also A Good Thing. Faced with a countryside under assault, the movement to place honey bee hives in our towns was taken up with vigour. And, indeed, this was a good thing - at the time. Knowing that an apiarist had been granted space for one or more beehives, bestowed upon a site coveted green credentials. So in they went: into parks, cemeteries, back gardens, leisure centres, and onto office roof spaces. Most livestock needs adjacent grazing, but bees can fly off and find floral resources nearby; the immediate sterility of an asphalt roof is no impediment. They will thrive, the thinking went, as long as they are away from fertilisers, herbicides and insecticides; Britain’s gardeners (in the main) don’t use such things and, above all, thanks to a 50% reduction in the nation’s hedgerows since the Second World War (that’s an estimated 118,000 miles of hedgerow that has been grubbed up), our towns have the floral resources needed by these bees that our countryside no longer has. As a nation of gardeners, we can all come to the rescue of the bees … including our friend and neighbour Ivor. Perhaps above all, the survival of the very agents that pollinate the crops that feed us would be given a helping hand. These are powerful arguments. They certainly won me over …

… until I started looking closer.

Managed honey bees

We need to pinch ourselves to be reminded that honey bees are livestock. They are an agricultural achievement, the product of successful monocultural breeding that over millennia has muscled out the wild competition. At the height of summer, an average hive of bees may contain around 50,000 bees, so says an apiarist I know. Although each hive divides itself into a queen, a number of male drones and a mass of female workers, they are all the same single species, Apis mellifera. Add more hives, and the non-variety remains the same monoculture with no increase to a place’s biodiversity. Yet these female workers are hugely successful foragers that will travel substantial distances to obtain their floral nutrient.

This provision of nectar and the resulting pollinating activity is in general terms the same for all pollinators and all flowers. It happens with moths, butterflies, flies, bees and beetles. The honey bee is different in that collectively their colonies produce honey. Is our reverence for the honey bee in fact a displaced reverence for man’s own success at exploiting it? Are we merely applauding our own ingenuity while dressing it up in yellow and black hoops? Should we perhaps be pitying this insect as a programmed slave to our own mercantilism? No longer is it an emblem of nature.

Other pollinators

The honey from managed honey bees in Crete is glorious. (The island’s apiarists flaunt their produce in a fine display in each airport’s duty free area - something of a novelty.) Free of chemicals and available in different flavours that match the fields and woods in which the bees are kept, Cretan honey on the breakfast table provides a wholesome start to the day. Walking in open countryside, you won’t miss the hives that dot the island’s landscape. Our wild flower guide this May was an advocate, although by then he was preaching to the converted. Curiously, we occupied different ends of the same telescope: on the hedges and plants around our small country rental villa, we were seeing nothing but honey bees; in his flower-rich fields, he looked blank when we described that in Britain we could see (if we are lucky) 26 different types of bumblebee and a further two hundred and forty something species of wild bee. When we repeated this, we felt as if we were being regarded as heretics, and we fell back on praising Cretan honey.

This bafflement may be as ubiquitous as the honey bee itself. So, for the record, here are some approximate numbers for the natural, unmanaged pollinators that we have in Britain:

Wild (unmanaged) bees already exist in multitudes, a surprising variety of them, with sizes and colours to match. All are pollinators. Some are as successful at doing it as the honey bee. In addition, as if this isn’t enough, we have a bewildering array of other pollinating insects that also perform this essential service. They are the butterflies, moths, flies (including hoverflies) and beetles. In reserve, there is a surprising number of wasps that, whilst seeking nectar to fuel their other activities, are accidental pollinators. All these insects have to compete against the honey bee for the same floral resources.

Strictly speaking, the honey bee’s services are not required. There could be enough wild pollinators to do the job.

Resource competition

Most other pollinating insects have a narrow range of plants which they feed on (and pollinate). These wild pollinators have a short life span and are active in narrower periods of the year, timing their appearance to exploit their preferred flower resources. In contrast, the honey bee is active throughout the whole of the flowering season and is flower-agnostic: it will take pollen and nectar if it is available and more or less irrespective of the plant. Given honey bee numbers, this makes it a successful and voracious feeder. Not for nothing, do those who know its ways call it a honey cow.

“Over six months a single hive will use the resources that would otherwise have supported 200,000 wild bees”, Andrew Whitehouse of Buglife quotes, citing biologists from the University of Utah.

If our towns and cities were freed of their blanket coverage by honey bees, our parks and gardens might well be re-populated by the kaleidoscopic displays of wild pollinators - something we found when we went into the centre of Chania on the north coast of Crete. With honey bee hives restricted to the countryside, the island’s urban parks and gardens were abuzz with hoverflies, a happy counterbalance to the absence that we had noted in open countryside - and the diametric opposite of what one finds in the average urban English garden.

Back to the garden

Is there an equivalent to this ‘pillager’ in our garden? Is it the same as pigeons or starlings in the vegetable garden or allotment? What about foxes? These creatures are capable of taking resources or of being ‘messy’, yet they are ‘unmanaged’ and answerable to no-one. It’s easier to co-exist with these free spirits, isn’t it? A better comparison might be a neighbourhood cat that leaves an unwanted present. Like the honey bee, this is ‘managed’ and yet its owner allows it out untended - and they show up in our gardens. Why have we colluded with apiarists to allow this to happen unquestioned? (Or have apiarists assumed that right without consulting us?)

At the very heart of this debate is biodiversity. Why should we have to see numerous instances of the same pollinator in our gardens, parks and hedgerows when we could be seeing variety? It’s what nature has gifted us. To my eye, the honey bee is a drab-looking insect, and certainly not the one depicted in all those dashing yellow-and-black logos. Many of this country’s approximately 283 species of hoverfly, for example, are infinitely more pleasing to the eye while being no less effective as pollinators. Yet our unquestioning attitude towards honey bees is blinding us to the unintended consequences of our love affair with them. We need to wake up and stop smelling the honey.

Conclusion

For the purpose of disambiguation:

• The profusion of honey bees in towns is harming wild pollinators.
• This density in which honey bees are being forced to live is increasing the risk of honey bees themselves being exposed to disease.
• By tilting the scales in favour of crop pollination being done more by the honey bee than by wild pollinators we are exposing our own food web to greater risk.
• If we think we are ‘saving the bees’ by adding bee hives into our towns and cities, we are mistaken. It would be better to plant a diversity of pollinator-friendly flowers to attract the wild pollinators that already exist.
• If you are genuinely concerned about insect biodiversity, be prepared to consume less honey and/or pay a lot more for it.
• Don’t get angry with apiarists. They do great work. Instead encourage them to put their efforts behind the promotion of insect (and flower) biodiversity rather than the production of honey.
• These views are neither anti-bee nor anti-beekeeper; think of them as being pro-pollinator views, please.
• If you have an alternate view on this subject, please back it up with the science.

Source materials

Background reading

• Field Guide to the Bumblebees of Great Britain and Ireland by Mike Edwards and Martin Jenner; Ocelli; revised edition, 2012.
• Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland by Steven Falk; Bloomsbury, 2016.
• The Hidden Universe Adventures in Biodiversity by Alexandre Antonelli, Director of Science, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Witness Books, 2022.
• Silent Earth – Averting the Insect Apocalypse by Professor Dave Goulson; Jonathon Cape, 2021.
• The Insect Crisis – The Fall of Tiny Empires that Run the World by Oliver Milman; Atlantic Books, 2022.
• Colletes hederae - a Taste of the Future? by Mike Edwards; The Central Association of Bee-Keepers, 2022
• Britain’s Hoverflies - a field guide by Stuart Ball and Roger Morris; Princeton Uinversity Press, second edition 2015.
• British Hoverflies - an illustrated identification guide by Alan E. Stubbs and Steven J. Falk; British Entomological and Natural History Society, second edition reprint 2012
• Solitary Bees by Ted Benton and Nick Owens; William Collins, 2023
• Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps by Seirian Sumner; William Collins, 2022
• RES Handbook, Volume 7, Part 12: Ichneumonid Wasps (Hymenoptera: Ichneumonidae) by Gavin R Broad, Mark R Shaw, Michael G Fitton, Dawn Painter and Olga Retka; Royal Entomological Society
• The Fly Trap by Swedish entomologist Fredrik Sjöberg; Particular Books, 2014, in which the author suggests that the insects that Samson saw swarming from the lion’s belly would most probably have been the hoverfly Eristalis tenax