There are hundreds of kinds of native solitary bees that pollinate in the wild. They would do better without competition from honey bees. More important is to have native plants and wild places for them.
Honey bees are livestock. They are important for pollinating crops and producing honey. But we shouldn't consider them important part of ecosystem.
In my yard, I planted native plants and got more bumblebees and other native bees which are hard to tell from flies.
>Honey bees are livestock. They are important for pollinating crops and producing honey. But we shouldn't consider them important part of ecosystem.
Europeans brought them over centuries ago. Just becsuse they weren't a natural part back then doesn't mean that closing the bottle won't have devastating after effects similar to what they did in the first place.
There's a point where an invasive species simply becomes the "natural" and I believe we crossed that line quite a whole ago. I'm not entirely sure that modern nature could sustain only on those solitary bees in the 21st century just becsuse it worked in the 14th century (you know, assuming we don't devastate nature anymore so than we've done the past century).
First, nobody is seriously proposing to outlaw or eliminate livestock honey bees. They're too valuable for agricultural service. Of course, thinking about what is good or not good for commercial bee colonies is a lot like thinking about what's good or not good for battery-farmed pigs; in fact: what's "good" in our natural ecology for livestock pigs has turned out to be a calamity across North America as feral pigs multiply uncontrollably. Either way: the bees aren't going anywhere. New stressors of bee colonies will simply raise costs for beekeepers.
Second, the idea that the extinction of feral honey bees would be "devastating" is directly falsifiable, because they have been eradicated from North America, in the recent past. The world did not end; in fact: you didn't even notice.
What you want to be paying attention to are our diverse native pollinators, including a variety of native bees. If you want to help our insect ecology, get some mason bee tubes. Unless you really like fresh honey, don't bother with the honey bees.
1. I'm aware. We'll see how they adjust to climate change, but all this was mostly a theoretical to emphasize how important their duties are. Despite the name they aren't just there to make sure our foods are sweet so I wanted to point that out. We'd have better luck going back to trying to eliminate mosquitoes over trying to eradicate honeybees.
I didn't "notice" because people who are experienced in this field went out of their way to correct this. I'll just say that I'm not a huge fan of this narrative "it isn't affecting my everyday so it clearly doesn't matter". That's how so many things slip down to a slope of "we'll fix it when it's too late".
>What you want to be paying attention to are our diverse native pollinators, including a variety of native bees
And you don't think a massive reduction of any one pollinator would have drastic effects just because you care about this "native" aspect? Again, these bees have been here for over 400 years. Where's the line?
I'll be honest and just say you're making a mountain out of a molehill here. I just wanted to pitch in that honeybees are important to the ecosystem and you're reacting as if I'm saying only honeybees matter. You as someone who understands the basics of such pollinators weren't necessarily my audience here. Those who think that bees just make honey and are a "luxury species because we don't need honey" were. And I hope that point got across to that audience.
I don't think it's true that you didn't notice because of a huge effort to fix the problem, because I don't think that effort happened. Again: honey bees are invasive in North America. Where there are feral honey bee colonies today, they trace to escapes from husbanded colonies. From the late 1980s until probably the 2010s, there were very few feral honey bees at all (and for some stretch of that, there were none).
I think you're thinking I'm calling back to the "colony collapse" scare of roughly ten years ago; I'm not. Here's a paper:
Also worth noting: that paper establishes a history of honey bee introduction into America, and they have not in fact been here for 400 years (at least, according to that paper; I don't have a dog in this hunt, it wouldn't matter to me if they'd been here for longer).
Here's a fun paper from back in the day where they found honey bees in the Channel Islands off California, and immediately set to work eradicating them:
Honey bees are livestock. They are important for pollinating crops and producing honey. But we shouldn't consider them important part of ecosystem.
In my yard, I planted native plants and got more bumblebees and other native bees which are hard to tell from flies.