It’s an amazing experience to put on a bee suit and see a hive,” says Andrew Whitehouse, head of operations for the invertebrate conservation group, Buglife. “There’s suddenly thousands and thousands of bees flying around you. But you know,” he adds, “beekeeping doesn’t give you a connection to nature.”
That may surprise some readers, but Whitehouse’s point is that a beehive is as natural as a pasture full of grazing sheep and, like a lot of livestock, domesticated honeybees also have a negative impact on actual wildlife. They compete with wild pollinators for nectar and pollen, and transmit diseases to them, too.
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Invertebrate ecologist and campaigner Dave Goulson made a similar point in a video he posted on social media earlier this year. Some companies have run campaigns in the past, he noted, saying they are going to help save the bee by encouraging all the farmers who supply them to keep more hives. This was, he went on, akin to trying to reverse bird declines by keeping more chickens.
A booming honeybee population
And just to be clear, like chickens, honeybees are doing extremely well around the world. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the number of managed beehives globally is around 100 million and increased by 85 per cent between 1961 and 2017, while honey production grew by 181 per cent over the same period.
In the UK, the growth has been even more dramatic and the number of beehives has more than tripled from approximately 80,000 in 2008 to more than 240,000 today.
It’s a moot point as to whether honeybees are as environmentally harmful as sheep or chickens, but over the past five years or so it has become increasingly clear that where they are present in dense concentrations, other pollinators are not faring as well.
Buglife has calculated that a single hive needs two hectares of wildflower habitat to feed it during the year, and in the UK – and other parts of Europe – we know that kind of habitat is severely lacking.
In short, many more mouths to feed but the same amount of food resources, in the shape of nectar and pollen, results in some insects going hungry.
Threats to native bee species
The science backs this up. For example, one study from 2019 carried out in Paris found the pollinating activity of bumblebees, solitary bees and beetles negatively correlated to the density of honeybee hives in the locality.
“Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that honeybees might outcompete wild pollinating fauna by exploiting flowering rewards,” say the authors of the paper, published in the journal PLOS One.
More recently, scientists in Vienna found a high degree of overlap in the ecological traits – such as the size of their tongues and the distance they travelled to forage – between rare wild solitary bees and bumblebees in highly protected areas within the city. Such similar adaptations could mean more competition for the same kinds of flowers.
“Our conclusion is that beekeeping should not continue in these areas or that density of hives should be reduced,” says Sophie Kratschmer of BOKU University’s Institute of Zoology. “However, the flower supply needs to be increased in urban green zones outside these areas, and suitable alternatives for beekeepers provided.”
Other studies have found density of honeybee hives vastly outweighs the carrying capacity of many cities.
Kew Gardens’ Phil Stevenson, for example, showed in a paper published by the New Phytologist Foundation that London shouldn’t have any more than 7.5 hives per hectare, but an organisation called Apicultural – which creates and manages pollinator habitat for corporate clients – has said parts of the city could see densities of 50 hives per hectare or more.
An average of 10–30 is probably more normal, but even these exceed what is regarded as sustainable.
Apicultural’s owner, ecologist Mark Patterson, says the problem of over-supply of honeybees is a result of companies offering to help large businesses with their Corporate Social Responsibility by installing beehives on rooftops or land they own. At the same time, the number of small, hobby beekeepers – who understand that you can’t have too many colonies – is diminishing, and commercial concerns are taking over.
“A lot of them don’t realise it can do more harm than good,” says Patterson. “They think it’s ‘Win, win, win,’ but it’s not.” He says many local authorities are not happy with the situation either, and could restrict how many hives are installed.
Commercial beekeeping
BBC Wildlife contacted two companies: Alvéole, a Canadian company that (in its own words) “leverages bees on more than 2,200 commercial buildings to help companies increase tenant satisfaction and engagement, earn green building credits, and monitor real estate’s impact on nature and biodiversity”; and PlanBee, which is based in Scotland.
Both Avéole and PlanBee install beehives on their clients’ real estate to provide environmental brownie points with their customers as well as with their employees. We asked each company about the concerns expressed by conservationists.
Lynn Hall, commercial and operations manager for PlanBee, whose clients include Glengoyne Distillery, commercial property company Knight Frank and technology company Siemens, says when they engage with a client, they don’t simply offer to install beehives.
“Our head beekeeper is very passionate about responsible beekeeping, and if it looks as if there are too many hives in an area, we will suggest something different,” Hall says. “Alongside [any new hives], we will encourage companies to do other things, such as wildflower meadow sowing and providing planters to support the hives and other pollinators.”
Responding to this, Whitehouse says that for every new hive, it’s estimated that two hectares of new wildflower habitat needs to be created. “From what I know, these companies cannot be putting in that amount of habitat to compensate for those extra bees,” he adds. “Just planting a few flowerbeds or a road verge is not enough.”
Hall refers to one project PlanBee carried out for an offshore wind energy company in Grimsby, where they were asked to transform a quarter of a hectare car park that was no longer in use. “We have turned that concrete space into a modular garden that is nice to look at for the community, is benefiting wild pollinators and has four honeybee hives,” she says.
Company employees are encouraged to get involved with checking the hives, if they wish. “Beekeeping provides a form of meditation for some people,” Hall adds. But according to Buglife’s figures, if the company put in four hives on the car park site, they would have needed eight hectares of wildflower-rich meadows to provide for the hives’ 150,000 or so bees (a single hive can contain 30–40,000).
Responding to this, Hall describes the two hectares figure as a useful “rule of thumb” but says “honeybees can forage several kilometres from their hive and well beyond the immediate two hectares.”
The other company, Alvéole, did not put someone forward to be interviewed, but did provide a statement in which it emphasised the importance of its work in reconnecting people with nature. Its client projects include ‘wild bee habitats’ and ‘biodiversity education’, as well as the installation of beehives. According to Avéole’s statement, “Our projects generate biodiversity data, including pollinator activity and habitat indicators, that provide benchmarkable, actionable insights for our customers”.
Whitehouse emphasises that Buglife is not anti-beekeeping and that companies offering hive installation services are not dishonest or concealing bad intentions, they’re just “misguided”. He says the explosion of interest in honeybees in the UK appears to have come about as a result of campaigns, run by the likes of Buglife and others, highlighting the threat to wild pollinators, but the message has come to represent the domesticated species.
Still, as Whitehouse also points out, the main driver of pollinator decline in the UK is loss of habitat. “There are issues around pesticides, pollution and climate change, but the number one problem is that there are just not enough flowers.”
Top image credit: Getty
