The Quiet Mystery of Native Bees
When you think about saving the bees, I’m guessing you picture the honey bee. Its iconic stripes have been plastered across news headlines and conservation campaigns for years. As a result, people have taken up its cause and rallied to its defense, and this collective concern is a wonderful thing.
The honey bee is struggling right now; with fewer flowers to forage and too many harsh chemicals, it’s a challenging time for all pollinators.
But according to the Xerces Society and their Bug Banter podcast, honey bees aren’t in any real trouble—it’s the native bees that need our help.
“There are literally millions of hives all over the world, probably tens of millions and potentially even hundreds of millions. … But from that perspective, honey bees are in a situation right now where they’re still fairly resilient.”
The honey bee isn’t going extinct. We won’t let it, because we need it for agriculture. We actively manage and replenish honey bee populations. Native bees don’t have that same protection, which is exactly why they need us.
Honey bees aren’t native to the US—they’re an introduced species. We brought them here from Europe in the 1600s for their honey and wax, and later started using them for their pollination services. We found ways to store honey bees in boxes and transport them all over the country to pollinate crops.
Our agricultural system is now dependent on the honey bee, and that’s why you see so many headlines about them. They thrive in our current monoculture system—one big field, one crop, one type of flower. A hive of 10 to 50,000 honey bees can figure out how to gather the pollen from that one flower and do it over and over again.
We use them so extensively they’re now considered livestock, not wildlife.
We’ve essentially turned the honey bee into a tool of our industrial farming complex. It’s become yet another victim of our wrong idea that nature is just there for our use and has no life of its own. We took the honey bee out of its home range in Europe, because we wanted the products of its labor. And then we turned it into a commercial resource by trucking its hives around whenever we wanted a field pollinated. It works for us now.
Our “care” for the honey bee is strongly tied to what it does for us.
We’ve linked it so tightly with our farming industry that the honey bee’s decline is an agricultural concern. There are ways around this though.
Our native bees are still wild and free, and pollinating plants the same way they did for ages before the first honey bee arrived. If we think from a more sustainable farming perspective, we could let our native bees pollinate our crops.
“There are ways to grow crops such that there’s enough native habitat nearby that we can have our native bees do a vast majority of the pollination services.”
In this way, we’d become partners with the bees. We’d provide the habitat and allow them to do what they do naturally. Our crops would grow, and the bees would still be wild.
We have close to 4,000 native bee species in North America, and of those, only about 50 are the other commonly known bee—the bumble bee. That means there’s an immense bee world out there that most of us have never even noticed. In a small wilderness area with healthy habitat, you could expect to find hundreds of different species.
You might be surprised to learn that 75% of bee species in the US are solitary. They don’t live in hives, they don’t answer to a queen, and they don’t make honey. They build individual nests, mostly underground, and go about their work alone—living, laying eggs, and gathering food as individuals. They often nest close to each other, but they still operate independently.
Bumble bees, mason bees, and sweat bees are just a few of our native bee species, and they do need our attention. A number of bumble bee species are either federally listed as endangered or considered close to extinction.
While we’ve been following the headlines about one introduced species, thousands of native bees have been going about their work—quiet, solitary, and free. They don’t make honey we can harvest or live in boxes we can move around. They simply do what they’ve always done, pollinate the native plants that have evolved with them over many thousands of years.
There’s a powerful mystery to a fish that migrates across oceans without human guidance. And there’s an equally powerful, if quieter, mystery to bees we know nothing about who go about their pollination without any input from us.
We’ve put all of our focus on saving the wrong bee. The ones that really need us have always been here, nesting underground in places we’ll never see, following patterns we haven’t mapped, living according to rhythms that have nothing to do with our agricultural industry.
Maybe the first way we can help native bees is simply to know they exist. To appreciate that their value is far greater than the service they provide to us.
Like wild salmon navigating oceans, native bees carry on essential work beyond our control, our counting, our understanding. There’s beauty in that mystery, and that mystery is wildness—wildness we need to protect.