Adding honeybee hives increases pressures on native bees
An iconic practice originally designed at helping bees is the
introduction of beehives. In the past few years, citizens, companies, or
collectivities have started to welcome beehives in their facilities and
their number has consequently sharply increased particularly in cities
such as in London, Paris and Berlin (Lorenz & Stark 2015; Stevensonet al. 2020) and in natural areas (Herrera 2020). For example,
the number of beehives in Paris has been estimated from 600 in 2015 in
Paris to more than 2600 in 2019
(French
ministry of Agriculture). But Apis mellifera , the
honey-producing domestic bee is not the sole bee; to date, 20 000 bee
species have been described worldwide, most of them being solitary and
nesting in the ground (Michener 2007). Historically, Apis
mellifera has been transported from Europe across the world for honey
production and has been many times associated with the decline of local
populations of bees (Thomson 2004; Valido et al. 2019).
Therefore, artificially supporting Apis mellifera , which is not
threatened of extinction, does not help the hundreds of wild solitary
bee species (Colla & MacIvor 2017; Geldmann & González-Varo 2018;
Baldock 2020). Instead, increasing the density of honeybees could affect
wild bees through competition for floral ressource, pathogens spillover
or disruption of pollination networks (Geslin et al. 2017;
Mallinger et al. 2017). Over the past few years, the body of
literature highlighting negative effects of honeybees on wild
pollinators has sharply grown (Herbertsson et al. 2016; Magrachet al. 2017; Henry & Rodet 2018; Valido et al. 2019; Hunget al. 2019; Ropars et al. 2019, 2022; Angelella et
al. 2021; Renner et al. 2021). For example, as evidenced in
Paris, the increase in the number of hives has resulted in exploitative
competition for floral resources exerted by honeybees on wild
pollinators (Ropars et al. 2019) and same trends have been found
in natural reserves or flowering rich habitats in France, Spain and the
United States (Torné-Noguera et al. 2016; Henry & Rodet 2018;
Hung et al. 2019; Ropars et al. 2020). Therefore,
following the framework of Ford et al. (2021), focusing policies
and conservation initiative on the sole honeybee is the first example of
misplaced conservation of bees through a) the misinformation of public
on the decline of honeybees and their importance in the maintenance of
ecosystems, b) the waste in funding and resources potentially allocated
to wild pollinators, c) the direct harm on biodiversity through
competition (Colla & MacIvor 2017; Geldmann & González-Varo 2018;
Egerer & Kowarik 2020).