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).