Year after year, there is news that highlights
some sort of honeybee doomsday scenario.
Here's one from 2023 that's pretty alarming.
Nearly half of all honeybee colonies in the U.S. died last year
Of course, this is a huge deal.
These insects are vital for food production in the United States.
So unsurprising they've become the face of a larger movement to save the bees.
Except honeybees don't really need saving.
Now, don't get me wrong.
I've got the mouse pad.
I am all in. We should save the bees.
But our hyperfocus on this celebrity of the species leaves out thousands
of others, hundreds of which are actually at risk
of being lost forever.
When someone says “bee,” there's a good chance
your mind jumps to the honeybee.
I kind of consider them a gateway bee because it's the bee that's in all
the illustrations in our children's book, and they're really cute.
Sarah Kornbluth is a field researcher at the American Museum of Natural History,
where we shot this interview.
She studies bees.
You look at them under the microscope,
their eyes are fuzzy as well as all of their bodies.
They typically have stripes that are there's either
like a darker color, which is sort of a dark brown or black.
And they're also sort of like either an orange or a lighter brown color.
Krystle Hickman is a community scientist and photographer who specializes in bees.
Honeybees are kind of where I started.
So that was my gateway bee.
These insects are so important to agriculture that they've been declared
a state insect in 17 US states, yet
they're not native to the United States.
Settlers actually brought honeybees here in the 1600s,
which is why their full name is European honeybees.
Farmers kept honeybees for wax to make things like candles.
And of course, honey.
Well, it might be hard to think of an insect as domesticated.
That's exactly what they are.
They're essentially farm animals closer to a chicken
or a dairy cow than any wild animal.
Over the years, as farming changed, so did the role of the honeybee.
Many farms today look like this:
acres and acres of the same type of plant that needs to be pollinated at the same time.
Thousands of honeybees can make that happen.
They can overwinter in mass and then be ready to collect pollen
and nectar the next spring, as soon as plants start to bloom.
They are hungry and they are ready.
And so honeybees became a vital gear in a billion dollar industry.
Today, about a third of all the food Americans
eat come from plants pollinated by European honeybees.
We're talking $15 billion
worth of crops things like almonds, apples, broccoli, cranberries.
You get the point.
I hate filming in public.
I look like such a creep.
With so much of our food supply on the line.
Obviously everyone was more than a little concerned when around 2006
beekeepers started reporting massive colony loss.
And there are a few reasons for this.
One is the pesticides that we put on plants which can poison the bees.
Another is disease, parasites, or mites.
Even the stress of being transported around the country can be a contributing factor.
Over the years, demand
for pollination services from honeybees has continued to rise
and the fees for those services has more than doubled since 2004.
So it's no surprise that everyone quickly rallied
behind a cause aimed at saving the European honeybee, but...
saying “save the bees”
and using a honeybee as representative is like saying you want to save the birds.
But using a chicken as representative.
These are domesticated animals where caring for them.
Their populations are not globally threatened.
From a global perspective, despite losses in some countries,
colonies are up 80% since the 1960s.
Essentially, honeybees support a billion dollar industry
that in turn supports them.
They have more than enough attention and money.
Thousands of other bee species do not.
Most of what you know about bees is probably based on what you know about
European honeybees because of our long and close relationship with them.
Now, forget all about that.
So there's over 20,000 species of bees in the world
and the United States, that number is a little over 4000.
And so many look nothing like the bees we picture like orchid bees
with their super long tongues in iridescent colors, or
this parasitic cuckoo bee with bluish markings from Africa.
And these stylish looking leaf cutter bees found in the western U.S.
Some of these bees are as small as a grain of rice.
Others can be bigger than a quarter.
But what's probably most surprising is 90% of native
bees in the United States don't live in colonies or hives.
They're more likely to be solitary burrowing and would soil
or plant stems and of the ones that are social.
Unlike honey bees, native bees in the U.S.
don't overwinter as a colony.
The next year's queens are the ones that will overwinter
and all of the current year bees, the workers and the queens
and the drones, the males, will all die once the weather gets cold.
And none of the ones in the U.S.
produce actual honey.
But they're still really important.
Native bees are estimated to pollinate 80% of flowering plants around the world.
Many of them, like bumblebees, use a method called buzz pollination,
which is when bees vibrate their bodies in order to shake pollen free.
European honeybees can't do this, but a lot of native species can.
And it's vital for plants like tomatoes, eggplants and peppers.
If we look at just the United States, native bees
pollinate an estimated $3 billion worth of food.
And we're quietly losing them.
With so many species, it's hard to say exactly how many native bees are disappearing,
but individual species are definitely declining.
One assessment found that 50% of leafcutter bees
and 27% of mason bees are considered at risk.
Other estimates say that one in four American Bumblebee species in the U.S.
are threatened and may be at risk of extinction.
Just like honeybees, pesticides are often to blame.
But the way we farm hurts them too.
One of the main reasons for their decline is land loss.
Grasslands, where many native bees thrive, are being rapidly destroyed
across the country, often to make way for farmland.
Iowa and Illinois, for example, lost over 99% of their natural prairie grass
landscape over the last two centuries, mostly to agriculture.
This means there's less diversity and fewer native plants for native bees to feed on.
And then when honeybee hives are brought in
to pollinate that farm, they crowd out those limited resources.
They have like about a two mile range
so they’ll actually spread out to - if there are native areas around -
they’ll spread out to those areas as well, and they’ll actually outcompete the native bees for resources.
There's also the effects of climate change, fires and drought,
which can wipe out native plants and change bloom times.
As the number of native bees continues to decline
we're still not entirely sure what a world with fewer pollinators might look like.
It definitely would not be great.
If you think about the disappearance of native bees, it coincides with the disappearance of native species
of plants, native soil, microbiota, everything that eats bees
or everything that eats pollinated fruits or seeds or nuts.
We're talking about the loss of everything that depends on pollination in the food web.
But native bees just don't have the same attention or funding as their domestic counterparts.
The answer is not “do away with the non-native honeybee.”
That would be catastrophic.
Native bees on their own can't replace what honey bees do on the farms that we've created.
But the better option for everyone
may be to opt for more bee diversity by limiting pesticide
use and attracting these native insects to our homes and farms.
So we see that when you have not just honeybees, but also
native species present, you do have more complete pollination in the fields.
You know, a zucchini or cucumber is curving
because not all of the seeds have been fertilized.
So the more complete your pollination is really,
the more symmetrical and wonderful and big your fruits can be.
That means embracing what we've been told is messy and wild.
So I think people need to kind of look at their yard as part of an ecosystem.
Of course, all of this can help the honeybee, too.
But saving the bees doesn't just mean saving our domestic celebrities,
but saving a diverse spectrum of wild pollinators that don't need us
to raise them as much as they just need us to leave things be.
One of the biggest threats to bees and other
pollinators is a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids.
The good news is they're already banned in Europe
and bills are slowly working their way through the U.S..
New York just passed the Birds and Bees Protection Act, which bans
the use of these pesticides, except when using them on invasive species.
And nationally, there's a bill called the Saving America's Pollinators Act.
It's been introduced,
but as of the making of this video, it's still stalled in Congress.