Tove Danovich is a writer in Portland, Ore., and the author of “Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them.”
Opinion Backyard bees disfigure yards in ways we are only beginning to comprehend
By Tove Danovich
April 13, 2023 at 6:15 a.m. EDT
In 2006, honeybees began dying in large numbers because of a mysterious illness that became known as colony collapse disorder. Many people rallied to help; countless cities, including New York, Minneapolis, Denver and Los Angeles, legalized urban beekeeping. Urban hives sprung up in backyards, on balconies and on office rooftops. Notre Dame cathedral, Madison Square Garden and Airbnb headquarters in San Francisco all have their own hives.
The honeybees came in, and native pollinators started disappearing. Now even some urban beekeepers are sounding the alarm. Urban environments have a surprising number of flowering plants — but not enough for a hive on every corner.
One study last year of beekeeping in Switzerland also found the number of urban hives has become “unsustainable”; the country lacks sufficient flowering plants to support them. A newer study of beekeeping in and around Montreal found that hives in the French Canadian city increased from 238 in 2013 to almost 3,000 in 2020. As each hive can contain up to 80,000 insects, that’s a lot of bees to plunk down into an ecosystem.
Before I got bees, I rarely noticed what insects in my yard were doing; once they arrived, my 25,000 bees demanded all of my attention. They had to be treated for diseases and stopped from swarming. Beekeepers need to check hives regularly in case they need to add more space or provide chemical treatments to stop mites and other problems that can kill a hive.
As spring gave way to summer, I realized a much bigger party was taking place in the backyard. When the holly trees flowered, the bees covered them in such numbers that the buzzing sounded like music. I heard the neighbor kids stop their game of Marco Polo to yell when bees landed in the pool to get a drink. The bees were in the air, on the ground, sometimes on me, their yellow legs thick with pollen. Every time I walked past the hives, the smell was intoxicating — sticky honey and a hint of musk that reminded me of old leaves.
I also began to see the other insects that made my yard home for the first time. Not just the charismatic butterflies and dragonflies but also leggy wasps, tiny hovering flies and fuzzy bumblebees. Many visited the same flowers as the honeybees I’d brought in; I couldn’t help but wonder what effect the honeybees were having on them.
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According to the Montreal study, nothing good. As honeybee populations rise, the nearby availability of pollen for other insects decreases. There’s often just not enough food to go around. The study also found that smaller, native bee populations were particularly affected by an influx of urban bees, likely forcing the native bees to travel longer distances to find food. It’s a bit like gentrification: When new honeybees move in, life gets harder for the native pollinators that were there first.
Though we think of all bees in our midst as equally wild, honeybees operate more like livestock — they’re a species bred, managed and moved by humans all over the world. Honeybees are trucked all over the United States to pollinate monoculture crops such as almonds, because they are very good at what they do. But native species that specialize in pollinating certain crops — say, squash bees that fit into squash flowers — play an important role in biodiversity. “Having a high diversity of bees,” said McGill University researcher and pollination ecologist Gail MacInnis, who conducted the Montreal study, “means more of our plants get pollinated.”
Yet, unlike most farm-raised animals that are provided with food, honeybees forage from the surrounding landscape. This puts them in direct competition with native insects whose populations are also struggling.
Overcrowding in urban areas accelerates this trend. That crowding increases as more aspiring beekeepers, proud of their little jars of artisanal sweetener, tend to their ever-growing hives. “Some neighborhoods are so saturated that each of these colonies struggles to make enough food to sustain themselves,” said Andrew Coté, who helped legalize beekeeping in New York City in 2010.
When I brought my honeybees home in their pre-started colonies, sliding combs full of pollen and baby bees from the travel box into their wooden hives, I inserted tens of thousands of insects into an established ecosystem.
Setting up a hive might not be as bad as paving a meadow to put in a parking lot, but for the native pollinators, it certainly crowds the neighborhood. When hives fail, beekeepers can replace them. “We can’t replace native bees by ordering a package in the mail,” MacInnis said.
When my honeybees didn’t make it through the winter, I didn’t try again. Instead, I put in more native plants and left brush piles and leaves for native insects to shelter in. I might not get honey from these pollinators, but my fruit trees now benefit from pollinators of all shapes and sizes. Even without the hives, they bear more apples and plums than I can eat by myself.
