My Garden Rant Guest Rant: Honey bees suck

No honey bees here...

This post was originally published on Garden Rant (click here for the original post), if you haven't been to Garden Rant, check it out- it is one of the best garden blogs on earth (a little pun there for you).  Thanks to Susan Harris and the writers at Garden Rant for the opportunity to vent a little.

That’s right, they suck.  Someone had to say it.

If you want honey bees (Apis mellifera) for say, I don’t know, honey- that is great.  No problem.  If you have converted a heterogeneous, beautiful landscape of native plants and wildlife into a monoculture for crop production, and every plant requires pollination in the same, narrow, discrete window, honey bees are for you.

However, if you are interested in any of the following:  biodiversity, bee conservation, pollinator conservation and diversity, wildlife gardening, native plant landscaping, getting your native plant garden pollinated, or just plan learning about the really cool insects in your garden, than yes, honey bees suck.

Somewhere along the way of promoting awareness of pollinators and their role in plant, wildlife and bee conservation, people wove in honey bees.  This is really unfortunate, so I am trying to set the record straight. 

In our garden I have collected over 150 species of bees and “pollinators” and one of those species is honey bee.  In fact, honey bees in our garden are pretty uncommon, especially outside a narrow time of day and time of year.  The diverse species of native pollinators provide so much more than pollination to our garden.  Just as a small example, the larvae of the flower fly (Spilomaya spp.), a yellow jacket mimic, pictured below, are effective predators of aphids in the garden (including our vegetable garden).

Not a bee, but a fly (whose larvae eat aphids), trying to look like a yellowjacket!

I venture that honey bees are pretty ineffectual pollinators of most things- especially native species.  As far as colony collapse disorder, although academically interesting, don’t be fooled: it is not a conservation issue.

Honey bees are native to Eurasia (where most of our noxious weeds are coincidentally from), and share no evolutionary history with plants in the US, and in particular with plants of the intermountain west of Montana.  Consequently, they are not good nor effective pollinators of the diverse native plants we have here. They only will pollinate over a narrow range of dates and temperatures, and can only exploit certain sizes and shapes of plants.  Again, too narrow of a range to be effective. 

Too cold for honey bees

For example, in the Missoula valley, and in my garden, spring arrives with sagebrush buttercups (Ranunculus glaberrimus), that flower in late February or early March.  They often arrive when snow still covers the ground, most of days are barely above freezing, and the blooms can be rapid.  This time of the year, nary a honey bee is in sight or even able to survive- these blooms predate the hives trucked in from the south.  Native flowers come and go; blooming across different days (and some only at night) from snowy spring until late October, long after the honey bees head back down south or hunker down trying to survive.

No honeybees at night, either

Even as temperatures become more appealing to honey bees, morning and evening can be too cool for them to do much of anything beyond surviving.  Sure, on a warm July afternoon, honey bees will be out in force pollinating some things, but they don’t do much.   

Leave the milkweeds for the big fellas to pollinate

Our native pollinators, including moths, butterflies, bees, flies, beetles, ants, and others are so diverse in terms of habitats they occupy, body sizes and morphology, that than can pollinate and exploit a diversity of native plants that no truck load of honey bee hives consisting of identically sized and shaped honey bees could even imagine.

Don't count on a honey bee to pollinate this shooting star!

So, yes, honey bees are great for producing honey.  They are great for pollinating commercial crops (though their value is probably grossly overstated), but they have little place in conservation and little room in my garden.

Just another moth doing some pollinating in our garden, while imitating a yellowjacket!