Sweeter Than Honey

Saving our native bees

Text by Glyn Bowerman

We have a love of honey bees in North America. Beyond what they provide for us, there is a sense of industriousness, teamwork, and productivity we admire. When we say “busy as a bee,” we’re probably thinking of honey bees. But our native bees and pollinator species are much more diverse than their famous cousins. They have different lifestyles, needs, and habitats. And our obsession with honey bees is pushing them out, and jeopardizing their very existence. We asked Sheila Colla, a conservation scientist and associate professor at York University, about how to save our native bees.

Glyn Bowerman: It seems like there’s a general awareness of the important role pollinators play in an ecosystem. Does that encourage you as a conservationist?

Sheila Colla: It does. I think it’s the result of a lot of work, though. Many years of people like myself getting out there. But there’s some concern around that framing, because it implies we should only protect things that are useful to us, because they provide some sort of ecosystem service to us, or our environment. There are a lot of wildlife out there that are just doing their own thing who also deserve to exist, even if they’re not providing a service.

A common eastern bumblebee on a woodland sunflower. IMAGE/ Sheila Colla

GB: You’ve said we take a special liking to honey bees, sometimes to the detriment of the environment. Can you explain what, exactly, is the problem with the cultivation and preservation of the European honey bee?

SC: There’s been a lot of confusion around the beekeeping industry and the decline of bees. The bee industry has its own struggles to make as much profit as possible. Those struggles include disease outbreaks, a lack of places to bring millions of honey bees in hives to feed off when they’re not pollinating—because crops pollinate at different times of the year, so hives will be moved around to different crops, and they need space to feed on pollen and nectar in that time. And we’re talking about tons of bees, like you heard about the truck falling over with millions of bees on it. So, the honey bee industry has their own issues, and people confuse that with what’s going on with their native bees.

Managed bees are more exposed to agricultural pesticides, so most people think that’s the major problem. But our native bees have different concerns. In Canada, we have 865 species of native bees. Most of them are solitary, many of them cannot sting you. None of them make honey. Most of them aren’t even yellow and black—we have a lot of silver, blue, and green bees. So a lot of what people think about in terms of bees is basically incorrect, if you’re thinking about the number of actual native bees we have. And the kinds of threats they’re facing are different. We haven’t studied all of those species, but for the ones we have studied, like bumblebees, we know climate change and introduced disease from the managed bee industry are probably the top two threats to wild populations. More locally, you get things like habitat loss and pesticide use. But, in terms of describing patterns of loss, climate change and introduced diseases (kind of like COVID for bees) are the main threats. When we introduce managed bees, they bring diseases our native bees have not co-evolved with, so it can hit them pretty hard, which is why we think the rusty patch bumblebee is now endangered.

A green sweat bee on an echinacea flower. IMAGE/ Sheila Colla

GB: Can you tell us a bit more about the rusty patch bumblebee?

SC: In southern Ontario, we have about 20 species of bumblebees. And in the ‘70s, ‘80s, early ‘90s, the rusty patch bumblebee was one of the most common species. If you saw 100 bumblebees in the field, about 15 of them would have been the rusty patch bumblebee, it was the most common species. It emerged early April and finished up in October—different bumblebee species come out and finish up their colonies at different times. They had a really long colony cycle, so it was a really important pollinator of both spring and fall plants. And we have records of it from downtown Toronto, St. George Street, from student collections in the ‘90s. Now it’s basically disappeared. The last time it’s been seen in Canada was when I found it in Pinery Provincial Park, I found one individual in 2005, and one individual in 2009, and it hasn’t been seen since in Canada. There are some spots in the midwest, and a couple in the Appalachians where it still seems to be hanging on. But, in general, it’s very rare now and very patchy, and has declined from its massive range along eastern North America very quickly since the ‘90s.

GB: What do we lose if we lose a species like the rusty patch bumblebee.

SC: We lose resiliency. We have a bunch of bee species out there: some emerge early in the spring, some visit long tube flowers, some visit flat flowers, some visit blue things, pink things, yellow things. And there’s probably more than one thing visiting each one of these flowers at any given time. But, as we lose these bees, we might start losing some of these pollination services. And, as we go through climate change, we know having resiliency is important in these systems. Having a little bit of overlap so, if there is a flood, maybe a different species that nests high above ground will still be out there to pollinate. Every single species we have is important to keep our ecosystems intact.

A common eastern bumblebee. IMAGE/ Sheila Colla

GB: A lot of municipalities and regional governments have programs in place to help, if they can, preserve species like the rusty patch bumblebee and other pollinators or, as you say, even non-pollinators. What are we getting right, and what do we still need to understand about this attempt at preservation?

SC: There’s still a lot of conflation around honey bees versus native bees. When the Toronto pollinator plan came up, it was just someone who cared about honey bees who went to their councillor saying, “I think the City should do something about bees.” And it was only because the City staff knew, from long relationships with myself and other colleagues that, if we’re going to do a pollinator policy, we should consider native bees in that. And the Toronto policy is actually one of the few that doesn’t focus on the European honey bee in North America. There’s a lot of policy out there that promotes honey beekeeping. A lot of times, when you see a ‘save the bees’ policy, it means open up space for urban beekeeping. And cities are not deserts for biodiversity, when it comes to insects. Cities can be refuges from climate change a little bit—people water their plants, if a tree gets broken in a storm it can generally be replaced. So it’s a bit buffered from the smaller things related to climate change. Generally, they’re pretty good places in terms of pesticide use, so insects tend to be more protected. And they used to be places where there was not a lot of managed bee diseases. But as urban beekeeping has grown, and it’s grown largely because people are worried about bee populations and think this is a sustainable thing to do, now we have high densities of European honey bees in cities which have limited flowers available. But we also have these diseases coming in harming our native bees. So the biggest thing we need to learn is distinguishing between beekeeping and bee conservation, because they’re not the same thing.

A half-black bumblebee. IMAGE/ Sheila Colla

GB: Is it possible to do both in the city?

SC: Not with the same policies. You can try to mitigate some harm. We do that a lot with livestock: we test manmade livestock for diseases regularly, if there is an outbreak, we manage that. But for some reason honey bees are exempt from all of that. In general, people just think they’re good, so we can have five hives on the top of the CBC building, those bees can go out and forage in their 15-kilometre radius, and there’s not too much concern around what diseases they’re spreading or how they’re impacting native wildlife. In general, livestock tend to be more contained.

GB: In in my own little corner of the city, I have a small backyard, and my partner and I have tried to plant species that attract pollinators. What do I need to know about my garden, and how can I best encourage a diversity of species?

SC: Planting as many native plants as possible in whatever area you have available to you, and trying to get things that bloom early in the spring and later in the fall—the critical periods are when the bees come out of hibernation in the spring time, when they’re on the verge of starvation, and when they’re building up their fat bodies to go into hibernation in the fall, which is why goldenrod and aster are such important things for hibernating insects and also for monarchs about to fly over the Great Lakes. And insects generally go towards what’s more common in an area so, if you’re trying to select some plants, it might be worth seeing what your neighbours have, and getting a few of those as well. Bumblebees are landmark navigators. Honey bees rely on the sun, and do the waggle dance, and they communicate to each other where all the best pollen and nectar is. But bumblebees will memorize a landscape and learn one or two types of flowers. So they’ll be like, “I’m a common milkweed bumblebee pollinator,” and then they’ll just go to all the common milkweed, they’ll make a trap line and go around to all the common milkweed plants until those are done for the season, then they’ll choose another plant. So, even if you only have two milkweed plants, but your neighbour has two, and so on, that really helps these insects, because they’re out searching certain types of plants. I really like trees and shrubs, because they have a small footprint. So, if you don’t have a lot of space, you can have hundreds of flowers in a single tree or shrub, even though it doesn’t take up a ton of space.

A common eastern bumblebee on an aster. IMAGE/ Sheila Colla

GB: Sorry, you said “waggle dance?”

SC: Yeah, honey bees use the position of the sun, go back to their colony, and they do a dance that somehow uses the position of the sun to describe a direction that bees should fly to go and maximize whatever the best pollen and nectar sources are at that given time. And, as far as we know, native bees don’t have that kind of communication, which also makes honey bees really good competitors and why they’re so successful in places where they’re not supposed to exist, because they actually tell each other where the best plants are. Whereas our native bees need to go out and find it themselves.

BIO/ Glyn Bowerman is the editor of Ground. He’s a Toronto-based journalist who writes about urban affairs, and he hosts the Spacing Radio podcast.