North America’s bee populations are in trouble, but don’t blame the honey bees. While some people argue that an overabundance of managed honey bees – those raised to help pollinate crops and produce honey – is causing native bees to disappear, the evidence doesn’t support the claim.
What is true is that populations of many species of bees, including honey bees, are struggling.
Half of all honey bee colonies die every winter in the United States, on average. Commercial beekeepers experienced their highest losses on record – more than 60% of their colonies – in the winter of 2024-25. Overall, one-fifth of pollinators in North America are considered to be at risk for extinction due in large part to habitat loss, rising temperatures, extreme weather, diseases and pesticides.
We study bees and other vital pollinators, and we can tell you that there are good reasons to love all the bees. In fact, they’re essential.
Why care about pollinators?
Bees help farmers grow the foods people love to eat, everything from apples to almonds.
Along with other pollinators – such as flies, butterflies and moths – bees help nearly 80% of flowering plants produce fruit and seeds, which in turn support birds and other wildlife.
About 75% of the world’s agricultural crops, including vegetables, fruits and tree nuts, benefit from pollinators. Additionally, pollinators contribute to production of feed for livestock and fiber crops, such as cotton.
In the United States, pollination by insects contributes $34 billion to the economy.
Among the pollinators, honey bees are the most important for agriculture crops. Managed honey bees, which beekeepers can move from field to field, are particularly essential in intensively farmed areas that lack the natural habitat to support wild bees.
So, why are people concerned about honey bees?
Honey bees were introduced to North America by European settlers in the early 1600s.
Since honey bees are not a native species, the most common concern you might hear is that they will outcompete wild bees for pollen and nectar. This is typically portrayed as a numbers game: If resources are limited, the more bees present on the landscape, the less food there is to go around.
Honey bees live in large social colonies and are adept at capitalizing on high-quality patches of flowers, leading to the concern that this species in particular may have a rapid, outsized effect on native bees that share the same food.
Managed bees can also carry viruses and other pathogens that may infect native bee species. Because viruses are shared among colony members, viruses can persist in managed honey bee colonies and then be spread to other bees that forage on the same flowers.
Scientists and farmers also have a concern about economic sustainability if farms are too reliant on honey bees alone for crop pollination. Threats to honey bee health and high colony mortality in the United States could put crops at risk if other pollinators aren’t in the vicinity to do the job.
Why don’t studies find a honey bee impact on native bees?
Humans actually know little about bee interactions. The U.S. has more than 4,000 native bee species, but there is enough data to estimate population sizes and ranges for less than half of them. Meaningful data examining the effects of honey bees on other species are even more scarce.
In a recent analysis, we found that only 15% of 116 published studies on resource competition involving honey bees measure how competition from honey bees affects the survival, reproductive output and long-term population trends of native species.
The majority of published studies on honey bee and wild bee competition address different versions of a narrow question: Do honey bees and native bees visit the same plants?
Because honey bees are “super generalists” that thrive worldwide well beyond their native range, most scientists would predict that the answer to this question is a resounding “yes.”
However, about half of the research suggests that honey bees don’t change the way native bees go about their day at all. From the perspective of a wild bee, the honey bees simply don’t exist in their world.
Different bee species can coexist with very little evidence of direct interaction. An analysis of bee communities measured across diverse agricultural, urban, grassland and forested environments found the abundance of honey bees and the abundance of native bees were positively associated about five times as often as they were negatively associated. In other words, rather than landscapes supporting one bee species at the expense of another, the same habitats support both.
Calls to restrict honey bees from certain locations also often miss a key reality: Native bee hot spots and urban and commercial beekeeping rarely overlap.
Beekeeping is anchored in agricultural lands. North America’s rarest bees thrive in environments like the Sonoran Desert – habitats that are poorly suited for managed colonies.
If competition occurs, it is typically the product of agriculture practices that strip the land of flowering plants that bees need.
Research that has artificially introduced hives into natural areas like the high Sierra – places beekeepers don’t typically go – has generated competition that left less pollen and nectar for the native bees. But frequently competition involves common native bees that are not under threat.
So, if honey bees aren’t to blame, what is?
The top drivers of pollinator declines are considered to be land use – the spread of cities and agriculture, as well as the way land is managed – along with rising temperatures, extreme weather and pesticide use.
Agriculture and urbanization reduce the amount and diversity of flowering plants, and droughts can reduce plant flowering and the resources bees rely on. Pesticides can reduce bees’ ability to lay eggs and care for their offspring, or they can kill bees outright.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab tracks bee populations in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region. Studies using its data have found that urbanization and weather changes have been the major drivers of changes in wild bee abundance and diversity in that region.
As temperatures rise, wild bee populations are expected to decline there. Warmer winters mean bees active in spring emerge earlier from their nests, and increased spring rain and temperature fluctuations can limit their ability to feed their offspring, meaning fewer bees.
The western bumble bee, Bombus occidentalis, was once widespread and abundant across western North America, but it has been in decline since the late 1990s. Long-term monitoring of its populations from 1998 to 2020 shows the primary reasons are land management changes, increasing temperature, drought and pesticide use.
What can you do to support pollinators?
The biggest threat to pollinators is the disappearing variety of flowering plants.
You can help reverse this by filling your garden with more flowering plants, trees and shrubs to give bees, butterflies and other pollinators a variety of food sources.
You can also advocate for bee-friendly behavior in your community, such as creating pollinator habitats in public and private spaces and reducing the use of harsh pesticides and herbicides. Planting more flowers in parks and along roadsides, and protecting wildlands where the rarest native bees live, can help keep these wonderful species thriving.
This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.
