Text and photos by Bill Dunson reporting for Native Plant News
What’s the matter with honey bees? The upshot is that they are non-native, outcompete beneficial insects, and seriously disrupt the balance of our ecosystems. Our native bees and other insects need our help. More native plants are needed.

The western honey bee, Apis mellifera, is native to Europe and was brought to North America in the 1600s by colonists. In southern areas, this European bee has integrated with a “killer bee” or Africanized bee, which is a hybrid of two other subspecies of Apis mellifera. The Africanized bees entered via a release in Brazil and migrated northwards. They are not individually more dangerous but they attack more aggressively and in larger numbers.
There is a huge scientific literature on bees and their numerous relatives. Estimates are that native bees living in the United States number from 3,600 to 4,000 species with about 70 percent nesting in the ground. I highly recommend a 288-page basic introduction to the complex literature, The Bees in Your Backyard: A Guide to North America’s Bees by Joseph S. Wilson and Olivia Messinger Carril.
It may surprise you to find that the beloved honey bee is an exotic, non-native, feral inhabitant of North America and as such, poses a considerable potential threat to native bees and all animals that feed on plant nectar and pollen. For the most part this threat has not been recognized nor evaluated scientifically due to the mistaken notion they are native and due to the value of honey bees in agriculture. They pollinate a large proportion of our crops including virtually all almonds.
There are many questions about the true value of honey bees to agriculture, such as the degree to which native pollinators would replace them if there were not extensive use of pesticides, and widespread destruction of the natives by many human activities. Honey bees also pose a serious threat to native bees via transmission of diseases and parasites.
Honey bees outcompete native bees and other pollinators
The presence of honey bees severely reduces the numbers of native pollinators by outcompeting the native pollinators for nectar and pollen. The presence of many tens of thousands of efficiently foraging honey bees in a small area will negatively impact other animals feeding on the same resources.


The most common method of cultivating honey bees is to provide rectangular hives that then can be transported long distances so they can fertilize crops. Because they are placed in large numbers in local areas when not used to pollinate crops, this massive population of honey bees can devastate the native pollinators within several miles. Such grouping of honey bee hives is, unfortunately, commonly seen in natural areas that are normally assumed to be a protection against feral species such as this.

Cultivated honey bees can escape production farms and seek places in the wild to build their combs, usually inside tree trunks; but, sometimes you will find combs outside the tree trunks. Colonies will occasionally swarm, establishing new colonies elsewhere.

My philosophy is to destroy all wild hives if possible, since they can only cause damage to native pollinators with little or no benefit to crops. In Florida there is an additional incentive to destroy wild hives: they can potentially be quite dangerous because most hives contain Africanized members. A simple technique to destroy wild hives is to wait until the winter air temperature falls into the 40s; the honey bees become quite lethargic and it’s possible to cut open the hive tree with a chainsaw and spray the bees with a fast acting pesticide. The wild hives may be gathered and put in a domestic hive, but very few bee keepers are willing to do this without a hefty fee.
I have developed a very simple indicator of the local impact of honey bees based on the relative numbers of native pollinators to non-native honey bees that are observed in specific garden areas. My experience over many areas of eastern North America is that honey bees dominate the insect fauna at flowers in many locations. Of course this varies due to the time of day and temperature: bumble bees are homeothermic and can forage during cooler weather when other insects cannot. Our location in the Piedmont of North Carolina, in eastern Alamance County along the western side of the Haw River, is one of the very few I have encountered where there are virtually no honey bees seen at yard flowers. This must mean that there are both no domestic hives being maintained nearby (within 5+ miles) and very few wild colonies.
Beneficial insects are threatened by honey bees
An enormous biodiversity of beneficial native insects forage on flowers for nectar and pollen. Unfortunately, they are imperiled by honey bees.








There is a wide range of biological diversity in bees, butterflies, moths, and other native insects that forage on flowers for nectar and pollen, all of which are threatened by non-native honey bees. One of the interesting difficulties in identifying bees is that there are quite a few mimics. A “bee fly” resembles a yellow jacket (actually a wasp) and some bees. The robber fly is a close mimic of a bumble bee and quite an efficient predator on bees. One of the strangest mimics is a carrion beetle that bears a surprising resemblance in flight to a bumble bee. Another pollinator is a fig beetle shown on Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) while the bumble bee steals nectar from a Carolina Jessamine (Gelsemium sempervirens). The carpenter bee feeds on a native Scarlet Sage (Salvia coccinea). The spectacular zebra swallowtail obtains nectar from a non-native invasive Butterfly-bush. Its caterpillars only eat Common Pawpaw (Asimina triloba) tree leaves. Invasiveness of the non-native Butterfly-bush can be diminished by diligent deadheading of the seed heads. Another example of biological diversity is the snowberry clearwing moth, a mimic of a bumble bee. It hovers like a hummingbird while feeding on nectar. All these native insects are outcompeted by honey bees.
In conclusion I ask you to put aside all the good feelings you have about honey bees and their delicious honey regurgitated from their stomachs and instead consider how they most likely have a large negative impact on native pollinators. Do the right thing for nature: do not buy honey, kill any wild hives you encounter, and discourage the use of domesticated hives transported to pollinate crops.
We need many more studies to evaluate the viability of native insects as crop pollinators. It is also not impossible to imagine living without some products which are basically non-sustainable without the use of non-native honey bees, almonds for example. I like almonds, too, but would gladly give them up to save thousands of native pollinators, which are being destroyed by non-native honey bees to provide a non-essential product. When we consider its negative ecological impact, do we really need almond “milk”?
Reflect on the relevance of the “Tragedy of the Commons” (https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/tragedy-of-the-commons/), made famous in early English history whereby the common land resource of each village was pillaged by the few for their own selfish goals. In this case the totality of native pollinators and the nectar and pollen resources of wildflowers represent the common resources available to all, which unfortunately, are not protected. Beekeepers can place their hives often on public land and allow thousands of honeybees to forage on natural flowers with no limitation whatsoever. So who speaks for the native pollinators against this onslaught from non-native bees? Certainly we can individually make decisions to refuse to buy any products derived directly or indirectly from honey bees. But in the future I can only hope that a growing awareness of the importance and value of native pollinators will lead to a change in this situation that threatens the ecological fabric of natural ecosystems.
Editor’s Note: It is understood that native plants help balance our ecosystems and that native bees make for healthier and more genetically diverse plant populations. Native bees play crucial ecosystem roles. In a recent interview published by LSU Agricultural Center, Professor Bryan Danforth, an entomologist at Cornell University, stated that “native pollinators are two to three times better pollinators than honey bees.” Over one-third of our food crops require bees for pollination, and native bees are better pollinators. For more information about “the most important group of pollinators,” see the Xerces Society Saving the Bees: Why Honey Bees Are Not the Answer and Want to Save the Bees?

William Dunson, Ph.D. in zoology, is a native of Atlanta, Georgia where he skipped out on his final high school year. Today he believes in sharing his lifetime of knowledge with others and recently led two NC Native Plant Society tours of his North Carolina property. He attended Yale University and University of Michigan, and retired from a 34-year teaching and research career as a professor of biology at Penn State University. In addition to being a prolific scientific writer, after retirement he worked as biologist for the Seminole Tribe and helped transform a 107-acre Virginia farm into a nature preserve.