Regular readers of this column will know that, in general, I struggle to muster much affection for non-native species, especially ones that may have negative effects on native flora and fauna. To a degree, this antipathy extends to the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera.
And yet I’m inclined to cut this insect some slack. The remarkable talents of the honey bee demand admiration, and the genial nature of this insect (at least of the more docile strains) invites friendship. But even aside from the honey bee’s behavior, I have a modest soft spot in my heart for the species, because it is invariably the first bee species I see in spring. An early honey bee lifts my winter-burdened spirits by marking the start of a season-long parade of my current favorite group of insects. It’s not quite right to speak of the first honey bee of the spring. Unlike any of our native bee species, honey bees survive the winter as entire colonies, at least if they’re being properly cared for, rather than as larvae, unhatched eggs, or solitary queens waiting to found their own new colonies.
On mild days, even in the depths of January, it’s not surprising to find a few honey bee workers out exploring. Of course, with all the Island’s plant life dormant, these midwinter optimists have little chance of finding anything to forage on. But the honey bee season never entirely ends. And by mid-March, nature is catching up to the honey bee’s positive thinking. A few lucky yards already have snowdrops, crocuses, or winter aconite in bloom, and a friend of mine recently posted a photo of an early periwinkle flower. Other early bloomers will soon follow: spring bulbs, ornamentals like Japanese andromeda, native willows. Honey bees will visit them all, enjoying exclusive rights until the first native bees emerge in late March or early April. I even find early honey bees on spent cut flowers that my wife chucks into our backyard.
On the Vineyard, honey bees apparently live almost exclusively as domesticated animals, occupying artificial structures and cared for by human beekeepers on farms and in yards. Feral honey bee colonies may occasionally form, but these seem to be both rare and short-lived. (I’ve only known of one on the Vineyard that was firmly documented.) I know next to nothing about beekeeping, a venerable practice, and one that is both art and science; keeping bees, I am certain, is a vocation that both offers and demands a lifelong pursuit of learning.
I do, though, encounter honey bees in the wild, as I carry on my obsessive hunt for insects to watch. Apis mellifera is one of the few domestic animals that truly functions as a part of the local ecosystem, taking pollen or nectar from an extraordinarily wide variety of flowers, both native and exotic — the same flowers that support native bees. How much effect the resulting competition has on native bees and other pollinators is an open question, and a complex one.
The ecological effects of honey bees have not been closely studied on the Vineyard. But a steadily growing body of research done in other parts of the world raises some concerns. Pollen and nectar are renewable resources; flowers will produce more if their supply is exhausted. But over the short term, the remarkable ability of honey bees to engage in concentrated, cooperative foraging can pick even a robust patch of flowers clean, leaving nothing for other insects to feed on until the flowers have been able to produce new supplies. Moreover, honey bees are socially dominant over most species of native bees, which, with just a few exceptions, are smaller than Apis mellifera. If both honey bees and smaller native bees are foraging in the same area, you usually don’t have to wait long to witness instances of honey bees bumping their smaller relatives off a flower.
This displaced bee usually resumes foraging moments later on a nearby blossom. But the interruption represents a loss of time and energy, and even if it’s a small loss, it still makes life harder for the displaced bee. And of course, if the interruption is repeated, those losses can add up. Under some conditions, research has shown, the presence of honey bees reduces populations of native bees. My sense, based largely on a three-study of farm pollinators that I recently helped coordinate, is that honey bee competition is a fairly minor problem for native bees, likely less of a concern than habitat loss or environmental toxins. And I believe that competition is often lessened still more in settings that offer rich and diverse floral resources; it’s not uncommon to see, for example, honey bees and native bees concentrating on totally different flower species, pursuing their own preferences, and avoiding any contact with each other at all. I hope such instances of coexistence are common.
In any event, as I write this, I’m still dreaming of my first bee of the year. Odds are, it’ll be a foraging honey bee, a member of a remarkable non-native species that I can’t quite bring myself to dislike.
