快猫短视频

Efforts to 鈥渟ave the bees鈥� by encouraging urban beekeeping over the past decade may have been good for honeybees, but wild, native bees appear to be paying the price.

Researchers in Montreal, Canada, surveyed wild bee populations across the city in 2020 and found that the diversity of species of wild bees was lower in areas with higher concentrations of honeybee hives.

The overall bee diversity in the city also dropped since the survey was last done in 2013, before an influx of around 3000 new honeybee hives. A survey of the same sites found 177 different wild bee species in 2013, but just 120 species were spotted in 2020.

鈥淭he sites that saw the largest increase in honeybees over the years had the fewest wild species,鈥� says now at the National Bee Diagnostic Centre at Northwestern Polytechnic in Beaverlodge, Canada.

The honeybees seem to be crowding out wild bees by competing with them for food. MacInnis and her colleagues also sampled white clover at every study site and found that the amount of available clover pollen declined as honeybee numbers went up.

While the study doesn鈥檛 prove that the honeybees are directly causing the drop in wild bee diversity, this is likely to be the reason.

at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London says the drop in wild bee diversity is concerning. 鈥淢aintaining the balance of species is critical to maintaining the services they provide,鈥� he says.

Although honeybees are vital for pollination in many agricultural settings, wild bees are actually better pollinators for native plants, and even some crops, such as apples. 鈥淢any wild bees actually provide the services that we attribute to honeybees,鈥� says Stevenson.

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The complexity of the challenges facing pollinators often gets lost in oversimplified messages about saving the bees, which have been conflated with the plight of commercial beekeepers in the US, says Stevenson. While he doesn鈥檛 want to demonise honeybees 鈥� or any of the people who want to help them 鈥� it is important to understand their role, he says. They are domestic, not wild, animals. 鈥淚f you wanted to save the birds, you wouldn鈥檛 keep chickens,鈥� he says.

For those who want to do their part for the underappreciated wild bees, MacInnis recommends a simple fix: plant lots of different flowers, focusing on local, native plants, rather than the imported ornamental flowers that tend to be popular in cities. 鈥淧lanting more native plant species will help to foster wild bees,鈥� she says.

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