First published: The Victoria Naturalist, Vol. 80.5 (March/April 2024); Updated: August 1, 2024
Charming though they are, are honey bees actually bad? Not evil bad, but bad as in masquerading as an unquestionably good thing, which upon closer inspection doesn’t measure up to the hype?
The idea of questioning the “sustainability” of honey bees popped into my head fully formed, a small thought explosion, when I came upon a sign in front of bee hives declaring such. I was in a formal garden open to the public, and our small group was walking slowly along the little trails, admiring this and that as we went. I assumed the sign’s first purpose was to warn people away, but it went on make this grand claim of sustainability.
Fans of wild, native bees know that honey bees can be bad neighbors. A honey bee hive has tens of thousands of bees, many of them out and about foraging all day, taking all the nectar and pollen from whatever is on offer in their environs. Most native bees are solitary nesters, nesting in the ground or in cavities or stems. Some, such as bumble bees, make small colonies that live only through the summer season, producing new queens that go on to over-winter, emerging alone next spring to create a new, small, short-term colony. There is a wonderful variety of wild bees that will happily use our gardens, if we let them. But if there is a honey bee hive in the vicinity it can be very difficult for native bees to compete with the horde.
In that garden, the other day, bees were coming and going steadily from the two hives. But where were they going? The host garden is very dry and has very few flowers. Even before coming upon the hives I’d noted little evidence of bees in the garden. This garden is not feeding these bees. They must be flying to the surrounding properties to find the nectar and pollen they need for feeding and expanding their colonies.
Sitting with a friend who’s career is built around helping countries plan for climate change, better able than me to look at things with a global perspective, I told her about what I’d seen and asked my question: “what about honey bees is sustainable?” She nodded her head somewhat sadly, surprising me by saying “there’s a lot of greenwashing.”
I don’t believe people are intentionally “greenwashing” the business of keeping honey bees, but rather they are failing to think about what keeping bees means.
We know that serious problems have beset honey bees in recent years, with beekeepers struggling to get their honey-bee colonies through the winter. That alone should make one ask about sustainability.
I was a sheep farmer and wrestled with a similar question a few years ago. I was convinced of the nobleness of my efforts: grazing sheep on species rich pastures growing in limestone soils, producing excellent sweet meat. I knew that what I was doing was the right thing.
But then I read of George Monbiot, and his analysis of sheep production in Britain. He showed how little product is actually produced, contributing a vanishingly small portion of the food consumed in Britain, and showed the financial drain such farming was, buoyed only by cash transfers designed simply to keep sheep farming going. And when the low productivity and absence of financial viability were juxtaposed with the environmental cost of keeping those hills in grazing, when they otherwise would naturally grow up into species-rich woodlands, with all the benefits therefrom, including removing carbon from the atmosphere and supporting a vast diversity of wildlife, the conclusion was obvious. There was little justification for continuing sheep farming in Britain.
Monbiot’s analysis shocked me. My internal voice kept saying “no, no, this can’t be true.” But I looked at what I was doing with a new perspective. Sadly, I concluded my own sheep farming also was too costly to justify. Although my product was excellent, I could not sell it for a price that supported its production. I’d been struggling with this unfortunate fact for several years, hoping a magic solution would materialize from thin air. Then I learned of Monbiot’s thinking. And now, when I compared the cost of my beloved sheep farming with the alternative of letting our fields grow up into the sugar maple forest that wanted to grow there, I concluded allowing the forest to return would be better than continuing to farm.
I felt a continuity with the earliest farmers who had domesticated sheep; my sheep were descended, over thousands of years, from theirs. And I felt a connection to the farmers who’d settled here, in Vermont, clearing the land and building the rock walls lining our fields. I wanted to honor their work by continuing. Keeping working land working is good, right?
But the realities of climate change, and the plummeting biodiversity we saw on our farm – butternut trees dying of blight, monarch butterflies almost completely absent some summers, fewer barn swallows nesting in our big barn every summer, and the horrific slow motion disappearance of our bats as white nose syndrome arrived and killed almost all – put my romantic passion for the nobleness of my sheep farming in a new light. I concluded that our land should be forest, not pasture. It was a very painful realization.
And so, with this background, I come upon a couple of bee hives in a garden with a sign declaring them to be sustainable. And I ask “really?” “How is this sustainable?” Has the romance of it all, bee keepers tending hives with care, feeling the loss when hives die, and the joy of golden honey, stopped people from asking the difficult question “is it sustainable?”
Wouldn’t we be better to skip the honey farming in the city and instead welcome our native bees into our gardens?