Connor here: It’s time to start working on the garden you’ve been planning for years.
Written by Christina Grozinger, Andy Melathopolous, Clare Rittschof, Harland Patch, and Jay Evans. Grozinger is a professor of entomology at Pennsylvania State University. Melasopoulos is an associate professor in the Oregon State University Department of Horticulture. Ritzchev is an associate professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky. Patch is an assistant professor of entomology at Penn State. Evans is a research entomologist in the USDA Agricultural Research Service Honey Bee Laboratory. Originally published on The Conversation.
North America’s honey bee population is in trouble, but don’t blame the bees. Some argue that an overabundance of managed bees, kept to help pollinate crops and produce honey, is causing the extinction of native bees, but the evidence does not support that claim.
It’s true that populations of many species of bees, including honey bees, are in trouble.
On average, half of honey bee colonies die each winter in the United States. Commercial beekeepers experienced record losses of more than 60% of their colonies in the winter of 2024-2025. Overall, one-fifth of North America’s pollinators are considered at risk of extinction, primarily due to habitat loss, rising temperatures, extreme weather, disease, and pesticides.
We study honeybees and other important pollinators, and we have good reason to love all bees. In fact, they are essential.
This wild ground bee, Andrena notoscordii, typically lives in the Midwest and Southeastern United States and loves fake garlic flowers. Sam Droege/USGS Bee Lab (via Flickr)
Why do we care about pollinators?
Bees help farmers grow the foods people love to eat, from apples to almonds.
Bees, along with other pollinators such as flies, butterflies and moths, help almost 80% of flowering plants produce fruits and seeds, which feed birds and other wildlife.
Approximately 75% of the world’s crops, including vegetables, fruits, and nuts, benefit from pollinators. In addition, pollinators also contribute to the production of livestock feed and fiber crops such as cotton.
In the United States, insect pollination contributes $34 billion to the economy.
Bees are the most important pollinators for agricultural crops. Managed bees that beekeepers can move from field to field are especially essential in intensively farmed areas where natural habitat to support wild bees is lacking.
So why are people worried about bees?
Bees were introduced to North America by European settlers in the early 1600s.
Because honey bees are not a native species, the most common concern is that they will compete with wild bees for pollen and nectar. This is usually depicted as a numbers game. When resources are limited, the more bees there are on a landscape, the less food there is to go around.
Bees live in large social colonies and are adept at exploiting high-quality flower patches, leading to concerns that this species in particular could quickly and severely impact native bees with which they share the same food.
Queen bees are marked with non-toxic green paint to make them easier to spot when inspecting the health of European honey bee hives in Maryland. David Illig, via Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA
Managed bees can also transmit viruses and other pathogens that can infect native bees. Because the virus is shared among colony members, the virus can persist within a managed honey bee colony and spread to other bees feeding on the same flowers.
Scientists and farmers are also concerned about the economic sustainability of farms that rely too heavily on bees to pollinate crops. Threats to honey bee health and high colony mortality in the United States can put crops at risk if other pollinators are not nearby.
Why don’t studies find out how honeybees affect native bees?
In fact, humans know very little about bee interactions. There are more than 4,000 native honey bee species in the United States, but for less than half of them we have enough data to estimate population size and range. There is a further lack of meaningful data examining the impacts of honey bees on other species.
A recent analysis found that of 116 published studies on resource competition involving honeybees, only 15% measured how competition with honeybees affected native species’ survival, reproductive output, and long-term population trends.
The majority of published research on competition between honey bees and wild bees addresses various versions of the narrow question: “Do honey bees and native bees visit the same plants?”
Most scientists would predict that the answer to this question would be a resounding “yes,” since honey bees are “supergeneralists” that thrive all over the world, far beyond their natural range.
However, about half of the studies suggest that bees do not change the way native bees spend their days at all. From a wild bee’s perspective, bees simply don’t exist in their world.
Different species of bees can coexist with little evidence of direct interaction. An analysis of bee communities measured across diverse environments, including agriculture, cities, grasslands, and forests, found that bee abundance and native bee abundance were positively associated with approximately five times as many negative associations. In other words, rather than one landscape supporting another bee species at the expense of another, the same habitat supports both.
Honey bee species can be found almost everywhere in the United States, as this map, modeled after 3,158 species found in the museum’s collection, shows. However, some regions, such as the desert Southwest, are particularly rich in bee species, and the color scale represents the estimated number of species. Page R. Cheshire et al., 2023, CC BY
Calls to restrict bees from certain locations often miss important realities. That means there is little overlap between native bee hotspots and urban and commercial beekeeping.
Beekeeping is rooted in agricultural land. North America’s rarest honey bee thrives in environments like the Sonoran Desert, a habitat not well suited for managed colonies.
When competition occurs, it is usually the product of agricultural practices that deprive the land of the flowering plants that bees need.
Research that introduced artificial hives into natural areas like the Sierra Nevada Plateau (places that beekeepers don’t normally go to) created competition that reduced pollen and nectar left for native bees. However, common native bees, which are not under threat, often find themselves in competition.
So if the bees aren’t to blame, what is?
In addition to rising temperatures, extreme weather events, and the use of pesticides, the biggest factors contributing to pollinator declines are believed to be land use, including urban and agricultural expansion and land management practices.
Agriculture and urbanization reduce the abundance and diversity of flowering plants, and drought can reduce plant flowering and the resources on which bees depend. Pesticides can reduce a bee’s ability to lay eggs and care for offspring, or they can kill the bee completely.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s Native Honey Bee Inventory Monitoring Laboratory tracks honey bee populations in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. A study using that data found that urbanization and climate change were the main drivers of changes in the number and diversity of wild bees in the region.
As temperatures rise, wild bee populations are expected to decline there. Warmer winters mean spring-active bees emerge from the hive earlier, and increased spring rain and temperature fluctuations can limit their ability to nourish their offspring and reduce bee numbers.
The western bumblebee, Bombus occidentalis, was once popular and abundant in western North America, but has been in decline since the late 1990s. Long-term population monitoring from 1998 to 2020 found that the main causes were changes in land management, rising temperatures, drought, and pesticide use.
What can you do to support pollinators?
The biggest threat to pollinators is the loss of flowering plant species.
You can reverse this situation by filling your garden with more flowering plants, trees, and shrubs to provide a variety of food sources for bees, butterflies, and other pollinators.
You can also advocate for bee-friendly actions in your community, such as creating pollinator habitat in public and private spaces and reducing the use of harsh pesticides and herbicides. Planting more flowers in parks and roadsides, and protecting the wildlands where our rarest native bees live, will help keep these wonderful species thriving.
