Downside of the amateur beekeeper craze: Honeybees are not endangered and raising them reduces food availability for native bee species

It’s morning on a City of London rooftop. But that rooftop itself is a little oasis: a tennis court-sized patch of meadow complete with clover, buttercups and five beehives.

But only one is buzzing.

The remaining four are empty as the keeper, Dale Gibson of Bermondsey Street Bees, realised such numbers of honeybees were doing more harm than good.

“London is Europe’s most densely populated city for honeybees, possibly the world,” he said.

“We’ve been hijacked by the Save the Bees motto, which has been interpreted as meaning honeybees.”

[Entomologist Dr. Lucy] Witter is not anti-honeybees if there is a guaranteed abundance of food, but, in many cases, they reduce the food available to native wild pollinators.

She also thinks their amazing PR detracts awareness from all those other critical pollinating insects – and as they are such efficient gatherers of pollen, they are worse at helping plants to reproduce.

“Honeybees don’t drop much pollen whereas solitary bees, like the red mason bee, are such messy eaters they end up covered in pollen and this falls off on other plants doing the pollination job,” she added.

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