People have been collecting honey from honeybees for thousands of years. Egyptian tomb paintings depict beekeeping practices and an extensive honey trade before 2600 BCE.
European colonists first brought honeybees to Virginia in 1622, where they raised the bees for honey and beeswax. In colonial America, it didn’t take long before swarming honeybees had spread all the way to the Great Plains, arriving west before Europeans did. Honeybees could not cross the Rocky Mountains, however. It took Mormon pioneers to carry honeybees to Utah in the 1840s. People shipped these bees to California in the 1850s.
Thomas Jefferson, in his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” says: “The bees have generally extended themselves into the country, a little in advance of the white settlers. The Indians therefore call them the white man’s fly, and consider their approach as indicating the approach of the settlements of the whites.”
Although early colonists did not employ modern beekeeping practices, they still tried to breed a species that produced larger amounts of honey. They isolated the most desirable males with a queen bee. They also tried artificial insemination as early as 1790. Today, thanks to selective breeding, honeybees produce two to three times as much honey as the hive needs.
When the number of bees in a hive grows too great, bees swarm to start a new one. The old queen flies away, followed by about two-thirds of the adult workers, and finds a location, such as a hollow tree trunk, in which to start a new hive.
After a swarm leaves, new daughter queens emerge as adults in the old hive. The queens fight each other until only one remains – the new queen. Without mating, the new queen can lay only eggs that will become male, so she goes on a nuptial flight in which she mates with one to 17 males, called drones. Now she can produce female worker bees, which account for 90 percent of bees in the colony, and after mating she stays in the hive and lays eggs.
The queen places one egg into each honeycomb cell prepared by the workers. Each egg hatches into a legless, eyeless larva. Nurse bees feed the larva bee bread made from pollen. After about a week, the larvae are sealed into their cells, where they pupate into adults.
An adult worker collects nectar to make honey, transporting the nectar in a special stomach called the honey stomach. The bee regurgitates it into the mouth of another bee, who then swallows and regurgitates the nectar into a cell in the hive. During these processes, the nectar mixes with bacteria from the bees’ stomachs and enzymes from their salivary glands. These components break it down into the simple sugars glucose and fructose. (In other words, bees make honey by mixing nectar with their vomit and spit.)
It takes many loads of nectar to fill one cell. The nectar mixture is 70 percent water, but the bees evaporate it by fanning their wings until the moisture content is low enough so it won’t mold. Only then is it honey. They cap off the honey with wax and eat it during the winter to produce heat for the hive. The queen stops laying eggs until the days become long enough.
Today, commercial beekeepers transport honeybees around the country to pollinate agricultural crops. For example, in February they bring one-third of all the managed bees in the country to pollinate almonds in California! Later, they transport these bees to pollinate apples and other crops throughout the country.
Today there are about 3.8 million farmed bee colonies in the United States. This is a million more than only five years ago! Honeybees are the fastest-growing livestock in the nation without even counting feral honeybees that have escaped their managed hives and live on their own. There are even more feral bees than managed bees, and more honeybees today than there ever have been in the history of our nation.
Although honeybees are important for some agricultural crops, the number of native bees in an area decreases when the number of honeybees increases – and one honeybee hive can contain 15,000 to 50,000 bees, an onslaught that’s hard for native bees to compete against. According to the Xerces Society, an environmental organization, one honeybee hive collects as much pollen as would support 100,000 native bees.
There are more than 4,000 native bee species in North America, and about 28 percent of native bumblebees, for example, are threatened.
Honeybees are less effective at pollination than wild bees in that natives transfer much larger amounts of pollen to the flowers they visit. That means that where honeybees live in high numbers and push out natives, it’s difficult for native plants to reproduce because of lack of pollen transfer. In addition, honeybees – unlike most natives – promote the reproduction of invasive plants such as Japanese knotweed. By pollinating this plant, honeybees help it to spread its seeds.
Many native plants require native bees for pollination. Native squash bees, for example, start their work before dawn, visiting squash blossoms that open early, and are done for the day before honeybees even leave their hive.
According to Scientific American:
Outcompeted by the hordes of honeybees pouring from hives all across the country, native bees, with their solitary lifestyles and picky eating habits, have been disappearing for decades. Over 20 years of data now indicate that honeybees deliver a range of negative impacts, including direct competition with more effective native pollinators … Honeybees readily escape the hives of beekeepers … easily invading and dominating a vast array of ecosystems from coast to coast.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, honeybees are “significant competitors of native bees and should not be introduced in conservation areas, parks or areas where you want to foster the conservation of native plants and native bees.” According to the journal Scientific Reports, “Beekeeping in natural areas appears to have lasting, more serious negative impacts on biodiversity than was previously assumed,” because honeybees reduce the number of wild native bees and impair their ability to pollinate native species.
As fascinating as honeybees are, we should do all we can to help our native bees. Planting native species and not using pesticides are two of the most useful ways that people can help our native bees. Not introducing honey bees to areas where we want native bees to thrive is also important.
Reader photo
Oscar Nigam spotted this eastern towhee in Somerville’s Assembly Square on Feb. 25, 2023.
Have you taken photos of our urban wild things? Send your images to Cambridge Day and we may use them as part of a future feature. Include the photographer’s name and the general location where the photo was taken.
Jeanine Farley is an educational writer who has lived in the Boston area for more than 30 years. She enjoys taking photos of our urban wild things.
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