Save the Bees? You're Probably Picturing the Wrong One

"Save the bees" may be the most successful conservation slogan of our age. It is on tote bags and T-shirts, in supermarket campaigns and children's books, and it has done a great deal of good in waking people up to the plight of pollinators. But it carries a quiet and rather awkward problem. The bee that most people picture when they hear it, the honeybee in its wooden hive, is largely doing fine. In some places it is doing a little too well. And the bees that genuinely need saving are the ones that almost nobody can name.

The honeybee is livestock

Here is the fact that reframes everything: the honeybee is a farmed animal. There is only one honeybee species in Britain, the Western honeybee, Apis mellifera, and it lives, overwhelmingly, in hives built and tended by beekeepers, who keep it for honey and for pollination much as a farmer keeps hens for eggs. Virtually every honeybee you see in the wider countryside originated in somebody's hive.

And as a species it is in no danger at all. Globally, the number of managed honeybee colonies has risen by around 45% since the 1960s. In the UK, recorded hive numbers climbed from roughly 80,000 in 2008 to more than 120,000 by 2013, and newer counts put the figure far higher still. Honeybee numbers, in other words, track the popularity of beekeeping, and beekeeping is booming. Worrying about the honeybee going extinct makes about as much sense as worrying about the extinction of the chicken. As one conservationist neatly put it, a beehive is roughly as natural as a field of grazing sheep. Fascinating, useful, valuable, yes. Wildlife, no.

Meet the other 269

Britain is home to around 270 species of bee. Take away the single honeybee and you are left with about 24 bumblebees and something like 245 species of solitary bee: mining bees, mason bees, leafcutter bees, plasterer bees, furrow bees, a whole quiet nation of them. Most people have never knowingly seen one, and yet they are in almost every garden and park in the country.

The solitary bees are the ones worth getting to know, because they live utterly differently from the honeybee of the popular imagination. No hive. No honey. No queen, no swarm, no colony of thousands. Instead, each female works alone, building and stocking her own little nest, in a tunnel in the ground, a hollow plant stem, a crumbling wall, or a purpose-built bee hotel. She is usually small, often overlooked, sometimes mistaken for a fly or a wasp. She is also, along with the bumblebees, where nearly all of Britain's bee diversity lives, and where nearly all of its trouble lies.

They do the real work

It would be easy to assume that these small wild bees are minor players and the mighty honeybee does the serious pollinating. The science says almost the opposite. Wild bees are not just numerous; they are frequently better pollinators than honeybees, flower for flower.

The landmark evidence came in a 2013 study in Science that pooled data from 41 different crop systems on six continents. It found that visits by wild insects improved fruit set roughly twice as effectively as an equivalent number of honeybee visits, and that honeybee visits meaningfully increased fruit set in only about 14% of the crops studied. Crucially, the two groups worked independently: managed honeybees supplemented wild pollinators but could not substitute for them. Wild bees tend to deposit more pollen per visit, and some do things honeybees simply cannot. Bumblebees, for instance, "buzz-pollinate", vibrating their flight muscles to shake pollen loose from flowers like those of the tomato, a trick the honeybee never learned. So even for the food on our plates, the wild bees are not optional extras. They are irreplaceable, and no number of hives can stand in for them.

And they are the ones in decline

Now the sober part. While the farmed honeybee thrives, the wild bees are slipping away, and it is their loss that "save the bees" ought to be about.

The most thorough British assessment, published in 2019, tracked the fortunes of the country's wild bees and hoverflies between 1980 and 2013. The picture it painted was genuinely mixed, and worth reporting honestly rather than dramatically. A handful of species did well: the dominant crop pollinators expanded their range by about 12%, and bumblebees as a group, helped by farm schemes designed for them, rose by around 38%. But beneath those few winners sat a great many losers. A third of all the species studied declined. Solitary bees fell by 32%. Upland species crashed by 55%. Two of Britain's bumblebee species went extinct over the last century, and several more are hanging on by a thread. The pattern is not a uniform collapse but something subtler and, in its way, sadder: the generalists and the farmed honeybee do fine, while the specialists and the solitary bees, the ones adapted to particular flowers and particular places, quietly disappear. The causes are the familiar ones from elsewhere in this series: loss of flower-rich habitat, pesticides, and disease.

The uncomfortable twist: more hives can mean fewer wild bees

Here is where the story turns properly counterintuitive, and where the slogan can actively backfire. Keeping honeybees, the very thing many well-meaning people do to "help the bees", can harm the wild bees that need help most.

The reason is simple arithmetic. Honeybees and wild bees eat exactly the same food, nectar and pollen from the same flowers, and a single hive contains tens of thousands of hungry foragers. Drop that many mouths into a landscape where flowers are limited, and the honeybees, superbly organised and sheer in number, can simply out-compete the wild bees for the available food. The research bears this out: studies around high-density apiaries have recorded wild bee numbers and foraging success falling by roughly half, and other work has found reduced reproduction in mason bees and reduced colony fitness in bumblebees near hives. One recent review found that, as of 2022, about two-thirds of all studies measuring interactions between managed and wild bees reported negative effects on the wild ones. On top of the competition, honeybees can also transmit diseases to their wild cousins.

It is fair to add the honest caveat that conservation scientists still debate how far these local effects translate into wild-bee extinctions, which is exactly why bodies like the Bumblebee Conservation Trust apply the precautionary principle rather than sounding a full alarm. But the direction of the evidence is clear enough, and it is why the recent boom in urban beekeeping worries so many ecologists: too many hives chasing too few flowers. The blunt conclusion is one that surprises almost everyone. Keeping honeybees is not an act of conservation. It is a hobby, or a form of farming. Doing it to save wild bees is a little like keeping chickens to save wild birds.

So what actually helps?

None of this means honeybees are villains or that beekeepers are doing wrong; a well-run hive in a flower-rich place is a fine thing. It simply means that if your goal is to help bees in the conservation sense, the hive is the wrong tool. The right ones are cheaper, easier, and open to everyone, whether or not they own a scrap of land.

Grow flowers, lots of them, all season. This is the single most useful thing you can do, and it is the one action that helps honeybees and wild bees alike, because more flowers eases the very competition described above. Aim for a diverse, single-flowered, nectar-rich succession from earliest spring to late autumn, as the piece on planting for pollinators sets out.

Give them somewhere to nest. This is the step nearly everyone forgets. Wild bees need a home as much as a meal, and most of ours are homeless in a tidy garden. Leave a sunny patch of bare, undisturbed earth for mining bees to burrow into; keep hollow stems, dead wood and a bee hotel for the cavity-nesters; let a rough bank or a strip of long grass simply be. A garden can be full of flowers and still empty of wild bees if there is nowhere for them to raise the next generation.

Put down the spray, and leave the mess. Pesticides hit wild bees hardest, and the untidy corners so many of them nest in are exactly what an over-groomed garden removes, as the chemical-free and ten ways to rewild pieces argue.

And learn to see them. Notice the tawny mining bee's little volcano of soil in the lawn, the leafcutter's neat semicircles snipped from a rose leaf, the red mason bee filling a hole in the wall. Naming a thing is the beginning of caring about it, and these are astonishing animals hiding in plain sight.

The ''right'' bees

The slogan got the feeling right and the species wrong. The bees that need us are not the ones in the white boxes at the bottom of an enthusiast's garden. They are the small, solitary, unnamed ones nesting in a sunny bank or a hollow stem, asking for nothing more than flowers to feed on and a patch of undug ground to raise their young. They do a huge share of the real work of pollination, they cannot be replaced by any number of hives, and they are the ones genuinely slipping away.

So by all means, save the bees. Just make sure you are ''saving'' the ''right'' ones.

References & further reading

• Bees, Wasps & Ants Recording Society (BWARS); National Bee Unit, Wild Bees in the UK (2024); Bumblebee Conservation Trust: the roughly 270 UK bee species (one honeybee, ~24 bumblebees, ~245 solitary bees).

• Bumblebee Conservation Trust, Honeybees Position Statement (the honeybee is not endangered; managed stocks up ~45% globally since the 1960s; competition and disease concerns; the precautionary principle). https://www.bumblebeeconservation.org/

• Garibaldi, L.A. et al. (2013). "Wild pollinators enhance fruit set of crops regardless of honey bee abundance," Science, 339, 1608–1611.

• Powney, G.D. et al. (2019). "Widespread losses of pollinating insects in Britain," Nature Communications, 10, 1018. (Solitary bees down 32%; upland species down 55%; some crop pollinators and bumblebees up.)

• Henry, M. & Rodet, G. (2018). "Controlling the impact of the managed honeybee on wild bees in protected areas," Scientific Reports, 8, 9308. (High-density beekeeping depressed wild-bee occurrence and foraging success.)

• Buglife and the Wildlife Trusts: wild bee conservation, nesting habitat, and why beekeeping is not conservation. https://www.buglife.org.uk/ · https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/

• Steven Falk, Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland, for learning to recognise the wild bees.

• Companion pieces in this series, on planting for pollinators, gardening without pesticides and ten ways to rewild your garden.