Bee Washing
by Ron Miksha (ANBC board of directors)
The lady from the zoo phoned and asked where she should place the observation hive. “Near the greenhouse or among the prairie animals?” The fellow taking the call, a native-bee expert, said, “Honey bees? Put them next to your dairy cows.” The zoo didn’t have any livestock, and that was his point. Others say that keeping honey bees to “Save the Bees” is like keeping chickens to “Save the Birds.”
Until 2007, bees and beekeepers weren’t noticed much. Then honey bees started to disappear. Bustling colonies lost their bees, within days. Forty thousand honey bees vanished from colonies, abandoning honey and brood. Those honey bees simply disappeared. The problem, Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), was soon observed in apiaries throughout the USA. Time magazine noticed. So did National Geographic, Wall Street Journal, Science News, the New York Times, and hundreds more. New York Magazine headlined “Bees are literally working themselves to death,” while CNN reported, “It's a case worthy of ‘CSI’ — millions and millions of missing honey bees, no bodies, no clues...” Today, evidence points to a virus, coupled with exotic mites, as well pesticides, as the bee pandemic’s cause.
Beekeepers lost a half-million hives each year, in the USA alone. People feared all of America’s bees would soon be gone. People didn’t realize that honey bees are not the only bees. Losses of honey bees are tragic for those insects and expensive to replace for beekeepers. But honey bees are livestock. More are bred to replace losses. Thousands of other bee species aren’t so lucky. No one herds them as livestock.
Many businesses take advantage of an environmental-publicity opportunity called greenwashing — spending more money on looking good than being good. We’ve seen it in advertising, sometimes from the biggest polluters, who show a nice meadow over a toxic waste site. Another easy attention-catcher is a hive of bees on an office roof, right above a company involved in some heavy-polluting industry. Charlotte de Keyzer calls this beewashing. The University of Toronto Ph.D. candidate told me that the word comes from a paper by MacIvor and Packer, who discuss native bee houses: “We advocate for due diligence on the part of retailers and promoters of bee hotels to avoid “bee-washing” – green-washing applied to potentially misleading claims for augmentation of native and wild bee populations.”
Researcher de Keyzer expanded the term. She says that beewashing includes any products and activities falsely advertised as having benefits to bee conservation. Most cases of beewashing promote a "bee-friendly" and/or "environmentally sustainable" way to "save the bees" or "help the environment." Her definition includes honey bees that are operated to make a company or organization look environmentally responsible.
A business that wants to illustrate concern for the environment may offer a local beekeeper a rooftop spot for a hive or two. This involves finding a beekeeper, checking their reliability, and developing an appropriate liability contract. An easy way to address this is to engage a company specializing in placing bee colonies. The largest of these providers is Alvéole, a Montreal-based company that has expanded into Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and a dozen other cities.
Although Alvéole is careful to avoid claiming that honey bees are inherently good for the environment, some of the companies signing its contracts use Alvéole's bees as an environmental statement. VIA Rail Canada, for example, issued a 2019 news release titled "VIA Rail and Alvéole partner to help save the bees." That year, the rail company's five million passengers had a chance to see Alvéole hives parked on train station rooftops in five cities. VIA Rail said the train company "has committed itself to furthering its environmental protection efforts by establishing a partnership with Alvéole. . . By promoting environmental awareness among urban populations, this partnership aligns with VIA Rail's mission to help protect and preserve the environment." Others suggest any money spent on rooftop hives would help the environment more if spent on energy efficiency for trains.
I don’t know the motives behind anyone’s beewashing efforts. Undoubtedly, most corporate executives see placing a hive of honey bees as a sincere effort to help the environment. A lot of people think this way. I surveyed 300 Calgary beekeepers. Stating their reasons for beekeeping, 58% included that they “want to help the flowers, bees, and the environment” by keeping honey bees. With news reports about colony collapse, climate change, and ubiquitous pesticides, saving the planet by keeping honey bees seems like a good idea.
But honey bees are not endangered, though they are increasingly difficult to maintain. Honey bees (and wild, native bees) are victims of new forms of farm chemicals and recent infestations of new pests and pathogens. However, around the world, honey bee numbers have been growing for years. In 1961, there were fewer than 50 million managed hives of honey bees. Today, because of their economic value, there are over 90 million.
In Calgary, from 2008 to 2018, the numbers are an eye-popper. For twenty years before 2008, Calgary’s colony count stayed below 150. Then beekeeping became popular. By 2018, the number passed 1400 hives. That’s a ten-fold increase in a decade. Beekeeping has been growing at a compounding rate of 26% each year in Calgary.
Western honey bees have had amazing population growth for an insect that is not native to much of the world. Honey bees were spread by European settlers to the Americas, Oceania, and east Asia four hundred years ago. We expect some ecological effect when a non-native creature arrives. We can think of rabbits feasting upon Australia, for example, or a thousand-colony load-out yard in southern California. Most agree that 1,000 colonies in one location will have an impact on native bees. Especially if another big yard is a mile away. What about 100 colonies? Or 10? At some diminishing number, the ill effects of overpopulation are probably not measurable, though native bees may still feel the stress generated by their new neighbours. Increasingly, evidence points to harm committed by honey bees: competition for pollen and nectar, spread of pathogens, and pollination of invasive weeds which crowd native flowers.
In North America, our native flowers developed alongside the native bees that pollinated them. We have various squash bees, orchard bees, and small blueberry bees that pollinate their partners better than honey bees do. Tomatoes need to be “buzz pollinated” by bumble bees — honey bees can’t do that job at all. Without native bees, we don't know what we could lose — a disease-curing plant which can only be pollinated by rare native bees? Our enormous agricultural production? Loss of native bee diversity is the loss of a link in the ecological chain that sustains us. The loss of native bees is already happening. Fully half of Midwestern bee species have disappeared from their historic ranges. Several bumblebee species have become extinct. The role that honey bees have played in this great disappearance in likely minor. A large parking lot replacing a grove of trees or a meadow may impact more native bees than a backyard honey bee hive. Nevertheless, whenever potential damage can be avoided, it should be.
If a person keeps bees because of scientific curiosity, family bonding, or household economics, senior beekeepers should mentor these folks to be sure they do it properly. But keeping honey bees to “Save the Bees” has resulted in some folks keeping bees who shouldn’t be riding that bandwagon. They often don’t realize the responsibility they’ve undertaken. Swarm calls and sting incidents are up. Last summer, in Calgary, a live hive was found in a dumpster — frames, bees, and all. It was neatly placed, so this was likely not a nasty prank. It might have simply been someone who grew tired of saving the bees.