VOX - What do you know about bees? That they produce honey? That they live in a hive? That they swarm?
Well, I have news: These characteristics don’t actually describe most bees in the US. Of the roughly 4,000 native species, not a single one produces true honey. Not one! Most of them live alone. Most of them have no queen.
The bees that many people are familiar with are honey bees, Apis mellifera, a nonnative species that Americans brought over from Europe centuries ago. Beekeepers manage them like any other farm animal, to produce honey and pollinate crops.
But all of that attention on honey bees has, some ecologists argue, overshadowed their native counterparts: the wild bees. They’re an incredible bunch, found in all sorts of colors and sizes, and they’re important pollinators, too — better, by some measures, than honey bees. On the whole, native bees are also at a much greater risk of extinction, in part, because of the proliferation of European honey bees.
“People are devoting a lot of their love and attention and funding to honey bees,” said Hollis Woodard, a bee researcher at the University of California Riverside. “That can be detrimental to wild bees. If we really want to say, ‘Save the bees,’ I think we need to get some facts straight about who’s who and what’s what.”