Dave Goulson: many people think they're helping the bee crisis if they take up beekeeping. But sadly, it's a completely misguided approach.

Elynor: so when people place honeybee hives all over a city for example, I think people are doing it with the best intention. I just think that there's an amount of miseducation or perhaps misrepresentation by the press as to what can be done to help

Rebecca Nesbit: Hello and welcome to Cat Among the Penguins. I'm Rebecca Nesbit.

Jenny Hickman: I'm Jenny Hickman. Today we are tackling the question of whether or not our obsession with honeybees needs to end. We'll be exploring everything from diseases threatening bees to urban myths about how much of our food supply relies on pollinators.

Rebecca Nesbit: got a couple of exciting guests but first I wanted to show you that I've dressed for the occasion. Can you see?

Jenny Hickman: That's absolutely perfect. So for those of you who can't see, Becky is wearing a t-shirt with an angry looking being on it that says buzz off. and that's perfect thing is the topic of our episode is whether or not we do want bees to buzz off.

Rebecca Nesbit: Exactly. And I think it's particularly funny because one of the reasons we love honeybees is that they all work for the common good of the hive. The idea of a grumpy bee just doesn't fit in there at all.

Jenny Hickman: It doesn't and actually that's a good point because I think this episode is one of the ones I was more surprised that you wanted to do because of how much everybody loves honeybees and how kind of culturally important I suppose they are. So I mean we have artwork depicting beekeeping that dates back to ancient Egyptian times. You know we've got this really really long-standing relationship with honeybees and with beekeeping. And I'm surprised that you wanted to do a honeybee episode.

Rebecca Nesbit: Well, that's absolutely right. They are very much entwined in human culture. There's sacred passages about honeybees in all the world's major religions. Just to clarify, we are talking about Apis mellifera, the Western honeybee, and that's one of eight honeybee species globally. And their native range is Europe and Africa, but humans have now spread them to every continent except Antarctica.

Jenny Hickman: But I suppose the difference with this one is there's been a very good reason that we have spread honeybees because they are so important for pollination.

Rebecca Nesbit: Yes, honeybees are important pollinators, but the story is more complex than most people realise. I actually discussed this with our first guest, Professor Dave Goulson from the University of Sussex, and he's done a lot to of insects and the challenges they're facing. He's got successful books, for example, Silent Earth, A Sting in the Tail and Beequest. So this is what he said about honeybees and pollination. Thank you.

Dave Goulson: So most crops don't require pollinating by an insect at all. The commonest crops we grow are grasses like wheat and barley, which are wind pollinated. But we do grow crops in the UK that require insect pollination. Things like oilseed rape and field beans and orchard crops, apples, cherries, pears and so on. but they're pollinated by a mixture of insects, including honeybees, and the estimates that I've read suggest that a maximum of 30 % of that insect pollination of crops is delivered by honeybees, which is still a big chunk, it's more than any other single species, but it does mean that 70 % or more of our crop pollination in the UK is being delivered by non honeybee insects of one type or another, and that includes wild bees and also butterflies and moths and wasps and hoverflies and so on.

Jenny Hickman: So it does, I suppose I am a little bit surprised that he's not a little bit more enthusiastic about honeybee pollination because I suppose the famous stat that a lot of people would have heard is that honeybees are responsible for, I think it's like one in every three mouthfuls of food that we eat.

Rebecca Nesbit: stat is so famous that nobody feels the need to back it up with evidence. And actually there's two issues adding to the complexity here. As Dave says, a lot of pollination is done by other insects, both wild bees and flies and moths, for example. So as Dave says, it's very hard to tell how much of agricultural pollination is due to honeybees. And this is hotly debated. Also, As Dave pointed out, not all crops need pollinators, so a lot of our food could be produced without insects pollinating them. To make it even more complex, about a third of crops do benefit from animal pollination, but they could still produce a yield without this. So, oilseed rape, for example, even if it wasn't pollinated, you'd produce some crop. Less, but there still would be some. So I think when people are doing rough calculations, they sometimes take it that, for example, all the world's oilseed rape crop is thanks to insects. And that's not actually true. The insects are enhancing the yield and the quality, but they're not solely responsible for it. Ultimately, it's estimated that about 5 to 10 % of global food production is due to animal pollination, though that figure is very hard to calculate. But it is lower than the traditional stat of one in every three mouthfuls.

Jenny Hickman: Yeah, I see what you're saying. but I suppose you could still look at it as maybe the stats have been blown a little bit out of proportion, but it's still incredibly important. They're still incredibly important as pollinators and these insect pollinated crops that we're talking about here, things like fruits, they're often really, high in micronutrients. you know, it still doesn't feel like we're completely overstating their importance. And I suppose there's the other element of what about the fact that they're going to be playing roles in ecosystems.

Rebecca Nesbit: I think you do have a point there. The crops they pollinate are nutritious and delicious. In terms of the role they play in wild ecosystems, it's good question, but it's actually quite hard to answer. the question to Dave.

Dave Goulson: Honeybees do contribute to wildflower pollination, Often they're probably the biggest single contributor to many plants. But there are a huge number of... plants out there that require insect pollination but the honey bees don't visit at all. Some insect pollinators, for example, there's an orchid in Madagascar which is pollinated by one species of moth with a long tongue. There are some really strange obligate mutualisms whereby one plant is pollinated exclusively by one insect. Actually chocolate is a good example, cacao is pollinated by tiny little midges, little flies. Honeybees would be completely useless for pollinating cacao. over millions of years pollination has evolved and different insects have evolved to visit different flowers and so on. So honeybees chip in, but they're a relatively small contributor in the grand scheme of things.

Rebecca Nesbit: what could be more important than chocolate? So is just showing how many bee species and other insect species, other pollinators are incredibly important and they just get no attention. And honeybees distracting attention away from those wild pollinators. There are actually 21,000 bee species in the world and around 270 in the UK. So why is so much of our attention directed towards Sunny B's?

Jenny Hickman: yeah, so their role, okay, so in a sense, their role is overstated. And like you say, there are some very, very key crops that we would not be in a good place without, that are not reliant on honeybees. But in terms of, I guess, other importance, so they're still very culturally important. They still are important as pollinators. And they're sort of, I suppose, they're a bit of a poster child for conservation. So, Is this really something that we need to worry about? They still play a very important role.

Rebecca Nesbit: Yes, they are still extremely important, but the problem isn't simply that they're a distraction, they are actually actively causing problems for other species. And this is something Dave was really keen to highlight.

Dave Goulson: are two particular issues ecologically with honeybees. Both problems really brought about by the fact that through domestication we've massively increased the population of honeybees compared to what might have lived here in the UK naturally. And we've also spread honeybees around the world to entire continents where they didn't naturally occur like the Americas. So there are lots more honeybees than there would naturally be, which exacerbates two problems. One is competition for pollen and nectar with wild pollinators. That's particularly acute in the modern world where there aren't anywhere near as many flowers as there used to be. So there's just not that much nectar and pollen in the landscape. and honey bees take a big chunk of it. So for example, there's clear evidence that bumblebee nests grow slowly if they're near apris where there are lots of honey bees, simply because there's not as much food as there would be otherwise. the evidence for that is absolutely crystal clear. There's no denying it's a thing. So basically if we want lots of wild pollinators, you don't want lots of honeybees. The other problem, which is kind of a related thing, is there's pretty clear evidence that honeybee hives often act as a source of disease that spreads out into wild pollinators. But lots of bee diseases or insect diseases are not specific to one species. They'll jump from insect to insect. It's quite interesting that a lot of bee diseases are spread on flowers. So if an infected bee lands on a flower, she leaves bacteria or viruses or whatever it might be, which can then be picked up by another insect visitor and that way they can spread from one species to another. And so, for example, there have been some UK studies showing that patterns of presence of bee diseases in honeybee hives are closely mirrored by what's happening in wild insects because the diseases are basically spreading out of honeybee hives into wild insect populations, particularly bumblebees, which undoubtedly won't be helping our wild pollinators. So it's kind of a double whammy there, the honeybees take all the food and also infect wild insects with sometimes fatal diseases. So too many honey bees is definitely bad news for wild pollinators.

Jenny Hickman: I suppose things like this are always, they're interesting, but it's, that for me is quite difficult because bees are everywhere and that, how would you study something like that? That feels like it would be a very hard thing to kind of prove and rule out other impacts.

Rebecca Nesbit: I agree, it is a classic problem in ecology. The world is so complex. How can you really know what's going on? So it will not surprise you to hear that this issue is hotly debated. And I wanted to read a few sentences from a review paper published in 2025 by two researchers from the University of Kentucky. And we'll put the link in the show notes. But this paper highlighted the complexity of the situation, they said. We found no clear pattern to explain which habitat types are more vulnerable to apis-molyphora competition, nor is the literature clear on impactful densities of managed honeybee hives in particular environment types.

Jenny Hickman: Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. Like density is very important in these sorts of studies. And I suppose sometimes bees are gonna occur in much higher densities if they're kind of managed for industrial agriculture.

Rebecca Nesbit: Exactly, and that will affect how much nectar and pollen they're consuming. That paper goes on to say, resource competition between Apis mellifera and wild bees is clearly a concern in some cases. However, more work is needed to identify and predict where Apis mellifera poses a significant threat to wild bee populations. Overall, the data do not support a generalized and widespread negative relationship between Apis mellifera abundance and wild bee community health.

Jenny Hickman: So refreshingly, more work is needed. That's always good to hear. Of course more work is needed.

Rebecca Nesbit: You They'll possibly come up every single episode we do. More science, more data.

Jenny Hickman: We need more data. But obviously, as always with conservation, we need to act in some way on the information that we have available. So did Dave have a take on what could be done?

Rebecca Nesbit: Yeah, exactly. not only does that review highlight some problems, but Dave is really confident that the problems are real.

Dave Goulson: It's not that difficult because you can do manipulative experiments. have been studies done on, for example there was a recent study on a little island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Italy where they experiment, which normally has honey bees, but they experimentally removed the honey bee hives. It was quite a small island, I forget how big it was, but it's small enough that they could basically remove all of the hives and then look to see what happened to the population of wild bees and other insect pollinators. shot up basically as soon as they removed the honeybees. And there have been similar experiments done off the coast of California on some little offshore islands. So it's not that hard to get a hand long and the evidence is pretty clear.

Jenny Hickman: Okay, so it's clearly, it's complex and it's environmentally dependent. It's dependent on the location. So I think you've convinced me that there's a problem, but we also know that they are still really important for agriculture. So surely we do need to take their problem seriously.

Rebecca Nesbit: is a good point and we need to think about their problems. I've got a clip from Dave that I'd like to play you.

Dave Goulson: People often equate, they hear that bees are in trouble and they assume that that means honeybees are in trouble. Perhaps because they're only aware that there are honeybees. But actually honeybees are fine. This is a really important point. Honeybees... are probably more abundant than they ever have been. They're certainly more abundant than they were 50 years ago and that's talking globally that's driven commercial beekeeping which has particularly increased in South America and China in recent decades. So overall the global population of honeybees is high and yes they have health problems, yes colonies die and beekeepers sometimes struggle to keep them going but they replace them. and because they're helped by people. Honey bees basically they're domestic animals, they're not in trouble. It's like being concerned about chickens going extinct, it's not going to happen. But the wild bees, really are, not all of them, but many of them are in trouble. few have gone extinct globally. but many more have declined really quite dramatically. My specialty are bumblebees and in the UK we've lost three of our 27 species and quite a few of the others have become incredibly rare. They're clinging on by their bee fingertips as it were and they're the ones that need our help, not the honeybees.

Jenny Hickman: Okay, so this has been a big brain shift for me. This is where it's all starting to fall into place now. That's the first time I've differentiated. I've understood that they're important for agriculture and that they're very important for pollinating crops, but this is the first time that I've identified them in my head as domestic animals. Like for the most part, these are domestic animals, like the same with cows, chickens, sheep. And we think about them, when we talk about them, we often talk about them in the context of... wild ecosystems and how we're helping wild ecosystems, whereas actually we need to be thinking about them differently. We need to be thinking about them as domesticated animals, right?

Rebecca Nesbit: Yeah, it's a really interesting situation, isn't it? Because they're fairly unique in the way that they fly free and we don't control them in some ways, but we manage them and we even breed them. There's artificial insemination for honeybees. Again, I will stick a video in the show notes because some honeybees, they don't get to fly off and mate. They get inseminated under a microscope. When I worked with honeybees, we once had a queen bee posted to us. from New Zealand. So this is not the wild species that we're dealing with in other situations. And the result is that there are roughly a hundred million managed honeybee colonies in hives worldwide. There are also some living in the wild, but that's a whole different story. And one I'm really keen to explore in a future episode. I've got some great guests lined up, but we'll park that for now. and come back to the fact that you're really right to make that distinction between domestic managed honeybees and all the other wild bee species.

Jenny Hickman: Yeah, it's an angle I'd never really considered before. We just don't view them that way at all. And when we talk about their sort of plights, it's in a conservation sense, it's a wild ecosystem. But this, makes a lot of sense with what Dave said about, their numbers are increasing, but they're also facing things like diseases. Now I'm looking at that in the context of, yeah, fine, when we breed sheep, when we have loads and loads of sheep, we also have a lot of sheep diseases that farmers have to deal with. That's a very, very different conversation to wild ecosystem conservation, but it's still an important conversation to be having because still beekeepers need to deal with these issues. do we need to do? What do we need to think about in order to help bee colonies?

Rebecca Nesbit: Very important question. I spoke to our second guest, is Dr. Eleanor Moore. She's a scientist whose work has included researching alternative honeybee foods at the University of Oxford. And she has an interesting perspective on what are the threats facing domestic honeybees right now?

Elynor: there's a number of things that honeybees are kind of threatened by, namely climate changes, really changing the flowering periods. And this leaves many gaps in the year where there just isn't enough flowering plants available for bees even if they want to be out and flying. But of course other things like agricultural intensification and urbanization means that our landscapes have changed massively and we've lost a lot of the flowering habitat that would usually be used by both honey bees and wild bees. And also things like pesticides, insecticides. These kind of things have a massive detrimental impact for honeybees, but of course also other insects and honeybees are also very affected by diseases at the moment as well. And so we think actually one of the big problems faced by honeybees is nutrition. lack thereof, proper nutrition. And we think that actually if honeybees had sufficient and proper nutrition, they'd be much more resilient to all of these other stresses that they're facing.

Jenny Hickman: Okay, nutrition, yeah, that makes sense. Again, it's the same sort of thing that farmers have to deal with, right? It's the same, are we feeding them the right stuff? If we're not feeding them right, if they're not getting the right diet, then they're gonna be sick. It's the same thing we have to think about. And yeah, nutrition is hugely important.

Rebecca Nesbit: Yeah, extremely interesting, particularly as honey bees are flying free and finding their own nutrition, but also sometimes beekeepers are feeding them. And we'd be really interested in everyone's perspective who writes in, including beekeepers, what are your experiences? What are you feeding your bees? So please keep those messages coming. Food is exactly what Eleanor worked on and she's given a bit of explanation in this clip.

Elynor: typically, it's very commonplace for honey bee keepers to now feed some kind of food supplement over the winter, especially, or to try and support the hives early in the year if the spring flowers are late or something like this. So, but these foods are very, very crude. They're mostly just, as you say, sugar or a bit of protein and they don't really contain any of the other essential nutrients. And so we really did want to make a food that would contain all the essential nutrients, especially so you could kind of support hives over the winter, because if you just feed them sugar, they're not going to be able to survive as long. And especially if it's a winter after kind of a year when perhaps towards the end of the year, there weren't flowers or the flowering periods had changed a little bit. And so the bees weren't able to collect. enough pollen to support them over the winter, then pollen is the source of most of their nutrients like fats and proteins and other micronutrients like the sterols for example. And so without a good supply of pollen then they'll really crash over the winter. And so beekeepers try and feed them to sustain them but if they're just feeding them with sugar and protein it's like us also just eating a diet of sugar and protein powder wouldn't last very long. We do perhaps hope that if we had a nutritionally complete diet for honeybees and we could feed it to colonies that were being used for pollination services, then within these kind monocultural environments, they would actually have all the resources that they need and they wouldn't necessarily then have to compete with wild bees for the naturally available floral resources outside of an agricultural... setting where they're being used for pollination.

Rebecca Nesbit: I think that perspective is really interesting, the idea that if we feed honeybees properly, particularly when they're used in high densities for agriculture, they won't be taking the resources that are needed by wild bees. There won't be so much competition.

Jenny Hickman: Yeah, such an interesting point. And again, it just goes back to reframing them as kind of this big population of domestic animals that are out there and taking these resources. Okay, so we know that we've got, know, bee nutrition is top of our to-do list. What else can we do? What other options have we got?

Rebecca Nesbit: Well, exactly. We've got complex information. What can we do with it? I put this question to Eleanor.

Elynor: I think that more generally things like our use of pesticides and insecticides needs to be drastically changed and I think the government could do an awful lot more to help fund newer alternatives which are already present, we just don't use them widely because the current kind of traditional pesticides and insecticides are harmful for all insects, not. just honey bees of course, other wild bees and insects. And that's been shown by so many other studies. I would say also we could do a better job of mapping where honeybee hives are and ensuring that honeybee hives are located in an area where they have sufficient floral resources to begin with, rather than placing too many hives in one area or placing them in an area where there isn't enough forage. And in doing that, we can also be mindful of trying to place honey bees in areas where they have enough food but they don't then deplete the resources of wild bees or other insects. So for example, not putting honey bee hives in a protected nature reserve and using them really in agricultural areas. But in general, I think sometimes honeybees kind of get a bad rap because they're portrayed as being... detrimental to wild bees but I think that this competition between managed honey bees and wild bees it only kind of becomes a negative thing when they're competing for the same resources in the same area and these resources are very limited because then of course the honey bees are dominant and they eat everything and then there's nothing left for the wild bees but I can imagine a system where both honey bees and wild bees can exist and we can protect both things in different ways with different strategies but where honey bees are used really in agricultural settings and then separately we invest a lot more in building or rebuilding a habitat for wild bees and other insects around agricultural areas and also urban areas.

Rebecca Nesbit: Interestingly, Dave also stressed farming is very important. He's done a lot of work on pesticides, but also acknowledging the challenge of working out how we feed the growing human population sustainably without inflicting further damage, acknowledging the importance of farmers and their complexities here. I'm sure a topic that we are going to return to pesticides.

Jenny Hickman: Yeah, for sure, because this is something that is a huge impact, but exactly like you say, we're so dependent on farmers and farming and pesticides are in place for a very important reason. We need to provide food, we need to kind of generate those resources. So it's a very, very complex topic.

Rebecca Nesbit: it very much is Dave was also keen to stress that there are some things that we can do as individuals.

Dave Goulson: Yeah, there's lots we could do and I guess the good news is insects can recover really quickly actually if we provide them with good habitat and stop poisoning them with insecticides and so on. You know, unlike a panda or a rhino or whatever which take decades to have offspring. So insect populations could spring back really fast if we looked after them better. How do we do that? Most people listening in are probably not going to be farmers and might think well there's not much you can do yourself but there are two things you can do. One is try and support regenerative sustainable farming things like organic farming by buying their produce where you can and when you can afford it. But also if you've got a garden or access to any kind of outdoor space that you can influence, then making it insect friendly is really easy and quite fun to do and something I do in my own garden. Don't spray any pesticides, grow some native wildflowers, don't mow your lawn all the time. Really simple stuff like that. Put up a bee hotel, have a pond for some of the aquatic insects. There's no magic to it, but it's amazing how effective it is. Literally within minutes, if you get hold of a lavender bush and put it in your garden, bees will appear as if by magic. The same day, sometimes within an hour, and you can feel you're doing something useful. If everyone did that, one garden's not going to make any difference, but with 22 million private gardens in the UK collectively covering 500,000 hectares of land, then if we could persuade most gardeners to do something for insects, that would really make a difference and it's something we can all kind of get our hands dirty doing.

Jenny Hickman: Nice, so lots and lots of themes that we're gonna wanna dive into there. We've got restoring wildflower habitats, that's a huge one with massive ecological benefits and the huge pressures that we're facing, climate change, pesticides, of interesting topics that I know we're gonna wanna dive into at some point.

Rebecca Nesbit: Yeah, absolutely. So much more to explore, but today we're running out of time. So just to summarise, we've seen that honey bees are incredibly common and that's because of humans. They've spread them around the world, living in managed hives as a domesticated species. This has caused problems directly for other species, including wild bees. But at the same time, we know that honey bees are very important, particularly for agriculture. producing nutritious food. So with all that in mind, what do you think? Have I convinced you that we should end our obsession with honeybees?

Jenny Hickman: Yeah, it's a really interesting one for me. think I still completely believe that honeybees are really important. That has not changed, but I have completely reframed how I think about honeybees and my understanding of them. think it's, we need to start looking at these as domestic animals. This is an agricultural problem. And the obsession that we currently have is very much theming it in the context of wild ecosystems as a conservation problem. And I think that for me has been the biggest shift. You can kind of see this as two separate things entirely. Yes, there are problems with bees and yes, we should be supporting them in ways that are specific to agriculture and providing them with nutrition and things like that. But that's actually separate to the conservation crisis of supporting wild pollinators.

Rebecca Nesbit: And to me, this brings it back to my favorite question of what's the point of conservation? If conservation is about preventing extinctions, then honeybees are not at all on that list. They're incredibly common. But if it's about wider benefits, such as food security, then honeybees are extremely important. So with that underlying question being so, so important, Our next episode out next week is going to be tackling the issue of whether nature has intrinsic value. Please tune in for that. But back to honeybees. My take is that it's not so much that I'm keen to end our obsession with honeybees, but it's more to increase our obsession with other species and not let honeybees mask the plight of all the many wild species.

Jenny Hickman: Yep, for sure. And if you think wild bees are unloved, just think about plankton and parasites and all the other species that we're gonna be covering in our future Unloved Species episodes. So if you're into the weird little creatures that don't get enough attention, make sure you're subscribed to us for future episodes.

Rebecca Nesbit: I want to leave you with an important parting thought from Dave, because not only do we need to see these unloved species with new eyes related to their importance, we need to learn to love them.

Dave Goulson: The more flowers there are, the healthier the landscape, the fewer the pesticides, the better off everything is going to be, both honey bees and wild bees. You're right to mention the sort of pleasure side of it. One of my favourite things to do at this time of year is to make a coffee in the morning and go and sit out on the patio where I've got some bee hotels. which are the moment they're buzzing with mason bees and later in year there are leaf cutter bees and there's a whole range of other interesting insects turn up. Just sitting and relaxing and watching the bees go about doing their thing is just a really lovely way to spend half an hour. I wish everyone had discovered it.

Jenny Hickman: Amazing. I could not agree more. think sitting outside watching the bees buzzing around with a coffee is absolutely one of my favorite ways to spend my time. So I encourage anybody listening, if you've got a garden, if you've got a pavement with some flowers on, anything you can get outside, watch the bees and remember why we care about these things.

Rebecca Nesbit: Thank you very much for listening to Cat Among the Penguins. We'd love to hear your take on the issues we've discussed today. Head over to our website, catamongthepenguins.com, to see the show notes and leave us your comments. We'll be discussing these comments in the final episode of our series. To make sure you don't miss it, please click like and subscribe on your podcast platform or follow us on Instagram. Your support is greatly appreciated. Thank you. See you next week.