NPR

Honeybees Help Farmers, But They Don't Help The Environment

Maybe honeybees get too much attention. They are agricultural animals, like sheep or cattle, and they sometimes make life harder for wild bees. In fact, the bees in true peril are the wild ones.
Wild bees impaled on pins in Nigel Raine's laboratory at the University of Guelph, in Canada. Farmed honeybees can compete with wild bees for food, making it harder for wild species to survive.

Honeybees are amazing and adorable, and they suffer when people spray pesticides or mow down wildflowers. We've heard plenty, in recent years, about collapsing bee colonies.

So Jonas Geldmann, at the University of Cambridge, says he understands how the honeybee became a symbol of environmental conservation.

But he still doesn't like "Lots of conservation organizations are promoting local honey, and even promoting sponsorships of honeybees and that kind of stuff, and that increasingly annoyed me," he says.

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