Is beekeeping good for bees?

I often hear from beekeepers that they are helping keep bee numbers healthy and are necessary for bee survival. This is often linked to their own honey sales, which they can now market as a sustainable product. However, I never carefully considered whether beekeepers were right that their honeybees help sustain wild bee populations. Luckily for me (and you, reader), in 2025, researchers Pasquali and colleagues wondered the same.

Why do we care about bee populations?

Before anything else, we have to get a really important distinction out of the way. When people talk about "saving the bees," they almost always picture the western honeybee (Apis mellifera). The problem is that the honeybee is a single, semi-domesticated species out of more than 20,000(!) wild bee species worldwide.

Honeybees, as a species, are not endangered and not in decline. Global counts of managed hives have been stable or rising for decades (Phiri et al., 2022). The bees that are actually in trouble are the wild ones. Around 28% of North America's 47 bumblebee species face some level of extinction risk, with some being endangered already. The decline is often attributed to habitat loss, pesticides, disease, and climate change.

There is also a good reason to care about the wild species specifically, beyond just general bioconservation: they do a large share of pollination. Garibaldi et al. (2013) looked at 41 crop systems worldwide and found that visitation by wild insects improved fruit set in every one of them, while honeybee visitation improved it in only 14%. Per equivalent increase in visits, wild insects were about twice as effective. Quite a practical argument for keeping wild bees around!

What did the 2025 study look at?

Most evidence until this study was correlational: places with more honeybees tend to have fewer or less-active wild bees. Since this is a correlation, it was always a bit up in the air what this means. A poor floral year could depress both groups at once, or beekeepers might simply place hives where wild bees happen to already be scarce.

Pasquali et al. got around this with an actual experiment. Their site was Giannutri, a small protected island in the Tuscan Archipelago with a single apiary of 18 hives. Since they were studying an island, it's as close to a closed system as you can get. Similar to a lab experiment, they were able to turn on and off the honeybee factor and measure the effects on the flowers.

To figure out how the plants responded to the absence or presence of honeybees, they closed the hives on selected days during the peak of wild bee foraging, creating a honeybee-present (HB+) versus honeybee-absent (HB−) contrast using the same plants. To understand if honeybees outcompete wild bees, they had many questions: do both populations feed from the same flowers?, does removing honeybees free up nectar and pollen?, do the wild bees forage differently?, and how does the population trend change over years?

What did they find?

In short: the two groups both fed from the same plants, and where honeybees were present they dominated, making up around 60% of all flower visits.

So does removing honeybees actually leave more food for the wild bees? Yes. The researchers measured how much nectar and pollen was standing in the flowers. Honeybees keep those flowers drained while they forage, so the test was simple: shut the hives and see what builds back up. On days the hives were kept closed (about 11 hours of lost foraging time), nectar volume on the most-visited plants was roughly 60% higher and pollen availability roughly 30% higher than on days the honeybees were out foraging. Switch the honeybees off for part of a single day, and the wild bees' food supply measurably recovers within hours.

With honeybees gone, wild bees visited more flowers, probed more nectar, and shifted the timing of when they collected resources. When honeybees were present, the wild bees took measurably longer to find pollen, which is what you would expect when the competition for food is stronger.

When they tracked the populations over time, using transect surveys (walking a fixed route and counting every bee seen), both focal wild species the Anthophora dispar and the bumblebee Bombus terrestris declined by about 80% between 2021 and 2024. Based on the short-term exclusion mechanism (honeybees deplete shared resources and push wild bees into costlier foraging) and the long-term trend, the argument that honeybees drive wild bee populations down is quite clear. This is in agreement with earlier correlative studies that showed the same trend, but since this study has an intervention, it is even harder to argue against.

What can we conclude?

On the best causal evidence available, adding honeybees does not help wild bees. In fact, it can even drive them down. Keeping honeybees "for the bees" only protects the one species that never needed protecting. It reminds me of the saying: “getting a bee hive to save the bees is like keeping chickens to save wild birds”.