With beekeeping and saving the bees becoming more and more popular, I can't stress this point enough! Beekeeping is amazing it teaches us a lot about bees and ourselves, but there is too much of a good thing and as beekeepers, we have to be aware of over-farming and why bees started to decline in the first place. It's not just bees it's pollinators in general but the strapline “save the bees” took off, it's not a bad thing as it brings awareness to the cause but most people just think of honeybees when they see it. This is not the case there are around 250 species of bees in the UK, the only ones we can really keep and make money off are honeybees hence the popularity. One of the biggest factors in pollinator decline is the loss of habitat and this is still the issue, but now what we have is a huge number of honeybees taking a lot of what little habitat is left for the rest of the pollinators and the other 249 species of bees. In places like America and Australia where they have a huge abundance of land to offer the pollinators they can afford to have hundreds of hives, but the simple fact is we don't have that kind of land here in the UK and what land we do have is constantly being built on. As much as I encourage people to take up beekeeping don't think you won't get this lecture from me, there are already a lot of beekeepers out there and if several people in a village keep bees and they all have between 3-10 hives (because no one ever just sticks with one hive ). A single healthy hive in summer can have anywhere between 50,000-80,000 bees, they only travel up to 5miles so say 60,000 bees across 8 hives you are already at 480,000 bees. Now if you live in an area with not a lot of year-round forage you can see how in that 5mile radius you are soon starving the other pollinators of food. There's no doubt honeybees have their own struggles and that's why it's important for us to continue doing what we do, but we have got to start being more aware and actively doing more for the other pollinators otherwise we are just adding to the problem.
Below are some of our native pollinators I've seen whilst out and about.
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