When beekeepers introduced honeybees to a protected island, wild bees nearly vanished. Could removing the hives reverse the damage?
Since 2018, honeybees have feasted on wildflowers across a remote Italian island called Giannutri every spring. But for the last four years, Lorenzo Pasquali had the unusual task of shutting the honeybee hives down and watching wild bees as they scrambled to claim the flowers, racing for every drop of nectar in the absence of their domesticated rivals.
Managed honeybees, often used in agriculture, and native bees feast on the same floral nectars and pollens. Ecologists have long suspected that honeybees may be pushing wild bees to the margins, but carrying out experiments in these wild insects has turned out to be tricky. Pasquali, an ecologist now at the University of Bialystok, Poland, and his colleagues turned the islet -- just over half the size of New York's Central Park -- into a living laboratory to test honeybees' impact.
The results, recently published in the journal Current Biology, suggest that wild bee numbers alarmingly dropped. With the temporary removal of honeybees, nectar and pollen levels surged, allowing wild bees to forage more and feed on nectar longer and altering their daily routines.