Comment by tptacek
3 years ago
(This is a hobbyhorse of mine...)
At least in North America, the "colony collapse" stuff was a livestock phenomenon more than it was a wildlife/ecology issue. Honey bees aren't native to the US; if you see a honey bee in your back yard, there's a pretty good chance that somebody owns it.
>if you see a honey bee in your back yard, there's a pretty good chance that somebody owns it.
This is true even in Europe. If memory serves the percentage of "wild" honeybees (feral may be a more fitting adjective) is in the order of 1%.
I have wild honey bees in my yard (New Mexico) and have seen them in other places. I believe they are Africanized but just looking I can't tell the difference.
At any rate, in warm areas of the US there are many feral old world bees.
They're africanized if they are very aggressive.
Recently I saw a talk where the speaker said that if you find any africanized beehives in the wild, you should kill the hive because you don't want the africanized bees to spread. (Or if you have an africanized beehive, re-queen it.) I don't have any, and I'd be loathe to kill bees because I'm quite fond of them, but it's probably good advice.
You should hire a professional exterminator, to be more precise.
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So what species are the native pollinators here in North America?
There's lots of them, including a huge variety of bees, but many (most?) of those bees are solitary, and aren't battery-farmed the way honey bees are.
I don't know what they are called, but the big bees that like to burrow into pine and other wood I have tried to make a home for. They aren't aggressive at all so I don't mind them buzzing about.
Every time I get a decent population we get some cold weather and I don't see them again for a long time.
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