The global movement of managed honey bees

A native range, and everywhere else

Apis mellifera is native to Europe, Africa and western Asia. It is not native to the Americas, to Australia, to New Zealand or to most of Asia east of its range — where other Apis species and, in the Americas and Australasia, entirely different bee faunas were already doing the work.

It was carried to the Americas by European colonists in the seventeenth century, and to Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth. These were deliberate agricultural introductions, made because settlers wanted the honey, the wax and the familiar crops that came with them.

What arrived alongside

• Crops that needed pollinating, which is the reason the bees were wanted and the beginning of the pollination relationship.
• Competition for forage with native bees, including the stingless bees of the Americas and Australia and a very large solitary-bee fauna.
• Displacement of existing beekeeping. In Yucatán, imported Apis and later Africanised bees changed the economics of stingless-bee keeping that had been practised for centuries.
• Later, the parasites and pathogens of managed beekeeping, moving along the same trade routes as queens and packages.

The parasites took the same ships

Varroa destructor is the clearest case. It is a natural parasite of Apis cerana, on which it does comparatively little damage because host and parasite have a long shared history. It transferred to Apis mellifera where the two species were brought into contact by beekeeping, and then spread worldwide through the movement of managed colonies over the second half of the twentieth century, reaching most beekeeping regions and transforming the practice everywhere it arrived.

Tracheal mites, the small hive beetle, Nosema ceranae and a suite of viruses have moved by comparable routes. The general shape holds: a parasite with a long relationship to one host becomes a serious problem on a naive one, and the vector is trade.

This is why importing bees is regulated almost everywhere and prohibited in some places, and why a few regions — Australia notably held out against varroa far longer than most — treat their border status as an asset worth defending.