What is urban beekeeping, and does it help bees?
Short answerIt depends
Keeping hives on roofs, balconies and allotments. Urban colonies often do very well — and keeping honey bees is not a conservation measure, because they are managed livestock competing with wild bees for the same flowers.
Why cities suit bees
Cities are warmer than the countryside around them, which lengthens the season. Gardens, parks, street trees and railway edges give a varied succession of forage rather than one crop then nothing, and pesticide exposure is often lower than on intensive arable land. Urban honey is strongly multifloral and can be excellent.
The claim to be careful with
What does help wild pollinators is forage across a long season, nesting habitat — bare ground, dead wood, hollow stems — and less mowing. All of it helps honey bees too, and none of it requires owning any.
The real reasons to do it
Honey, craft, teaching people something true about an insect they have never watched, and for many people the only contact with beekeeping they will ever have. Those are sufficient. The conservation claim is what collapses when somebody checks it, and it takes the credibility of the rest with it.
Sources
- Assessment Report on Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production — Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (2016) · Systematic review Link
- Bumblebees: Behaviour, Ecology, and Conservation — Oxford University Press (2010) · Monograph
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Work it out for yourself
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