Want to 'save the bees'? Skip the honeybee hives and grow native plants

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Want to 'save the bees'? Skip the honeybee hives and grow native plants
People have embraced the 'Save the Bees' slogan — but few understand which bees need saving
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In 2012, the rusty-patched bumblebee became the first native bee in Canada to be designated as endangered. Photo by Ann Sanderson
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Ecologist Sheila Colla has developed an impressive skill. Picture a Where’s Waldo puzzle book, but instead of combing the crowd for someone wearing a striped shirt, she homes in on pollinators.
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“I can’t go on walks anymore without noticing bees flying around. Like, I won’t see the birds or the cars. My search image has been trained to see bumblebees going from flower to flower,” says Colla, laughing.
In 2009, riding on the passenger side of a car in Ontario’s Pinery Provincial Park on Lake Huron, this ability led to a remarkable finding. (All the more notable for the discovery being one to two centimetres long.) As part of her PhD work, Colla had been scouring the park every summer since 2005, searching for the once-common rusty-patched bumblebee .
One day, Colla spotted something unusual, so she and the graduate student behind the wheel stopped to investigate. There, by the side of the road, was a rusty-patched bumblebee — the last in Canada to be found in the wild.
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“I just saw something that looked different than what we were normally seeing. I didn’t know exactly at the time what it was. Then we saw what it was, and we were like, ‘What do we do? We don’t have any pictures of it. Do we capture it?’ We just totally freaked out,” she recalls.
In the space of two decades, the rusty-patched bumblebee went from being commonplace to elusive in its eastern North American habitat , which stretches from southern Ontario in the north to Georgia in the south, southern Quebec and New Brunswick in the east to the Dakotas in the west.
In 2012, the rusty-patched bumblebee became the first native bee in Canada to be designated as endangered . And in 2015, it was listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species .
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Sheila Colla was the last person in Canada to spot the rusty-patched bumblebee, in 2009 in Pinery Provincial Park on Lake Huron. Photo by Ann Sanderson
Pinery Provincial Park has not experienced much habitat degradation, explains Colla, now an assistant professor and conservation biologist at York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies specializing in bees and endangered species.
There is no pesticide use or loss of flowers, she adds. And though there may be more invasive plants in the park, the rusty-patched bumblebee is a generalist accustomed to visiting hundreds of plant species.
The rapid decline is thought to be due to a disease introduced by introduced bees, Colla says, but the causes have yet to be confirmed. “It just gets back to people understanding that we can’t replace our native bees with managed bees, because there are a lot of impacts of using managed bees in our ecosystems.”
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Some pollinators are threatened — such as the endangered rusty-patched bumblebee and monarch butterfly — but the introduced honeybee is not one of them.
As Colla and co-author Lorraine Johnson illustrate in A Garden for the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee (Douglas & McIntyre, 2022), contrary to common belief, helping endangered pollinators does not entail leaving non-native dandelions on your lawn, installing “bee hotels” or starting an urban beehive.
Creating habitat, however, makes a difference. We can aid wild pollinators by growing native plants in our communities, whether together or individually, on a balcony, in containers or yard, says Johnson, a Toronto writer and advocate who has written on the topic for 30 years.
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“This is something that can be done anywhere and everywhere, and needs to be done anywhere and everywhere,” she emphasizes. “Because, of course, one of the factors that has led to the decline of certain pollinators and other species is not just habitat loss, but it’s also habitat fragmentation.”
“For people who are concerned about ‘how can I support bees?’ creating habitat, planting native plants, just makes so much sense,” says author Lorraine Johnson. Photo by Mathis Natvik
Species need connected habitat to be healthy, Johnson stresses. A bumblebee may only travel a couple kilometres in its lifetime. If there is only one pocket of habitat in that area, its health could be affected. The more pollinator patches with native plants we create on farmland, in cities and rural areas, the more connections there will be.
As global temperatures rise, species are on the move , Johnson adds, which underscores the need for connected habitat. “It’s like stepping-stones across the landscape to help species on the move in response to climate change. That’s (one) reason creating habitat with native plants is a climate action. And also, it’s one of the ways that we can help create resilience on the landscape.”
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People have embraced the “Save the Bees” slogan — but few understand which bees need saving. Canadians lack fundamental bee knowledge, suggests a 2020 survey analyzed by Colla’s lab and conducted by Friends of the Earth , an international environmental advocacy network.
When people consider bees, they think of honeybees, the survey of 2,000 Canadians found. As Colla explains, none of Ontario’s native bees make honey, and many of them are silver or green — not black and yellow. In contrast with honeybees, which live in hives, most native bees are solitary.
More than half of respondents thought honeybees are native to Canada, which they are not. Settlers imported the species from Europe in the early 1600s to produce honey.
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From TikTok to office buildings and schools, urban beekeeping is booming . But the issues facing wild bees cannot be fixed by backyard beehives or rooftop apiaries. Quite the contrary: “A growing body of science documents that non-native honeybees are negatively affecting native bees,” Johnson and Colla write.
Of the 865 known bee species in Canada, 46 are native bumblebees — one-quarter of which are at risk of extinction, the authors highlight. Scientists do not yet know how ecological communities will react as climate change increases the risk of drought , for example, and decreases snow cover .
“Having as many species as possible in these systems allows there to be resiliency. Allows there to be some overlap in pollination services,” says Colla. “So, it’s really playing with fire to even think about not protecting every single one of these species.”
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The community pollinator garden in Spruce Park, Mississauga features native plants such as asters and goldenrods. Photo by Jeanne McRight
Urban beekeeping is widely promoted as a sustainable practice — a way to help “save the bees.” But scientists have pointed out the flaw in this message, comparing it to “ saving the birds by keeping chickens .”
Colla prefers a different analogy: “I say it’s more like throwing (invasive) carp into Lake Ontario and thinking you’re saving the fish. Because honeybees go out into the environment. They’re not contained, and they spread diseases and they extract nectar and pollen out of the environment.”
Honeybees not only sustain themselves on nectar and pollen during the summer, Colla underscores. Unlike native bees, they also store food for the winter. She references a 2016 study published in the journal Conservation Letters , which found that one apiary collects as much pollen as four million wild bees would in a three-month period.
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The honeybee is a successful invasive species, she adds. It has been introduced all over the world and is not endangered by any metric.
Colony collapse disorder — which was first reported in 2006 when some American beekeepers lost 30–90 per cent of their honeybee hives — is a livestock management challenge, Colla stresses, not a biodiversity conservation issue. “You can order more in the mail. When we have honeybee losses, that’s a financial problem. It’s not an endangered species.”
Adding to the evidence of Canadians’ confusion, more than 85 per cent of the Friends of the Earth survey respondents thought pesticide use and loss of flowers are the main threats to bees. Though these factors are not helping bees, says Colla, this is also incorrect.
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Climate change and diseases brought in by honeybees — “kind of like COVID” — are the primary issues affecting native bees, she adds. “And those are things that people don’t talk about, because they’re so large, and it doesn’t feel like you can tackle them. But it’s still really important to realize that these larger systemic problems are what we’re fighting up against.”
Tri-coloured bumblebee (Bombus ternarius) and pussy willow (Salix discolor). Photo by Ann Sanderson
Campaigns such as #NoMowMay , promotional seed mixes and “bee hotels” are often presented as straightforward solutions. But “saving the bees” is much more complicated than allowing dandelions (an introduced plant) to take root on your lawn or scattering seeds without knowing if they are native to your region.
“Humans are awful at replicating nature,” says Colla. Bee hotels, for instance, result in increased parasitism or predation , because the insects are in an unnaturally dense structure. “The safest, easiest and most welcoming ‘bee hotels’ for native bees are the hollow stems, tree nooks and leaf litter of a native plant garden,” Johnson and Colla write.
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Native pollinators have coevolutionary relationships with native plants that we should be nurturing, Colla adds. And we still have much to learn about how these relationships function.
She cites the work of researcher Leif Richardson, who found that turtlehead (a wetland plant native to eastern North America) produces parasite-reducing compounds — and bees may “ self-medicate ” by visiting these plants more often when infected.
Because of such coevolved relationships, Johnson emphasizes, when you grow native plants, “you know that you are going to be doing something positive in terms of providing habitat.”
Lorraine Johnson and Sheila Colla’s A Garden for the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee is a guide to helping native pollinators by creating habitat with native plants. Photo by Douglas & McIntyre
Colla started studying bees in 2003 and has seen the issue of “saving” them rise from obscurity to becoming one of the most important environmental issues of our time.
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Countering misinformation around pollinators is “exhausting.” But she has seen some progress as non-governmental organizations have switched their messaging from promoting European honeybees to wild pollinators.
It is a complex issue, she adds — one that she is confident people without scientific training can understand.
Over the pandemic, people have learned how to read graphs and understand various modes of disease transmission, says Colla. “Our knowledge changes when things are more complex than they seem originally. But for some reason, with the ‘save the bees’ thing, people just latch on to the bumper stickers, the hashtags, the really oversimplified things.”
Take the “Milkweed for Monarchs” campaign. As its larval host, the endangered monarch butterfly needs milkweed (which was on Ontario’s noxious weed list until 2014). But the migratory species faces other major threats, says Colla, including not having enough goldenrod for energy to go south over the Great Lakes, pesticide use in the Midwestern United States and logging in their overwintering site in Mexico.
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“So, to really oversimplify it to be like, ‘Oh, you just need to plant a milkweed,’ that’s also a bit problematic. Because there’s this whole life cycle over three countries (Canada, the United States and Mexico).”
Spring beauty mining bee (Andrena erigeniae) and spring beauty (Claytonia virginica). Photo by Ann Sanderson
Johnson and Colla wrote A Garden for the Rusty-Patched Bumblebee to shed light on this complexity. Accompanied by illustrations by science illustrator Ann Sanderson and photos of pollinator gardens throughout Ontario, the authors pair science-based information with practical guidance on building habitat with native plants.
As with bees, misconceptions about native plants abound, highlights Johnson. Since she wrote her first book, The Ontario Naturalized Garden , in 1995, “we’ve come a long way.” But the “intersecting crises of biodiversity loss and climate change” call for urgent action when it comes to changing our notion of native plants.
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In her frequent presentations to horticultural groups, Johnson asks attendees, “What’s the first word you think of when I say native plants?” Often, the answer is, “Weeds.”
When she takes the conversation further, asking which plants people find problematic, the species they mention are inevitably invasive (non-native), such as dandelion, Creeping Charlie, bindweed, goutweed and knotweed.
“Native plants are not weeds, and they’re not the weeds that cause gardeners problems,” says Johnson.
“(Native plants) have coevolved here, in a region for thousands of years. They’ve developed all these crucial relationships, and associations with all the other species that are native to the place and to the region. And they all support each other. These relationships are so important to healthy ecological functioning.”
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Fallen leaves, old logs and rocks provide crucial habitat for native pollinators. Photo by Shawn McKnight, Return the Landscape
Another common misconception around native plants and introduced, non-native plants is the belief that any plant can supply all the resources that pollinators, other insects and birds need, Johnson highlights. But when it comes to plants, “all green is not green.”
The authors cite researcher Dr. Douglas Tallamy , who has shown that native plants support more species of Lepidoptera (an order of insects including butterflies and moths) than introduced plants. Other studies have found that wild bees benefit from native plants in similar ways, Johnson and Colla write.
We can help these coevolved relationships by planting native species throughout our communities and maintaining these pollinator gardens in low-effort ways, the authors explain. Let dead foliage fall, leave stems for cavity-nesting bees, bare earth for ground-nesting bees, and logs for nesting bees and other insects.
These simple actions can make a substantial difference to pollinators, like “the beautifully named and intriguing and lovely bumblebee, the rusty-patched,” says Johnson.
Part of the problem, though, lies in perception: Some people think native gardens look messy. “I would love to be a part of helping to create a culture shift. Where instead of seeing mess, we see abundance. And we see nature’s order.”
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