Wild Honeybees Now Endangered in the European Union

You could be forgiven for assuming honeybees are doing well: the honey sector is expanding, and beekeepers carefully tend their bees. Yet hives are not home to every honeybee. Wild colonies still occur across Europe, making their nests in hollows in trees and other natural sites, as their ancestors have done for millions of years.

For the first time, however, wild honeybee populations have formally been classified as endangered in the European Union. The designation appears in the latest revision of the IUCN Red List, the global official record of species’ conservation status.

Western honeybees have been associated with people for a very long time. Humans have maintained honeybee colonies for millennia, including the ancient Egyptians, who used simple hives to collect honey. Modern beekeeping, though, involving movable hives and commercial pollination, has had the greatest influence on the species.

As a result, the western honeybee now occurs in two forms: colonies managed in hives and colonies living independently of humans in the wild. Both are members of the same species, Apis mellifera, but their circumstances and future outlooks differ profoundly.

Since the 2000s, managed honeybees have experienced much-publicised crises, with beekeepers worldwide reporting worrying losses from their hives. Researchers have since collaborated with beekeepers to identify the causes and lower colony mortality.

This has led to a widespread view that the entire species is threatened. The situation, however, is more nuanced. Managed colonies do still experience substantial losses, but beekeepers care for them and scientists research them. Their wild equivalents have not received the same attention and, until recently, remained comparatively little studied, particularly in Europe.

This lack of knowledge prompted several European researchers to investigate honeybees that live freely in the wild. Colonies of this kind have since been recorded across Ireland and the UK; in French national parks; in forests in Germany, Switzerland and Poland; throughout Italy; and even in cities including Belgrade, Serbia. They are now being studied to establish whether they can create self-sustaining populations that survive without human assistance.

Tracking honeybees across Europe

Honey Bee Watch, a worldwide initiative, was established in 2020 to link these separate research projects. Its aim is to improve understanding of how honeybees survive in the wild. As part of this coalition, I joined a group of 14 scientists and specialists who worked with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to reassess the conservation status of wild A. mellifera populations.

This work contributed to a major update of the European Red List of Bees, led by researchers at the University of Mons in Belgium. It assessed the conservation status of nearly 2,000 species, many of them for the first time.

In 2014, wild A. mellifera populations in Europe were classified as "data deficient" because there was insufficient evidence to resolve an apparently straightforward issue: when a colony lives in a tree, how can we determine whether it is genuinely wild or has escaped from a managed hive?

A revised meaning of ‘wild’

Our latest assessment used another method. Honeybees are not fully domesticated because beekeepers have never been able to stop them completely from breeding with other colonies, whether these are wild or managed. Consequently, the genetic distinctions between managed and wild colonies are frequently unclear.

Rather than attempting to establish a genetic boundary between them, we modified the IUCN definition of “wild” for honeybees. Under this approach, wild honeybee populations were identified using two criteria:

First, they live freely and are not managed. Second, they maintain their numbers independently, without depending on the introduction of new colonies, including colonies that have escaped from managed hives.

Defining wild honeybees through ecology rather than genetics enabled us to assess their conservation status more effectively.

Wild honeybees endangered in the EU

Europe has the world’s lowest density of free-living colonies because managed hives greatly outnumber wild colonies. Recent analysis supplied by fellow assessors also shows that their numbers are falling.

Together with evidence of lost habitat, invasive parasites, disease and human-mediated hybridisation, this produced an unmistakable conclusion: wild honeybees are in difficulty.

Their Red List category has therefore been changed to "endangered within the European Union." In the broader pan-European region, though, they are still considered "data deficient" because information remains limited for areas including the Balkans, the Baltics, Scandinavia and eastern Europe.

Conserving wild honeybees is not solely about protecting an iconic species; it also means securing future food security, biodiversity and ecosystems. Wild-surviving populations have naturally developed the capacity to withstand parasites, diseases and other severe conditions that can destroy managed hives. They offer an important genetic reservoir that may help both wild and managed bees become more resilient to future threats.

The new endangered classification formally acknowledges that wild honeybees are native wildlife requiring conservation. We can no longer afford for them to remain inadequately studied and without protection.

Arrigo Moro, Postdoctoral Researcher, Galway Honey Bee Research Center, University of Galway

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.