I THINK IT IS TIME YOUR MAGAZINE published an informative article on the wild bee and pollinator crisis. So many people in the UK are fundamentally confused about the situation and it is your duty to bring clarity. The public often hears that the bees are in trouble and equate them with honeybees – please clear up this confusion.
Many people support beekeeping because they think they are ‘saving the bees’ but farmed honeybees are not wild animals, they are livestock.
The farmed honeybee is a breed of the ubiquitous western honeybee (), which is one. Our truly native honeybee subspecies is , whose population was almost wiped out by disease. There is much academic literature on the spread of disease from farmed honeybees to wild ones and in their huge numbers they compete for food with all wild pollinators.
