The problem with the “Save the Bees for pollination services” movement

by Dr. Kit Prendergast *

You’ll often hear repeated all over that we need to save bees because without bees there would be no pollination, and without pollination, there would be no food. This is incorrect. There are many pollinators that are not bees – flies, wasps, Lepidoptera, birds, mammals, even some herps (read more on my Patreon about lizards as pollinators!). But the main issue with this argument is that if we only conserved bees that were pollinators of crops, especially in Australia, where almost all crops are exotic plants, we would be dooming the majority of native bees to extinction.

The main pollinator of Australian crops is the introduced Apis mellifera (European honey bee) – which is a livestock species (or feral, when it’s in the wild). Conserving honey bees does not conserve native bees – it can, in fact, compete with native bees and cause them to be threatened! Moreover, other native bees that pollinate crops are generalists and they aren’t the ones that need saving. Even if we are conserving native bees that are pollinators of wildflowers, this will not conserve all native bees. The fact is, there are a number of bees that aren’t great pollinators, but are the most endangered.

Due to the nested nature of pollination networks, many plants are visited by a diversity of pollinators (and non-pollinators), and so the extinction of the visitor won’t spell the extinction of the plant (there are certainly exceptions though). Reversely, there are many native bees that are oligolectic ¹ on native plant species, and if their host plant isn’t present, they will go extinct. These include the majority of Euryglossinae – a diverse subfamily of Colletidae, endemic to Australia. They swallow pollen and lack scopae ², and so are poor pollinators, as are the related Hylaeinae, the majority that are also oligolectic. Then, there are the kleptoparasitic ³ bees. These bees lack scopae and furthermore parasitise the nests of ‘good pollinators’! An example of the Thyreus genus, which are kleptoparasites of Amegilla – fantastic pollinators, especially of plants that require sonication. As you can see, the argument of saving the bees for pollination fails to conserve a vast diversity of native bees. We don’t need a strategy to secure pollination, we need a strategy to avert the extinction crisis of indigenous native bees.

Read more about why we are going to continue to lose biodiversity under a capitalist ideology of saving species for ecosystem services in my peer-reviewed article Beyond ecosystem services as justification for biodiversity conservation, published in Austral Ecology. As I conclude, “Rather than perpetuating an idea that nature is here to serve the needs of humans and provide goods and services, it can be argued preservation of functioning, healthy ecosystems and the diversity of biota on this planet are better served under an ideology of biocentrism and appreciating that each species is a unique outcome of the fascinating process of evolution, a natural work of art, and a source of potential knowledge that would be lost forever from the library of life if it were to become extinct.”

As a wild bee ecologist, taxonomist and conservation biologist, I struggle to get funding to avert this extinction crisis, like many other entomologists who work on obscure and ‘non-economically important’ species. You can support my cause and learn more about the fascinating diversity of native bees on my Patreon The Bee Babette, where you can also access all my publications.

Dr. Kit Prendergast, May 25, 2025

* Dr. Kit Prendergast, PhD, is an Australian native bee ecologist and science communicator. She is involved in investigating the anthropogenic impact on native bees.

NOTES

1. oligolecty is a term used for bees that exhibit a narrow, specialized preference for pollen sources, typically to a single family or genus of plants. From Latinized Greek ολίγος (little) and λεκτός (chosen one).
2. Scopae are the morphological parts of body of a non-parasitic bee that form a pollen-carrying apparatus. In most species of bees, the scopa is simply a dense mass of elongated, often branched, hairs on the hind leg.
3. Kleptoparasitism is a form of symbiosis in which one animal deliberately takes food (steals) from another. Klepto- originates from the word κλέπτης (thief).
4. Pictures from public domain (Pixabay), thumbnail: by J_Blueberry and by BRRT insects: by Gordon Johnson