By Michael Graham Richard / Source: Treehugger

bee

Apiculture is great, but beware of unintended consequences!

Our little yellow and black friends are tremendously helpful to nature, pollinating countless plants while only asking for a little food in return. But bees are under attack, their numbers plummeting around the world because of pesticides and diseases… And now they might even be threatened – unintentionally – by some of the bees’ best friends. Apiculturists raise bees for commercial purposes, making delicious honey and often renting out the services of their hives for pollination purposes. So far so good.

But it turns out that captive bees can cause problems for wild species. A team of researchers from the University of Exeter has published a study in the Journal of Applied Ecology that shows the potential for diseases to jump from commercial bees to insects in the wild (including other species, like bumble bees, wasps, ants and hoverflies.

This is likely because commercial bees are not always species that are native to where they are, and their genetic diversity might be lower, or at least of a different profile, than the wild species.

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