Ongoing pollinator declines call for urgent mitigation measures guided by adequate evidence-based policies. Recently, increasing concerns about negative impacts of managed bees on wild bees through resource competition and pathogen transmission have fueled intense scientific, societal and political debate. The complex and fragmented evidence around this topic, and how it is interpreted, is increasingly polarizing views among a diversity of stakeholders globally, including beekeepers, conservation practitioners, growers and policymakers.
We, a consortium of 27 wild and managed bee experts from different regions of the world, have recently published an article entitled “Avenues towards reconciling wild and managed bee proponents” in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The main point of our paper is to foster the co-creation of effective, evidence-based policies to help resolve some of the conflicts and better inform decision making. This requires addressing key knowledge gaps which are currently acting as barriers to the understanding the risks posed by managed bees to wild bees, and a weighting of these risks against those posed by other known threats to pollinators, such as pesticides, habitat destruction and global warming. We propose research avenues to fill the identified gaps, discuss existing solutions, and highlight the challenges ahead.
You can access the article using this link.
