No ... what I am saying is that honey bees have little impact on other insects and in particular pollinators in the UK. That the original article that suggested honey bees were affecting the forage available was put together in the USA where beekeeping is very different and where monoculture is practised in a scale that we don't have in the UK. The study to which I assume you allude was put together on false science by people who have an agenda... there is no evidence anywhere to suggest that honey bees are having any effect on the ability of other insects to find sufficient food. Your post... as I suggested originally is unadulterated rubbish.
Would tend to agree with your assessment.
One of the problems we have..and I have had to deal with it several times...is the assumption that beekeepers are some sort of greedy rapacious idiots..and if we challenge them we are simply dishonest. That's the problem of trying to deal with single issue activists.
Plainly every action has a consequence....every flower pollinated by honey bees is then not available for bumbles etc.
However...the assumption that this then means we are responsible for decline in wild pollinators because we are taking all their food is a deliberate twisting of the facts to maximise their leverage in getting what they want...normally the expulsion of beekeepers.
ANy beekeeper.....large or small...who allows a situation to arise where forage is SO limited by our actions that there is nothing left for the wild pollinators is foolish in the extreme....and I don't think there are many fools on here.
If you strip the forage so bare there is nothing left the first casualty is your own bees. The wild pollinators tend to be up and about earlier than our own...and get first dibs on the flowers as a result. When we MOVE bees to crops we are not thinking of stripping the forage bare.....there is a balance to be had between maximum per colony return and efficient pollination....and a high proportion of nectar and pollen goes uncollected. There is normally plenty for all.
We are back to what you can show in a lab and what happens in the real world again.....
Not a serious issue in the UK...but we still come up against the eager and strident campaigners who want you put out of an area they want for their own species.
Our worst example was a Highland area frequented by some very lovely bumble bees...apparently we were killing them by having bees there despite the target flora of these bees being blaeberries and cowberries..flowering at a time our bees were not there. We only put bees in for the heather flowering..at which time the flora is so abundant we could have put 1000 hives where we were placing 200 and probably still only collect 5% of the resource. When this was pointed out to the pressure groups we were liars..when the estate supported us in the dates of entry we were paying them....when dated pictures of the bees sites in June with no bees in them were provided it was staged. Its was OBVIOUS that was the case. When pointed out that bees in that environment do not survive winter it merely proved that we did not care for bee health so why trust us about bumble bees.
When that all failed to sway the estate the letter writing started......people all over the country started sending in letters to the estate and the conservation bodies they were working with claiming we were liars. Then they got over *70* copies of a single article on the OTC case of 2009 sent through to prove they were dealing with liars............and people wonder why I have honesty concerns about activists?
Why oh why would we do a thing like have bees in an area with little beneficial forage when we have abundant forage elsewhere?
We are still keeping bees on the estate for heather btw............they go in mid/late July..they come out mid September. We see the lovely multi coloured bumbles all the time..there appears to be no conflict at all.
