It’s been highly publicized in recent years that the honeybees are in grave danger. Although we all love that sweet, sweet honey and don’t want it to go, the central issue is that honeybees are tasked with pollinating approximately one in every three bites of food that we consume. One of the main difficulties with honeybees is that they, much like us, are overstressed and overworked, which leads to early fatalities. With the honeybee population dropping 44% in 2015 people are finally starting to look for a solution.
This means wonderful initiatives of Urban Beekeeping and Lush’s willingness to assist the expansion of beekeeper businesses that align with their environmental and social values. However, this also means an uptake in food fraud scandals, shipments of extremely cheap honey coming in from suspect sources for a fraction of the cost. The Canadian Honey Council suspects that the honey entering Canada is being produced via an elaborate honey-laundering industry, selling honey diluted with corn syrup in the place of 100% honey.
So what do we do? Are we all hopeless in the face of a honey-free future? Is the end of the world coming from the extinction of honeybees rather than the widely assumed zombie apocalypse?
No! All is not lost in the wild world of pollination. An enlightening conversation with Jamie Armstrong, the Sustainable Lush Fund Coordinator in North America, made it clear that while honeybees are needed, of course, to produce honey, a lot of stress could be taken off them if farmers and beekeepers turned to other pollinators. He stated that “there’s a high demand on beekeepers to fulfill pollination contracts […] that means people might bring in queen bees from Southern California or Hawaii, they arrive stressed out and tired which contributes to a higher die off rate”.
The real solution to this stress is the unsung hero of the wild pollinators and a native to North America: the mason bee. Sure, the mason bee doesn’t produce that sweet nectar known as honey, but it sure knows how to pollinate the heck out of our produce. These lovely loners can be recognized by their metallic blue-black colour, are slightly smaller than the honeybee and pose almost no threat to stinging. Even if they do sting it’s akin to that of a mosquito bite rather than the searing pain the honeybee leaves in its wake.
So why haven’t we been turning to the mason bee in this time of need? Well the fact is mason bees lack the popularity of the honeybee because of their loner-like status. These bees don’t answer to the totalitarian regime of a queen bee and they don’t live in colonies. However, they are a surprisingly easy bee to keep, even in an urban environment. You can set up nesting boxes nearby the food supply and let them pollinate efficiently and on their own schedule.
In case these magic pollinators aren’t capturing your interest yet, Jamie told us “Honeybees are not that great at pollinating apples. There are crops that are evolved around a certain pollinator that no longer exists and relies on the honeybees. They do the job, but it’s not effective”.
Lush has a vested interest in the wellbeing of honeybees since most of their products are based on honey. Jamie is fully aware that the bulk of the money beekeepers receive comes from pollination contracts; a facet of the business Lush has no need for. If pollination contracts were to shift from honeybees onto other pollinators that would make it easier for honeybees to continue to make honey well into the future. He said, “mason bees are good and you can easily build homes for them. They are solitary bees and they don’t produce honey, but people will keep them for pollination contracts as they are much more effective”.
With all that in mind it’s clear that while we all need to be worried about the honeybees because they do still pollinate a third of our food. However, the answer doesn’t need to be producing more honeybees that will continue to die off. The answer is to start looking at other pollinators, like the mason bees, who can do the job better. Let the honeybees make the honey as is their delicious destiny; mason bees are willing and ready to help us pollinate our food so why not let them step up to the plant?
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