A collection of bad bee-washing
How do you know if a “bee-friendly” claim is actually true? We’re trying to take some of the guesswork out of that answer by highlighting the times when it Hasn’t been.
Consider this page a psa to help consumers and concerned citizens make heads or tails of the marketing spin around bees.
CBC:
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is helping to fight bee population decline by putting hives on station roofs. This sounds good for the environment and good for their public image, but it also sounds a lot like bee-washing! First off, introducing more bees without addressing why they are declining is like adding fuel to the fire. Not only that, but as the Canadian public broadcaster, perhaps CBC would be better off helping in the fight to protect wild Canadian bees, rather than domesticated livestock.
CBC’s reporting on bee declines is hit-and-miss. There are lot of feel good stories about businesses adding hives to their rooftops, but also well-researched stories about the wild bees facing real extinction risks, and even a few stories about honey bee and wild bee competition. Hmm.. seems like only the feel good stories were absorbed at the corporate-level.
Actually, the corporate office has an Environmental Strategy, which further states how keeping hives is part of an official corporate initiative for Biodiversity. Superficially, this sounds good, but it’s actually pretty concerning. Biodiversity is about the variety of life so a biodiversity strategy that focuses on a single non-native, domesticated species totally misses the mark. If CBC is an accurate reflection of Canadian culture and values, then biodiversity is likely broadly misunderstood. Bee-washing narratives are only adding to this lack of understanding.
Alvéole:
While beekeeping is essential to industrial agriculture, its importance in cities is less clear. Alvéole is an urban beekeeping company. They install hives on school and business rooftops and claim benefits to urban greening and environmental sustainability. They have grown rapidly in the past few years, expanding from Montréal to cities across Canada and the US. Unfortunately, Alvéole relies heavily on bee-washing to promote their business. Take for example, their promotional video, where the first sentence and several after are completely false. Alvéole knows that honey bees are not completely harmless, yet they have continued to use an intentionally misleading video for the past three years.
Let’s fact check the first 30 seconds or so:
1) actually, honey bees are harmful to many living things, including wild bees (through disease transfer and competition) AND honey bees have stingers, which obviously can and do cause harm, 2) honey bees are not actively contributing to anything outside the hive; pollination is an unintentional by-product of their flower-feeding lifestyle, not some higher-level moral decision, 3) honey bees can be really crappy pollinators! In some circumstances, honey bees are best described as pollen thieves, rather than beneficial pollinators.
The work this company does is not beneficial to conservation, yet they continue to use the #SaveTheBees tag on social media. Any positive outreach this company claims to do for wild bees is negated by the fact that their practices are not friendly to wild bees (i.e., adding millions of non-native bees to rooftops without providing any additional flowering resources and increasing risk of disease transfer from managed to wild bees). The workshops they give and info they provide conveniently fails to acknowledge how managed bees contribute to wild bee declines. Even if they were to un-bee-wash their online presence, many of their existing clients have already bought into a bogus bee-saving narrative and this will be tough to un-do.
Urban beekeeping regulations need to be in place and advocated for so that companies like this are kept in check. Profiting companies should not be allowed to determine how many millions of non-native bees a city can support. By the time their business is affected by hive-to-hive competition, wild bees may have already been lost. More research on urban beekeeping impacts on wild bees is urgently needed, but until then let’s not assume (or buy into) the “harmless honey bee” spin.
Take home: cute jars of local honey are no replacement for the wild bees in our cities!
Sierra Club:
The Sierra Club requires donations to stay afloat and perhaps apocalyptic messaging about honey bees is a good way to bring in cash? Perhaps, but that’s what we call bee-washing.
There is a lot to unpack even in this single tweet:
1) honey bees are NOT endangered
2) honey bees haven’t experienced habitat loss in the US. Like cows have grazing land, bees have forage land, not habitat
In addition to misinformed tweets, Sierra Club sends out dooms day letters and free packages of non-native seeds to help dwindling bee populations. This is all done without acknowledging that winter colony losses are a normal part of beekeeping in North America, that honey bees are non-native to the continent, or that honey bees can actually be a threat to native flora and fauna.
If the Sierra Club wants to support bees, they should look back at their mission statement and figure out how conflating wildlife conservation with livestock management fits in. Hint: it doesn’t.
General Mills:
Obviously every great environmental initiative comes with a free t-shirt... Just kidding!
Cheerios has been blasting Canada and the US with the #BringBackTheBees campaign and the disappearance of their mascot, Buzz, for several years. The first couple years of this bee-washing campaign received quite a bit of bad press — good job media! This was because the “wildflower” seeds they were offering for free were not really wildflowers, let alone specific to the localities being mailed out to. In fact, some of the species were known to be invasive in parts of Canada and the US.
The Canadian ad campaign tried to recoup the following year by handing out sunflower seeds instead. Better, but still bee-washing. The US campaign has improved more by 1) not giving away seeds and 2) teaming up with the Xerces Society to create 3,300 acres of pollinator habitat on their oat farms. The #BringBackTheBees campaign attempts to highlight the connection between bees and our food supply so this initiative makes sense. And, given that most people in North America live in cities, those “wildflower seeds” were unlikely to be planted in the places they were needed most (i.e., the inhospitable, industrial ag landscape from which most General Mills ingredients come from).
Need more evidence? General Mills buys from farms using glyphosate. The herbicide works to reduce floral diversity on crop fields (ahem… what happened to being a keeper of the bees? And letting the weeds grow?). In addition, a recent study has shown that glyphosate can alter honey bee gut microbes, which in turn increases their susceptibility to disease! Bad news for, Buzz!
Admittedly, General Mills is making progress, has invested in pollinators in other ways (e.g., this $4 million investment) and is clearly a company that listens (no more invasive seeds!), but they are still bee-washing their way to a better public image. Free sunflower seeds will not “change the world”. This is advertising and so is wearing that free Cheerios tee they sent you!
Crown Bees:
Think all the bee-washing is about honey bees? Nope, even “the native bee experts” are capable of bee-washing. Crown Bees is a company based in Washington that sells mason bee and leafcutter bee cocoons for crop and backyard pollination. They also sell all the stuff you need to manage these alternative pollinators. Increasing the diversity of managed bees is a good thing, but leading customers to believe they are all native is a bad thing.
When you shop for bees at Crown Bees you are given two options: spring bees or summer bees (no, they don’t give you the species names upfront). You have to dig to figure out that the summer bees are actually not native to the US. The summer bees are the European alfalfa leafcutter bee which is a massively introduced species with a nearly global distribution. Evidence so far suggests that this bee does not have much impact on native bees, but why not be upfront about shipping this species?
The spring bees are mostly the western sub-species of the blue orchard bee, Osmia lignaria propinqua. Technically native to North America, but this sub-species isn’t naturally found east of the Rockies. Crown Bees (and Costco!) will ship this bee to you though, wherever you are in the US! These bees tend to be locally adapted to their climate, so mixing up the gene pools between east and west isn’t ideal. Crown Bees knows this, so sometimes they buy-back bees from local farms in an attempt to have a more diversified stock of bees (i.e., not all from Washington). That means when someone in New York places a shipment, Crown Bees, in theory, can try to sell them local, native New York bees. This sounds better and I like where they are going with this, except for the fact that in the eastern US, local sources of blue orchard bees are dwindling. So those “local” bees are actually very likely to be the Japanese horned-face bee, Osmia cornifrons. This is problematic because the horned-face bee is thought to be having negative impacts on native mason bees through disease spillover.
Not surprisingly, Crown Bees tries not to mention this bee anywhere on their site. I found one mention of this bee in an answer to the FAQ “are your bees native to my location?”. They state that the horned-face bee is naturalized and found across the US. This a cause for concern, not a reason to ship it! We need more data on the impact this bee is having in the east where it was originally introduced. In the mean time, we definitely don’t need “native bee experts” spreading it around and downplaying it’s recent and worrisome introduction in the west!
One last point: I mentioned how they sell the stuff you need to raise these bees. Ya, you definitely don’t need to buy their mud.