GoKawiilThe Bee That Everyone Wants to Save
22 Mar, 2026
My neighbour keeps bees.
Fifty hives, all lined up neatly along the edge of his property. On warm spring days the air between our gardens hums with them. They work the plum blossom, the almond, the dandelions in the lawn. They are, by any measure, impressive.
A beekeeper a little further down the road has another thirty hives. At a conservative estimate of fifty thousand bees per hive, that's four million honeybees within flying distance of this garden on a warm spring day! Yes, you read that right.
Four million individuals of a single species, none of which would be here without human intervention.
To put that in perspective: a healthy population of mining bees might have a few hundred nesting females in a good aggregation. A bumblebee queen starts a colony that will reach a few hundred individuals by midsummer at most. The numbers are not comparable.
And yet the honeybee is the one we worry about.
Livestock
Apis mellifera, the Western Honeybee, is not a wild animal in any meaningful sense of the word. It has been kept, managed, moved, and selectively bred by people for at least six thousand years. It has been transported to every continent except Antarctica, introduced into ecosystems far outside its original range across Africa and the Middle East, and kept in densities that would never occur naturally anywhere on Earth.
... continue reading