Honeybees Are Barging Aside Wild Pollinators in the Hunt for Pollen and Nectar, Study Finds

The finding: honeybees are not sharing nicely

Honeybees enjoy a warm reputation as tireless, good-natured workers of the summer garden. A new two-year study from Anglia Ruskin University suggests that image deserves a revision: when it comes to flowers, honeybees are pushy neighbours. Researchers recorded hundreds of encounters in Cambridgeshire in which honeybees bumped into rival pollinators, chased them from blossoms and muscled them aside to reach pollen and nectar first.

The work, published in the journal Ecological Entomology, is the first to document the extent of this aggressive behaviour in the field rather than in theory. Its headline result is stark. In areas where honeybee numbers were highest, wild pollinators — bumblebees, solitary bees and hoverflies — were markedly scarcer. Where flowers should have been shared among many visitors, a single managed species was taking the lion's share of the forage.

Lead author Victoria Buckle and her colleagues argue that the findings matter because honeybee numbers are climbing fast, driven by a boom in amateur beekeeping, and because the wild insects being shouldered aside are already under pressure from habitat loss, pesticides and a changing climate. The study raises an uncomfortable question for conservation: can the insect we are trying hardest to save be making life harder for the rest?

Two years of watching flowers in Cambridgeshire

The team spent two years observing five sites in and around Cambridge, each within 300 metres of known honeybee colonies — close enough that managed bees were a constant presence on the flowers. They focused on bramble and ivy, two plants that matter hugely to pollinators: both flower generously and attract crowds of visitors when in bloom, making them natural arenas for competition.

Over 93 hours of close observation, the researchers logged every interaction in which one insect disrupted or prevented another from reaching a flower — around 300 encounters in total. Flower visitors were sorted into five groups: honeybees, bumblebees, solitary bees, hoverflies and an "other" category covering butterflies, beetles and wasps.

Each contest ended as a win — one insect took the flower while the other lost its forage — or a share, in which both fed without conflict. That simple scoring system let the team measure not just which insects visited flowers, but which ones controlled them. The pattern was consistent: the more honeybees in an area, the fewer wild pollinators were recorded, and honeybees were disproportionately the insects doing the disrupting.

Barging, bumping and chasing: interference competition in action

What the observers saw was blunt. Honeybees were frequently the instigators of encounters and usually the winners, physically barging rivals aside or pursuing them off the flower. In around a fifth of the competitive interactions that honeybees won, the victory came through displacement — a direct physical shove or a chase rather than simply arriving first.

Ecologists call this interference competition: rather than merely being more efficient foragers, one species actively denies a resource to another. Buckle said the aggression likely has roots in the way honeybee colonies organise themselves, noting that some castes act as guard bees with the capacity to threaten and repel intruders in defence of the hive and its brood. That defensive wiring, she suggested, may spill over into foraging behaviour.

The researchers were struck by how deliberate the behaviour appeared. Honeybees seemed to target the rival insect itself, manoeuvring to force it off the bloom rather than merely landing nearby and feeding. "You could tell that they're specifically trying to move the other one off the flower," Buckle observed of the encounters — a small phrase that captures the study's shift from counting visits to watching contests.

A beekeeping boom is raising the stakes

Behind the competition lies a remarkable surge in managed honeybees. According to the National Bee Unit, the number of registered beekeepers in the UK more than doubled from 19,000 in 2010 to 47,000 in 2025, spurred by high-profile campaigns to save the bees and a growing appetite for urban and hobby hives. Gardens, rooftops and allotments that once hosted only wild insects now hum with managed colonies.

Well-meaning though much of that enthusiasm is, conservationists have begun to worry that flooding landscapes with honeybees could harm the very creatures campaigns aim to protect — through competition for food and the risk of disease transmission between managed and wild insects. Buckle stressed that her team's goal was understanding, not blame: "The aim of our study was not to discourage beekeeping, but to better understand how competition happens between wild and managed pollinator species with the aim of helping to conserve our wild pollinators, which play such an important ecological role."

She added that many beekeepers are environmentally minded and keen to ensure their hives do not impinge on wild insects — an audience, she said, that makes this research a tool for better practice rather than an attack on the craft.

The one insect that fights back

One pollinator refused to be bullied. The ivy bee, first recorded in Britain in 2001, was the only species seen displacing and chasing honeybees rather than the other way around. Ivy bees specialise in feeding on the nectar of ivy flowers, and on the blooms the Cambridge team watched they held their ground and then some, driving honeybees off flowers the larger insects had claimed.

The researchers suggest that body size, emergence timing or sheer persistence may let ivy bees win contests that bumblebees and hoverflies lose. Its success is a useful reminder that competitive hierarchies among pollinators are not fixed — a smaller or later-arriving species can still come out on top. But the ivy bee is a single exception in a landscape where the traffic otherwise flows one way, and it offers little comfort for the bumblebees and hoverflies losing out most often.

Heat will make the jostling worse

The study also uncovered a troubling climate link. Hotter conditions brought a clear rise in competitive interactions, probably because nectar dries up and plants go into heat stress as temperatures climb, concentrating hungry insects on fewer rewarding flowers. When resources shrink, the scrum at each remaining bloom gets rougher.

That matters because mean summer temperatures in the UK are predicted to rise by as much as 4C by 2080, promising more frequent and sharper contests at the flower head. Buckle argues that the answer is not fewer hives but smarter conservation: more research into how wild pollinators can be protected, honest guidance for beekeepers on hive density and placement, and above all enough flower-rich habitat that managed and wild insects are not forced to fight over scraps.

The conservation message, then, is about abundance rather than blame. If the landscape offers plenty, the barging matters less; it is when flowers are scarce — in a hot summer, on a thin urban verge, beside an apiary packed with colonies — that honeybees' pushiness turns into a genuine ecological cost.

FAQs

What exactly did the researchers watch, and for how long?

The team observed five sites in and around Cambridge over two years, all within 300 metres of known honeybee colonies, focusing on bramble and ivy flowers that attract heavy pollinator traffic. Across 93 hours of observation they logged about 300 encounters in which one pollinator disrupted another's access to a flower. Each encounter was scored as a win — one insect took the flower while the other lost its forage — or a share, where both insects fed without conflict.

Why are honeybees so much more aggressive than wild bees?

Lead author Victoria Buckle links the behaviour to the honeybee's social organisation: colonies maintain guard castes equipped to threaten and repel intruders in defence of the hive and its brood. That defensive toolkit appears to carry over into foraging, so honeybees treat rival insects on flowers as intruders to be moved. Most wild pollinators are solitary or live in small, short-lived colonies, so they simply lack an equivalent instinct for confrontation and usually retreat.

Should people stop keeping bees because of these findings?

No — the researchers explicitly say discouraging beekeeping was never their aim. They want the results to guide conservation planning and beekeeping best practice instead. Practical responses could include spreading hives more thinly across the landscape, siting apiaries away from sensitive wild pollinator hotspots, and planting far more flower-rich habitat so that managed and wild insects are not competing over the same shrinking supply of forage.

What is the ivy bee, and how did it reach Britain?

The ivy bee is a solitary species first recorded in the UK in 2001 and believed to have spread naturally across the Channel as the climate warmed. It emerges in autumn, feeds chiefly on ivy nectar, and is now widespread across southern England. In the Cambridge study it was the only pollinator observed pushing honeybees off flowers instead of being pushed — a striking exception that hints competitive hierarchies among pollinators can shift.

How does climate change intensify this competition?

Warmer conditions produced noticeably more aggressive encounters in the study, most likely because heat dries up nectar and stresses plants, forcing more insects to chase fewer rewarding flowers. UK summer temperatures are projected to rise by up to 4C by 2080, which would make such contests more frequent. That makes protecting and expanding flower-rich habitat an urgent climate adaptation for pollinators, not merely a nice-to-have.