When many of us think of honeybees, we think of the ones we have seen buzzing around one of the flowering plants in our garden or we imagine a feral colony in the hollow of an old oak tree overhanging an apple orchard zooming around pollinating the crops or we think of a couple of boxes of bees managed by a local beekeeper.

But large scale farming involves mobile beekeepers taking their bees on the road in semi trucks – going from pollinating a crop in South Carolina to a crop in California. In the United States, paid pollination services and crop yield boosts exceed $15 billion per year. “In 2026, American beekeepers collected approximately $400 million in pollination rental fees. The crops their bees pollinated were worth $18.9 billion.”

Honeybees, unlike wild native bees are considered to be managed livestock, like cattle, and though there are wild colonies of honey bees who have split off from their commercially wrangled fellows, those are also considered managed livestock, though they are not being managed.

Honeybees differ from most native bees in that they live in colonies where each bee has a defined role to support the queen and the overall health of the hive. Though there are some exceptions, such as bumble bees, most native bees are solitary — living on their own, not in group housing.

Honeybees are not considered to be endangered, but there are many threats to their survival, including a changing climate, habitat loss, pesticide use, various parasites. and nutritionally deficient plants caused by monocultures and chemical fertilizer use. Kept bees, particularly, the mobile ones, experience a lot of stress. In 2007 mobile beekeepers started reporting cases of Colony Collapse Disorder  (CCD) where the majority of the worker bees disappear from the hive, leaving a few nurse worker bees, larval bees, food, and the queen behind. The hives cannot survive without a large number of workers. 

You might worry that we would not survive without honeybees  because they pollinate so many of the foods we eat. But we would. Some of our staple crops like wheat and rice do not rely on honeybees. Our food would be more expensive and a lot less diverse, a lot less nutritious, and a lot less delicious — gone would be apples, almonds, and berries.  Most concerning would be the collapse of ecosystems where bee pollination was a critical component. A cascade of destruction would occur.