15 ms·
This is completely anecdotally but keeping honey bees in my garden appeared to attract a large number of wild bees, like bumblebees, ground nesting and solitary
by mrweasel 3y ago
This is completely anecdotally but keeping honey bees in my garden appeared to attract a large number of wild bees, like bumblebees, ground nesting and solitary bees. Part of it might be that I've attempted to great an good environment for my own bees, part of it might also simply be that I notice bees a lot more.
Commercial beekeepers are a different story, but they mostly place their apiaries in areas where wild bees couldn't possibly manage to cover the entire area anyway, like fields.
One issue that might be at play in your case is that types of bees beekeepers normally keep are way better at dealing with pesticides, as compared to bumblebees and solitary bees. Your neighbors might be going a bit heavy on the spraying and some might actively be destroying the nests of ground nesting bees out of fear. For a few weeks each year my sidewalk is alive with ground nesting bees, while just a few meters away everything is fuck dead, because a stupid neighbor is allergic to bees and wasp and assumes that every bee is going to kill him (he doesn't keep an epi-pen so I question the seriousness of his affliction), so he sprays pretty much all sidewalks around here, except mine.