How common are wild colonies?

Bees (nest entrance above propolis stain on left) are basically snobs, and appreciate statuary and Listed buildings

I recently gave an 18 minute Zoom talk to the HoneyBeeWorld Café, an informal online salon for those interested in wild survivor colonies, on the unmanaged wild bees around my home.

Here’s a direct link to it on YouTube, though it’s actually more fun to navigate to it through the HoneyBeeWorld Resources page (look for 20th July 2023) where you will find a bunch of other interesting short talks.

The key point here is that, living in a village, I have had the opportunity of mapping (perhaps all of?) the local wild colonies. Mapping most, or all wouldn’t be possible in a town(1), where the sheer density of people and properties would mean you would not, over the years, get to be known as the local swarm collector. And it turns out the colony density is very high. There are far more unmanaged colonies than managed ones. Separately, I’m involved in a monitoring project to determine how long lived these colonies are; most survive several years.

It seems a tad unlikely that I just happen to live in some special high-density location, so one has to wonder about the extent of the survivor population around Britain, Europe and Russia, the home range of the Western Honeybee.

Of course there are denialists, but… just look up.

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(1) Well OK it is possible in a town: the only example I know of is, Jovana Bila Dubaic mapped the wild colonies in Belgrade, finding several hundred. I think it took a couple of years of dedicated effort. The results were published as  Unprecedented Density and Persistence of Feral Honey Bees in Urban Environments of a Large SE-European City (Belgrade, Serbia)