Beekeeping attracts practitioners with different backgrounds and motivations, different levels of expertise and experience, and even some people who prefer things like honey shows and committee meetings to actual beekeeping. There’s room for all of us. However, the special combination of factors required for success; a grasp of biology, hard facts, and something more tenuous – call it instinct – means that there are plenty of myths. These will often be propagated from person to person, or in modern times, from ‘content creator’ to followers, and so they become accepted truths, even though they are mistaken. I’m here today to try to do a little myth busting.

That Einstein Thing

You know the one: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left”. This is widely misattributed to Albert Einstein, and just as widely misunderstood. I’d argue it’s a myth built on a kernel of ecological truth, but grossly oversimplified and unhelpful in its most common form.

Einstein didn’t say it: There’s no evidence that Einstein ever made this statement. It didn’t appear in his speeches or writings, and it only seems to emerge decades after his death, first surfacing in French beekeeping circles in the 1990s — not the 1940s or 50s. So, from a historiographical¹ perspective, it’s a fabricated attribution.

Collapse of civilisation: When people hear “bee,” they often think “honey bee.” But:

•	Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are not native to every region where they’re now found.
•	They’re important agricultural pollinators in large-scale monocultures (e.g., almonds, apples), but not the only pollinators.
•	Many crops — wheat, rice, corn — are wind-pollinated or self-pollinating and make up the bulk of global caloric intake.

So if honey bees were to disappear, there’d be disruption — certainly economic and ecological — but it would not trigger the collapse of human civilisation.

Pollinators ARE important: The broader point — that pollinators are crucial to ecosystem function and food diversity — is valid. About 75% of global crop types benefit to some degree from animal pollination (not necessarily require it). Loss of pollinators would:

•	Reduce yields and variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds.
•	Increase reliance on manual pollination (which is expensive and unsustainable).
•	Diminish biodiversity, which cascades through ecosystems.

But that’s a more complex and nuanced scenario than the catastrophic claim in the quote.

Why it Persists: Well, it’s emotionally powerful as it links bees to the fate of humans. It fits into environmental narratives, and seems credible by association with a renowned scientist, even though the association is made up. Pollinators are vital, and their decline is a serious concern, but it ain’t all about bees, and certainly not honey bees.

Nasty Bees Make More Honey

Nope, not true. There will always be anecdotal evidence to support this, and also to refute it, so I shall attempt to find some science. One thought that does strike me about those evil colonies is that beekeepers tend to leave them alone. This may benefit the colony in the case of inexperienced beekeepers, who often cause more harm than good by blundering around inside the hive. However, you can only get better by doing, so this phase of incompetence should pass. Furthermore, anyone with much experience will soon realise that colonies are not the same. Some evil colonies may well produce bumper honey crops, whereas others, quite the reverse.

The other point, of course, is that the amount of honey yielded is strongly correlated to the availability of forage, weather conditions, and colony size. These would have to be controlled for in any experiment trying to compare defensiveness with productivity. Most studies looking at defensiveness tend to compare Africanised honey bees (AHB) with European honey bees (EHB).

I found an article² called “The Process and Outcome of the Africanisation of Honey Bees in Mexico: Lessons and Future Directions” which looks into honey production. They say that one study³ showed “colonies of primarily African ancestry produce less honey than colonies of primarily European ancestry.” It was 30% less. Moreover, hybrids with an AHB mother had lower honey yields than EHB, but hybrids with a EHB mother (crossed with AHB drones) actually produced slightly more honey than EHB. This suggests that honey production is possibly determined more by the queen than the drones. But anyway, the evil bees made less.

Okay, I’m struggling a bit on the scientific evidence front. What I can say for sure is that, as evidenced by many bee farmers using Danish Buckfast bees – bees that are extremely gentle and chilled out – who routinely produce enormous honey crops. The book that I co-authored with Paul Horton⁴ describes how Paul achieves consistently massive crops using these very gentle bees. If somebody tells you that you should put up with a horrible colony that attacks and follows you because they make a lot of honey – know that gentle ‘puppy-dog bees’ can also make lots of honey. They are also much nicer to work with.

The idea that defensive colonies make more honey is, to be kind, an oversimplification. While defensive colonies may show higher foraging drive in some locations (e.g., Africanised bees in some tropical zones like Brazil), modern selective breeding demonstrates that high honey yields and gentle temperament are not mutually exclusive. What holds in unmanaged or tropical environments does not always apply to managed apiaries in temperate climate zones, like the UK.

Leaving Bees Alone

In the section above I rudely suggested that, in the case of beginners, colony inspections may cause more harm than good and could lead to less honey produced than if they just left the bees to ‘get on with it’. This raises the old intensive vs extensive management debate; which is best? I think whatever is ‘best’ depends on your individual goals, resources, and temperament. But which method makes more honey? What would you expect the answer to be?

Intensive management involves frequent and regular inspections at certain times in the season, making manipulations in the hive, regular re-queening, varroa treatment, and so forth – basically, what I call beekeeping. Extensive management has minimal interventions by the beekeeper; it involves less work – meaning more colonies can be run per beekeeper – but swarming is not controlled.

From my readings, I have been able to produce a little table comparing the two:

As usual, opinions, and experiences will differ. The main purposes of hive inspections are:

• to ensure there is enough space for the queen to lay and for the bees and honey
• to prevent or control swarming and
• to look out for disease or pests and act promptly to deal with them.
  

One could argue that giving them a large brood box (e.g. Dadant) and adding plenty of supers all at once in spring would deal with the space issue in one hit. Further, that if around 30% swarm, and they are not in residential areas, then that’s probably okay. One or two disease/pest inspections per season would cover that particular issue – so you can see how the extensive approach can work. Horses for courses and all that.

For me, as one who likes to raise queens and prevent swarms, I’m more hands-on than the extensive management style of a beekeeper. However, now that swarm season is pretty well over (famous last words!) I probably won’t be rooting about below the queen excluders very often for the rest of the season.

Notes:

1) The study of the writing and interpretation of history itself

2) https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2020.608091

3) Guzman-Novoa and Uribe-Rubio (2004)

4) Healthy Bees, Heavy Hives (Northern Bee Books)