Galicia, an oasis where the wild honey bee survives in Europe

Although experts considered it unlikely that the honey bee would have survived as a wild animal in Europe, in reality it still exists and is found in Galicia, according to a study published by Biological Conservation.

A team led by the German Julius-Maximilians University (JMU) began searching Galicia in October 2019 for the presence of this insect in the wild.

The search focused on that Spanish autonomous community at the suggestion of another of the text’s signatories, Alejandro Machado, from the Galician association Ridimoas for the defense and study of native forests, who had observed the presence of these bees in hollow electrical poles and apparently thriving there.

The researchers scoured a 136-kilometre area analyzing power poles to find out if an entire population of wild bees could exist.

The search resulted in 214 posts in which the biologists checked if a colony of bees lived inside, said biologist Benjamin Rutschmann, one of the study’s signatories.

During the first year of the investigation they found 29 colonies and, on a second visit, in March 2020, they saw that 17 of them had survived the winter, although the animals had not been fed or treated against parasites.

Biologists ruled out the possibility that these honey bee colonies could be feral descendants of foreign bee strains imported by beekeepers.

To do this, they analyzed the wing venation pattern and found that all the colonies living on the power poles were members of the Iberian bee, Apis mellifera iberiensis.

The team does not rule out that in Spain the honey bee has existed both as a wild animal and as a livestock animal until today.

However, it is necessary to demonstrate with more years of observation if the population studied can be stable in the long term, highlighted another of the authors, Patrick Kohl.

Machado indicated that, after two years of study and 52 colonies of bees observed, they have verified that around 40% of these survive the winter, which constitutes the first data communicated so far on the survival rate in Europe.

The survival of Galician honey bees depends, to a large extent, on the naturalness of the environment, since the colonies that survive the winter the most are located on electrical poles surrounded by bushes, heaths or forests, compared to those that are next to crop fields intensive.

Of the colonies surrounded by more than 50% semi-natural habitats, at least one in two survived the winter, but in landscapes with less than 25% such habitats and thus little food supply, the chance was almost null.

In Galicia, the researchers found strong contrasts between contiguous semi-natural areas with no or extensive traditional use (heathland, scrubland) and large areas of intensive agriculture with high inputs of pesticides and fertilizers.

“It was this stark contrast between quasi-nature and agricultural wilderness that allowed us to realize that landscape context plays such an important role in honey bee survival,” Rutschmann said.

“Without enough nesting and feeding habitats, even banning pesticides or curbing climate change won’t help the insects,” Kohl concluded.