Knowledge / Background
Background
Honey bees and wild bees
In the Netherlands alone there are 360 different species of bee. The honey bee is only one of them; the rest are wild bees, which make an important contribution to biodiversity.
Wild bees do not produce honey, but they are excellent pollinators. Many of them specialise in pollinating specific plant species (monolectic and oligolectic), which makes the most specialised flower visitors the optimal pollinators. Tomatoes, for example, are pollinated by wild bees, not by honey bees. Wild bees form the foundation of our ecosystem; their disappearance would set off a chain reaction that would accelerate the current sixth mass extinction and cause an unprecedented loss of biodiversity. Astonishingly, more than half of the wild bee species are on the Red List of threatened species.
Image: This box from Naturalis contains 79 of the 104 wild bee species recorded in Amsterdam. These specimens are to be scanned at the Technical University of Darmstadt.
In brief
Wild bee or honey bee?
The honey bee is a single species and is not threatened. The Netherlands has 360 species of bee, and well over half of the wild species are on the Red List.
From reading to planting.
Find the bee that belongs to your neighbourhood, and plant her flowers.