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Comment by adolph | Hacker News Reader

I like bees, but aren't they effectively an invasive species too?

When temperatures increased, fauna and habitat changed drastically, causing the extinction of Apis in the New World until they were reintroduced by European settlers in 1622 (Engel et al. 2009).

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/9700...

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European honey bees are an "introduced species"[1], but this doesn't in itself make them an "invasive species"[2]. To be labeled invasive, they also have to be causing harm to their new ecosystem. While there might be some ways that honey bees are harmful[3], they aren't usually considered invasive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduced_species

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasive_species

[3] https://www.xerces.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/16-067_02_...

Depends upon what bee specific species and where. "Honey bees" (genus Apis) alone comprise several species which may or may not be considered invasive. In the particular case of the linked UMich paper, Apis mellifera (note: species mellifera, the Western/European Honey Bee) is definitely an invasive species to North America.

This says nothing of the, arguably more important, wild bee population, e.g. bumble bees (genus Bombus) ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_honey_bee#Claims_of_hu...

What about those "africanized" honey bees in the news a decade or so back?

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