Alien Species Reconsidered: Finding a Value in Non-Natives

[XemaSab]

The tale of the honeybee is a sadly familiar one: a once-thriving species is on the ropes. After brutal bouts with mites and fungi, honeybees are now facing their most dangerous threat yet: a mysterious disease called colony collapse disorder. In the winter of 2010 alone, U.S. beekeepers reported losing 34 percent of their hives to CCD, which may be caused by viruses, pesticides, or some diabolical combination of factors. Researchers are working hard to figure out exactly why the honeybees are dying and how to save them because of their ecological importance. Honeybees pollinate many of the country’s fruit and vegetable crops, and they also carry out the same service for many species of wild plants. In Brazil, honeybees help keep isolated rain forest fragments from dying out by moving their pollen from tree to tree.

Amidst all the concern for the honeybees, it’s easy to forget an important fact about them. They’re not native to the New World.

The earliest records of honeybees in this hemisphere come from English settlers who arrived with hives aboard their ships in the early 1600s. They brought the bees to make honey they could eat and wax they could burn. Over the past four centuries, new stocks of honeybees have arrived at least eight times, from Europe, the Near East, and Africa.

Introduced species can, in some cases, become dangerous invaders, wreaking havoc on their new homes. They may gobble up native species, outcompete them, or just infect them to cause new diseases. Much of modern conservation management is organized around keeping alien species out and killing off the ones that made it in. And yet there are no loud voices calling for the alien honeybees to be wiped out in the New World.

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/invasive_species_reconsidered_finding_a_value_in_non-natives/2373/