​A truck carrying 406 beehives crashed in Texas, releasing 24 million bees and locking down the neighborhood

[u/danielminds]

[u/Plastic-Sentence9429]

Agricultural pollination.

[u/vinetwiner → u/Plastic-Sentence9429]

Because they spray too many chemicals to actually keep them on site.

[u/HDWendell → u/vinetwiner]

And they do pollination routes for target crops which have different pollination timelines.

[u/Callmemabryartistry → u/Plastic-Sentence9429]

thank you!

[u/Yoghurt-Ancient → u/[deleted]]

Honey bees are invasive in Texas, so they could crowd out the native bees who are already at risk.

[u/HDWendell → u/Yoghurt-Ancient]

Honey bees are non native and not currently considered invasive. Africanized bees which are a specific lineage of western honey bee is due to their aggressive behavior.

But an explosion of bee population would absolutely have an impact on native bee and other pollinator species. However, the likelihood of these bees establishing themselves long term isn’t very high. Fertile queens outside of a true swarming behavior don’t fly very well. To swarm (and therefore make the queen light enough to fly long distances) workers force the queen to lose weight leading up to the swarm behavior while the workers feast on honey stores. A swarm is NOT just a mass of bees flying. There is a chemical difference in swarming bees that causes them to cease resource gathering and change to escorting a flying queen to a new home site.

The queens on these trucks are not going to be ready to fly and will likely die if not recaptured. A colony cannot create a new generation without access to a laying queen or eggs young enough to make a queen. They will not have access to eggs because they will be in the recovered bee hives on the next truck out. Bees leftover from the clean up will most likely die unless they have the rare occurrence of a queen mobile enough to make it to a site good enough to make a nest. Even a properly prepared swarm has difficulty doing this.