Honeybees invaded a reporter's home, and upended everything she thought she knew about them

It started with a single bee.

Sarah Kliff, a New York Times reporter, was working from home in Washington, D.C., a few weeks back, when she found a bee buzzing in her window. 

"I thought it had just gotten in by accident. When I went to get it, I saw another bee," Kliff told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

"Then when I went to my kid's room, there's this loud droning noise in the wall. And that's when it kind of dawned on me that I was dealing with not just a handful of bees, but many, many bees."

The interlopers turned out to be honeybees who had come through a gap in her roof and infested her attic. And, as she details in the Times, nobody would help her get rid of them. 

Exterminators wouldn't lay a finger on the insects. Beekeepers declined to take them off her hands. Meanwhile, her neighbours were begging her to save the bees. 

Kliff was worried about bee conservation too, she says. But when she started digging into it, she discovered something that shocked her — honeybees don't need our protection.

Honeybees are perhaps the bee most people are familiar with, but in North America, they're an invasive and managed species.

Brought over by European settlers in the 17th century, they are used partly for honey production, but mostly for agriculture pollination.

There were 794,341 honeybee colonies in Canada in 2023, according to Statistics Canada, up 3.6 per cent from a year earlier.

And while their colonies are sometimes plagued by mass deaths, often due to pests and diseases, they're not at risk of extinction.

"This is a livestock pollinator. So this right away negates any endangerment risk, because we're producing them in mass numbers to pollinate crops," Gail MacInnis, a Quebec entomologist, told CBC.

The bees that are at risk in Canada, she says, are the more than 800 native species. And like most insects, she says wild bees are in decline worldwide.

In fact, the proliferation of honeybees through urban beekeeping may be putting native species at risk, as they compete for limited resources — namely, flowers.