I’m thinking that my apple tree had hundreds of flowers on it and has produced 20 apples. If there were more bees, i assume the tree would have produced more apples as the time of flowers didn’t have enough bees to pollinate them before the flowers withered? From this, if this is so, does that mean that our obsession with prioritising honey over harvest is reducing fruit and nuts yields? If so, this sounds like the biggest opportunity in increasing food production with no effort needed besides abstaining from eating honey.
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If I am reading between the lines, your hypothesis is that the honey industry is a significant (if at all) factor in declining bee population. A quck few idea checks will guide you to conclude that deliberate honey farming that sustains bee colonies in otherwise sensitive areas if anything helps.
You can get some serious Agricultural property tax brakes here in Central Texas if you can sustain a few beehives, so everyone is a hobby honey producer. I can’t imagine an argument that ending that would be somehow helpful to bee populations. Reasonable means of honey doesn’t harm the colony unless you literally don’t care and are just destructive which again is counter productive to someone trying to make a viable business of honey harvesting.
The short answer to your title question is yes
Honeybees are not native to the US
Keeping them has a negative impact on native bee populations
Native bees do a better job at pollination than honeybees
Aside from that, if you only have one apple tree, you aren’t going to get many apples – most apple types require cross pollination, get another apple tree
The vast majority of pollination is done by native bees (and other pollinators), not honey bees. Stop eating honey will do squat. The best is to support your local bees.
Don’t use insecticides. That includes mosquito lawn treatment and grub treatment. Leave the leaves and stems. Many bees overwinter in hollow plant stems and many other insects need leave litter (fireflies!). Reduce the lawn (lawns are basically desserts that get watered and fertilized). Plant native, pollinator friendly plants.
That said, there are many reasons why an apple tree has very few fruit. A late frost can destroy the flowers, a dry season can cause young apples to drop, ditto an extremely wet season. But if you are worried (and you should be), start looking into pollinator friendly gardening!
The limiting factor for apple (and many other fruit) production is not, in most cases, the number of flowers that get pollinated, but the number of fruit the plant can support with nutrients. This is why farmers thin the fruits from the trees, and why in the absence of farmers the tree drops a ton of little green apples early in the season, well before harvest.