Montoya had recently retired from her career as a physician assistant because of a rare inflammatory disease, and the bee house sparked her curiosity. “I got immediately drawn to it,” she says. “So I went home that day, sat down and started reading.”
She read about native bees, their importance to the environment, and the threats they face. “And as soon as I learned about that, I realized that all they needed was more habitat. That seemed like such a simple fix," Montoya says.
She began to plant native flowers — first in her own backyard, then in her neighborhood. She raised money, enlisted volunteers and led planting workshops. And then she contracted with the City of Boulder to start a program in which community members could become pollinator advocates.
Montoya has now spent more than a half-dozen years advocating for pollinators and urging Boulder to save its bees. But not the kind of bees that usually get all the attention. While environmentalists around the world rally support for apis mellifera, the domesticated honey bee, the other 20,000 species of bees are going largely ignored. In fact, native bee populations, which play crucial ecological roles, are undergoing a steep decline that is only aggravated by the presence of honey bees.
“Honey bees don't need to be saved," Montoya insists.
The sweet reputation of honey bees
Honey bees have been cultivated in the Americas since European settlers brought them in the seventeenth century. Today, it’s estimated that around one-third of the planet’s current food supply relies on bee pollination, mainly by honey bees. How did humans survive before domesticating honey bees? Some native food sources, such as cherries, blueberries and cranberries, were pollinated by native bee species. Other species, like cereal grains, were wind-pollinated.
But cultivating non-native crops for large-scale agriculture has always gone hand in hand with cultivating non-native honey bees to pollinate them. And to make matters more delicious, those bees produce honey.
The public has been concerned with the decline in honey bees since 2006, when one beekeeper raised the alarm about a mysterious illness killing his hives. The phenomenon, dubbed colony collapse disorder, became a mainstream issue for environmentalists. Now, honey beekeepers across North America are reporting that severe and widespread colony losses last year are continuing in 2025.
One solution? Take up beekeeping. The more honey bees, the better.
Dawn Server is a beekeeper from Niwot who keeps honey bees as a retirement hobby. She and her husband started a small business to sell honey and lavender produced on their land.
Server is a beekeeper for pleasure, not for a living, “but it certainly helps when your hobby doesn't cost you money,” she says. “You're always learning something new.”
While Server didn’t start keeping bees for environmental reasons, it has made her more concerned about pesticide use in her neighborhood. She likes how selling honey connects her with the community.
She didn't realize that her hobby could impact native bees. But beekeeping might do more environmental harm than good.
Native truths about other bees
Of the 20,000 species of bees worldwide, at least 1,000 live in the state, according to the Colorado Native Pollinating Insect Health Study, which was authorized by the state and released last year.Science now suggests that native pollinators deserve as much, if not more, concern than honey bees. While honey bees might pollinate our crops, even more species of flowering plants — the native ones that make up our natural ecosystem — depend on pollination by native bees.
But honey bees can be very competitive, and a recent National Library of Medicine study found that more honey bees in an area equate to fewer wild bee species.
There are a few reasons for this. First, honey beekeepers can set up shop in urban and agricultural areas that have been cleared of native trees and other plants. Without those food sources, a habitat can’t support as many native bees, which don’t fly as far as honey bees for food.
Second, honey bees can pass harmful pathogens like vorroa mites, a contributor to colony collapse, to other bee species.
Third, honey bees are aggressive foragers, detailed communicators and abundant reproducers. Most native bee species simply don’t measure up.
Take bumblebees, for example. There are at least 24 bumblebee species native to Colorado, 20 percent of which are endangered. While a honey bee might travel up to five miles to find food, a bumblebee can only go one mile. A queen bumblebee might produce thirty babies in a season, while her honey bee counterpart produces half a million.
Honey bees use a famously intricate “waggle dance” to tell their hive mates the exact location of food sources. Other bees communicate much more primitively. Colorado State University professor John Mola, who studies bees, put it this way: “If honey bees are using the internet, bumblebees are using tin cups.”
A native bee case study
Tom Keras, former Open Space Ranger for the town of Superior, is an advocate for native bees. He helped lead a collaborative project between Superior and local beekeepers aimed at boosting the area’s native bee populations in the aftermath of the 2021 Marshall fire.
When Keras surveyed Superior’s open spaces, he looked for a diversity of native plant species. One indicator of biodiversity is bees. A healthy, biodiverse ecosystem relies on pollination by native species. Since Colorado’s 1,000 species of native bees have co-evolved with plants for maximum pollination efficiency. native bees are both an indicator and a booster of native plant populations, Keras suggests.
As drought, freeze-thaw and fire cycles shift out of balance, native plants with their deep roots and efficient nutrient storage systems are more likely to survive those cycles. “Putting these native bees back into our ecosystems is a step toward resilience in the face of climate change. It's really important to have that biodiversity intact,” says Keras.
His team mail-ordered colonies of mason, leafcutter and orchard bees to release in fire-burned areas. They created habitat for the bees by drilling holes in tree stumps and introducing reedy “straws” that some bees use for nests. Keras hopes the bees will proliferate and boost native plant species in areas where the fire was especially destructive.
Alex Vargas and Miles McGaughey are the beekeepers on the revitalization project. Even though they keep honey bees, they know the importance of building habitat for native bees.
In a mini-documentary about the project, McGaughey explains why the team isn’t installing honey beehives. “If you had only honey bees here, they don't work the same plants and crops so we wouldn't get the same benefit. Although this might sustain a honey beehive,” he muses.
When it comes to native plant pollination, native bees are much better at carrying enough pollen where it needs to go. On average, one native bee can pollinate as much as 100 honey bees can. But honey bees travel further, they’re hungrier and they are largely indiscriminate about their food. When honey bees get to flowers faster, there might be no pollen left when a native bee finds a flower.
Evidence suggests that a loss of food resources is the leading driver of native bee decline.
A study co-authored by Mola shows the amount and continual availability of floral resources are the best predictors of colony size. In other words, bees do better when they don't have to go for long periods without food.
If food is scarce one year, beekeepers will often supplement their bees’ food in the form of sugar water. This isn’t a perfect solution, Mola notes. In a talk at the Niwot Honey Bee Harvest Festival, he explained how a honey bee population boost during a drought — which parts of Colorado are facing this summer — can put unnatural competitive stress on native bee populations left to fend for themselves.
Flights of fancy
Despite the competition between honey bees and native bees, Vargas points out that honey bees are a useful proxy for tracking overall bee decline, since they are studied more. They face many of the same threats as native bees: pesticides, pathogens like mites, habitat loss and degradation, and climate change.
“With global warming and honey bees, honey bees were kind of the canary in the coal mine,” says Vargas. “People started realizing there's something wrong here. But it's something that we need a lot more data on.”
In an effort to collect that data, Colorado commissioned the Native Pollinating Insects Health Study. The study estimated that Colorado’s native insects provide a value equivalent to billions of dollars via agriculture and ecosystem services like climate regulation. It also assessed threats to native pollinators in Colorado and suggested ways to protect them. As a result, last May lawmakers passed HB 24-1117, which added invertebrates and rare plants to the species that may be studied and conserved by Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Among the Coloradans who supported the Invertebrates & Rare Plants Parks & Wildlife Commission Act were scientists and activists particularly concerned about Colorado’s native bees.
The bill also funded full-time staff to support pollinator and plant programs at the wildlife agency.
Last November, CPW hired the first of those staffers, Invertebrate and Rare Plant Program Supervisor Hayley Schroeder, who notes that Colorado, like most other states, now has the legal authority to manage insects. One of her team’s first tasks is to determine which of Colorado’s invertebrate species face the greatest threats; these are the species that CPW will prioritize in its State Wildlife Action Plan, which will guide conservation efforts for the next decade. In the meantime, the agency is also working with the Xerces Society, one of the co-collaborators on the pollinator health report, on the Mountain States Bumble Bee Atlas, a citizen science project.
Governor Jared Polis supports pollinator conservation and has been especially involved in the efforts, Schroeder says. He has pushed the team to collaborate with other government agencies in order to explore ways to integrate their work with the state’s transportation, water and fire management programs.
Another path forward could be more oversight on beekeeping, although CPW hasn’t announced any plans along that line. The state once made efforts to prevent the spread of diseases from honey bee colonies through the now-defunct Colorado Bee and Bee Products Act; today, Colorado is one of only eleven states that doesn't require honey beekeepers to register with the state.
"It's like loving something to death,” Mola says of honeybees. “We might love mountain biking or river rafting. But if everyone goes to the same trail, we are going to degrade that trail. So we have regulations and permit systems.”
At the very least, Mola suggests, “People who want to keep honeybees should ask themselves: Can I provide food and lots of it? Am I willing to upkeep my hives and check for disease? Am I willing to adapt to change?”
On the flip side, some wonder whether support of native bees could go the honey bee route. Could they be intentionally bred and domesticated?
Experts caution against that path. When some species of bumblebee were successfully domesticated to pollinate fruit trees, pathogens spread more quickly as a result, both to other bee species and among the bumblebees. According to CPW Pollinator Conservation Program Manager Adrian Carper, the recent wave of honey bee colony collapse just underscores the agricultural benefits of conserving native bee habitats, which can offer insurance against honey bee losses. Plus, crops like peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, squash and alfalfa are best (and sometimes only) pollinated by native pollinating insects, rather than honey bees.
But there are actions that can help. Restoring habitat is key for native bees, especially on the edges of cities and suburbs. Planting pesticide-free, flowering native plants in those areas can increase the range of those species little by little. People with lawns switch out turf for native flowers, making sure to plant a variety that will bloom at different times in the season.
“Continuity is key,” says Mola. “A small amount of food continuously available is better for bees than a boom and bust cycle. And you can discourage your local parks department from installing honey beehives.”
As a small-scale beekeeper, Server is on the fence. She sees her honey business as a resource for her community. But she also makes sure to grow plants that will feed bumblebees and other wild species.
Server co-organizes the Niwot Honey Bee Harvest Festival, which celebrates not only honey bees but all pollinators; talks there have focused on bats, bumblebees, mushrooms, wasps, soil, and habitat biodiversity. “There's room for everybody," she says.
Happy landings
Montoya stands in one of her pollinator gardens, a “pocket park” that she convinced Boulder to let her build on a traffic diversion island in the Goss Grove neighborhood where she lives. She comes here several times a week to tend to the plants and watch native bees land on flowers she grew from seed.
“This is why I got sick, to change my career. So the sickness served me," she says. "Otherwise, I'd still be practicing medicine, which was fine and good. But this serves my soul a lot more at this point in my life.”
She points to the houses in the neighborhood, explaining how she turned the block into a pollinator corridor. “All of these little gardens, in the houses that are privately owned, have little habitats in them that people had already created from either vegetables or native plants,” she explains.
One summer, Montoya went around to plant nurseries and asked them to donate end-of-season native plants to her cause. She planted some in the pocket parks, and wheeled others around the neighborhood in a wagon, knocking on doors and showing her neighbors how to plant them.
She asked them to volunteer in the new pollinator garden, too. “People bought into it. And they started coming. And every time they came, I felt like I needed to teach them something,” says Montoya. “So I did bee house building. I did native bee classes in the park. I did how to trim a shrub. I did how to plant a plant. Anything I learned, I went and taught them.”
While she is still worried about this country's reliance on honey bees, she remains hopeful about the future. “In the beginning, I felt very defensive about it. And I went at it from the point of view of us versus them," she admits. Now, she realizes, “we are all in this together. What can we do to come up with a healthy solution? We all want healthy habitat. I hope that we can all come to a place where we are all working together to try and solve the dilemma.”
