The study, published in Ecological Entomology, observed 300 interactions between flower visitors on bramble and ivy near honeybee colonies in Cambridgeshire. Honeybees were most likely to initiate competitive encounters and won the majority of interactions across both plant species. In roughly one fifth of cases where a honeybee won, it either displaced other insects – for example by landing on them or pushing them off a flower – or chased them away.
Other flower visitors actively avoided honeybees in 28.4% of interactions on bramble and 35.6% on ivy. The researchers documented encounters involving five groups: honeybees, bumblebees, solitary bees, hoverflies, and other flower-visiting insects including butterflies, beetles and wasps.
“That’s important because, of course, it means that the wild pollinators are facing a challenge from both those types of competition from honeybees,” said Victoria Buckle, lead author and a PhD researcher at Anglia Ruskin University. Previous research had shown that honeybees outcompete wild pollinators indirectly by depleting shared resources, but this study reports a more direct form known as “interference competition”.
The findings come amid a boom in hobbyist beekeeping in the UK. The number of registered beekeepers has more than doubled from 19,000 in 2010 to 47,000 in 2025, according to the National Bee Unit. Conservationists have raised concerns that the rise in managed hives is harming wild bumblebees and other pollinators by increasing competition for food and by spreading disease, particularly in urban and agricultural areas where flowers are scarce.
Bumblebees were also observed occasionally displacing other pollinators, but the researchers believe these incidents were likely accidental, reflecting their less coordinated movement in confined spaces rather than deliberate aggression.