Save the Right Bees
Honey Bee Awareness is not about eliminating honey bees. It is about protecting the kind of honey bees people can safely live with, work with, teach with, and depend on for agriculture: healthy, productive, manageable colonies that do not create an extreme defensive threat to people, animals, workers, or communities.
The Message Is Simple
Honey bees do not have to be dangerously aggressive to pollinate crops, produce honey, or play an important role in agriculture.
We want to preserve gentle, productive, manageable honey bees while supporting credible research aimed at reducing the extreme defensive traits that can turn a colony into a serious public-safety problem.
What Do We Mean by “The Right Bees”?
Honey bees are livestock, pollinators, food producers, and an important part of agriculture. They should be able to defend their colony. Normal defensive behavior is natural.
The problem is not a bee that protects its brood or stored food. The problem is extreme defensive behavior that can send large numbers of bees after people, pets, livestock, outdoor workers, or responders who may not even realize a colony is nearby.
“Save the Right Bees” means preserving colonies that are healthy, productive, workable, and reasonably manageable while refusing to normalize repeated or extreme defensive behavior as something the public simply has to accept.
Gentle and Workable
Colonies that can be inspected, managed, taught with, and maintained without extreme defensive response.
Productive
Bees that can pollinate crops, produce honey, raise brood, and contribute to agriculture without dangerous behavior being treated as a requirement.
Worth Preserving
Managed honey bees selected and maintained for traits that allow people, livestock, agriculture, and pollinators to coexist more safely.
See the Bees We Are Talking About
These are the kinds of honey bees we want to preserve: gentle, productive, manageable colonies that can be worked, taught with, and used in agriculture without extreme defensive behavior. The playlist below includes real Basic Beekeeping 101 footage from The Bee Place using Italian honey bees.
Open the Save the Right Bees playlist on YouTube
Putting Real Bees Behind the Research
The Bee Place is prepared to dedicate up to 150 managed honey bee hives to properly designed research aimed at better understanding honey bee genetics, inherited defensive behavior, productivity, breeding, mating, and scientifically validated methods for reducing extreme defensive traits.
That commitment is intended to give qualified researchers access to real working colonies rather than limiting the discussion to theories, isolated observations, or small demonstration groups. Depending on the research design, colonies could be used as gentle managed comparison groups, different mating or genetic groups, and other scientifically appropriate study populations.
Honey Bee Awareness does not claim that one particular technology, treatment, genetic tool, or delivery method is already the answer. The goal is to make meaningful colony resources available so researchers can test credible ideas and measure actual results.
What Research Should Be Able to Test
There are important questions that should be measured with real colonies and repeatable methods rather than settled by rumor or assumption. Research could examine questions such as:
- How strongly defensive behavior is inherited across different mating and genetic backgrounds.
- Whether highly defensive colonies actually produce more honey or perform better than manageable colonies under comparable conditions.
- How queen replacement, drone genetics, open mating, selective breeding, and controlled breeding affect temperament over time.
- Whether genomic, molecular, breeding, management, or other scientifically validated approaches can reduce extreme defensive traits while preserving colony health and productivity.
- How researchers can identify and preserve desirable traits without accepting dangerous behavior as the price of keeping productive bees.
This Is Not About Killing Bees
Honey Bee Awareness is not anti-bee, anti-beekeeper, or anti-agriculture. We are not asking for helpless bees, and we are not saying that every defensive colony is Africanized or that every colony showing defensive behavior should be destroyed.
We are asking a different question: if people can breed and manage honey bees for productivity, disease resistance, overwintering, color, size, and other traits, why should extreme defensive behavior be treated as something that cannot or should not be studied just as seriously?
Protecting good honey bees and protecting the public are not competing goals. They are part of the same goal: healthier bees, better stewardship, safer communities, and a future where productive honey bees remain welcome around farms, homes, schools, workers, livestock, and public spaces.
Our Goal
Preserve the bees we want more of. Study the traits that create unnecessary danger. Give science real colonies to work with. Stop normalizing extreme defensive behavior.
Save the Right Bees.