Honey bees: the queens of mass media, despite minority rule among insect pollinators

Abstract

1. Pollination is a critical ecosystem function with high ecological and economic value. Conservation initiatives aimed at protecting diverse pollinator communities in natural and agricultural habitats are essential, but the implementation and success of such initiatives often depends on public support.2. Mass media play an important role in building public awareness around environmental issues, and biased coverage can have damaging effects. Here, we present the first analysis of how Australian mainstream media present the 'pollinator' paradigm. We gathered insect pollinator and pollination related articles from major Australian online newspapers published over a period of 9 years, and performed a qualitative content analysis using deductive coding to record information on the pollinator species or groups discussed in the story.3. We found 151 stories, and demonstrate that within these, there was a disproportionate focus on introduced European honey bees as the most important, or only, pollinator insect relevant to Australia. Only 15% of stories mentioned native bees as pollinators and 17% mentioned non-bee pollinators.4. There is potential that the trend we report here for pollinators may be indicative of a larger overall simplification and neglect of biodiversity concepts in mainstream media, both in Australia and globally. As public awareness of science and environmental issues partly depend on disseminating accurate information beyond the scholar network, it is imperative that the broader effects of inaccurate science communication are fully understood.

Positive and Negative Impacts of Non-Native Bee Species around the World

“…It may change the population dynamics of insectivorous birds, generalist insect predators, or insects that prey solely on bees, such as beewolves [138]. There may also be interesting impacts of non-native bees on public perception of important ecological issues [139]. …”

Our House Is Burning: Discrepancy in Climate Change vs. Biodiversity Coverage in the Media as Compared to Scientific Literature

“…Recent communications about pollination, a service provided by ecosystems (IPBES, 2016), were not associated with a particular boost in our media analysis ( Figure 1A). However, the loss of pollinators and its consequences for human activities attracted a lot of media attention (Smith and Saunders, 2016) when IPBES pollination assessment report was released in 2015. The fact that such information was not retrieved in this study might reveal some potential limitations associated with our approach.…”

Pollinator Diversity: Distribution, Ecological Function, and Conservation

“…Kato et al 1995). However, although there has been limited research on the topic, it is clear that there is considerable media bias, and journalistic misrepresentation, of the diversity and relative importance of pollinators, with honey bees receiving attention that is disproportionate to both their importance and their need for conservation (Ollerton et al 2012, Smith andSaunders 2016). One of the main aims of this review, therefore, is to highlight how taxonomically 4 diverse pollinators actually are, how this diversity has evolved and become distributed globally, and why conserving this diversity is so important.…”