In a way, beekeeping is stealing nectar from wild bees.
I pretty much never see wild bees in my garden anymore - they're all honey bees, and usually some human is keeping/farming them - effectively stealing nectar from my garden and that of thousands of my neighbours that we had left out for wild animals.
It may have to do with the flowers you have in your yard. I have a beehive and a large number and diversity of native pollinators, but I plant to attract and support them.
This is completely anecdotally but keeping honey bees in my garden appeared to attract a large number of wild bees, like bumblebees, ground nesting and solitary bees. Part of it might be that I've attempted to great an good environment for my own bees, part of it might also simply be that I notice bees a lot more.
Commercial beekeepers are a different story, but they mostly place their apiaries in areas where wild bees couldn't possibly manage to cover the entire area anyway, like fields.
One issue that might be at play in your case is that types of bees beekeepers normally keep are way better at dealing with pesticides, as compared to bumblebees and solitary bees. Your neighbors might be going a bit heavy on the spraying and some might actively be destroying the nests of ground nesting bees out of fear. For a few weeks each year my sidewalk is alive with ground nesting bees, while just a few meters away everything is fuck dead, because a stupid neighbor is allergic to bees and wasp and assumes that every bee is going to kill him (he doesn't keep an epi-pen so I question the seriousness of his affliction), so he sprays pretty much all sidewalks around here, except mine.
Stealing is a weird choice of words. Do you steal the oxygen that you breathe, or the water that you drink ? For it to reach your tap, it has been stolen by some fish's lake
The nectar and pollen that flowers produce is in fact a limited resource, both in quantity and in time available.
Honeybees have the capability of depleting such resources because they are far more active than they actually need to be, which is one of the reasons we use them for crops with very high densities of flowers, like blueberries. They are efficient and thorough enough to get the job done.
There are times of the year (in particular, late summer/fall) where good flowers are especially hard to come by, and so solitary bees can have trouble trying to compete against a hive in the area when they are trying to gather the resources they need to reproduce. Meanwhile a hive also has honey stored so dips in availability during the year matter much less.
The parent has a point, though I never thought about it that way. In a way a similar case would be if you had a squad of squirrels that gather seeds and nuts from your neighbour's gardens, and you would then take and sell the bounty that they bring back.
If the bees are in a man made hive they need you to remove honey so that they have room to lay. If you don't they will leave and not all of that honey is going with them.
Honeybees produce more honey than they need for several reasons, mainly that a) they are natural hoarders, b) we've bred them to hoard even more.
It's true that colonies can become pollen-bound and/or nectar-/honey-bound, and thus have too little space for brood. When this happens it's very likely that the colony will swarm off, leaving behind as few as 20% or so of the bees behind, as well as and swarm cells from which one victorious queen will emerge, and then the rump colony will have plenty of honey while it's weak and recovering its numbers. During that time they'll consume whatever it was they had too much of and thus make room for brood.
Yes, and you will have happy neighbors... I do understand that the natural reproduction cycle isn't quite that simple. However for "normal" operation some removal is beneficial and not "stealing", so long as they have adequate supplies.
Not only that, but what beekeepers do is give the colony more room as it fills the hive with honey. The bees don't realize they have enough and just gather more and more, thus ending up with a large surplus that the beekeeper is happy to harvest.
The neighbour example is about wild critters getting the harvest from your own yard vs. your neighbour running a farming operation and keeping the proceeds.
Bees and flowers have a commensel relationship where the flowers provide nectar and some pollen to the bees in exchange for distribution of the flower's pollen for fertilization. The bees aren't "stealing" anything. That nectar has no purpose to the plant if it doesn't attract pollinators.
Of course neither the bees nor the flowers are conscious of this relationship or their roles in it as it evolved naturally from the natures of both plants and insects.
People take honey, but in exchange bees receive a few things
1) Pillbox Housing. Expensive beehive, made from metal and wood, and with only a few narrow entries easy to defend.
2) Comfort. In a quiet sunny place without loud music or sounds. A lid protecting from rain and storms and walls able to stand winds guarantee a dry and warm inner area. A lot of clean wax combs ready to be occupied with minimum effort and a structure to put each comb apart exactly how bees like it.
3) Free medical care. Provided by the species with the most advanced medicine known in the universe.
4) Free emergency help. Including extra food rations in winter and beehive rescue in case of wildfire or flood
5) Bodyguard services. Anti bear stone walls, Anti-wasp electric fences and Bee-eater deterrents if needed. Banners against human trespassers and regulation discouraging thieves.
8) Holidays. Free vehicle transport to visit fields in bloom exactly in the be-est touristic season.
9) Dating services at intercontinental level
10) All you can eat buffet. Gardens designed specifically and seeded with the best international selection of premium nectar.
I think the idea was that the native bees lose share of the resources to honeybees that are artificially supported. Which is not something I had thought about before.
> the idea was that the native bees lose share of the resources to honeybees that are artificially supported
This is not true necessarily (it depends on the context)
Most solitary native bees will not compete with honeybees (or will compete only partially) because they favor different flowers. In general if you find bees of very different sizes they basically will not compete. Honeybees rarely will touch small Fabaceae and are not common on Apiaceae. Alfalfa fields are pollinated by tiny native bees.
Pollen also has fats. Bees very much need some of those fats. I recently saw a presentation on a paper about bee diets where they tested honeybee pollen preferences, and they tend to like pollens with omega-3-rich fats, up to 25% or so.
I pretty much never see wild bees in my garden anymore - they're all honey bees, and usually some human is keeping/farming them - effectively stealing nectar from my garden and that of thousands of my neighbours that we had left out for wild animals.