Managed honeybees (Apis mellifera) and wild native bees forage on the same finite pool of nectar and pollen. When hive density is high relative to floral supply, honeybees capture a larger share of that shared resource, which lowers the effective carrying capacity available to native bee populations — a well-documented exploitative-competition effect near dense apiaries.
Native bee abundance N follows logistic growth with a resource-dependent carrying capacity K and a pesticide mortality term:
C = H / (H + N/50 + 1) // honeybee share of shared flowers
K = (habitat/100) · 420 · (1 − 0.8·C) // native carrying capacity
dN/dt = r·N·(1 − N/K) − m·N // r = 0.16 /s, m = pesticide mortality
Pollination % = min(100, (H·vH + N·vN) / F_total · 100)
- Hive density — colonies per hectare (H); drives orange honeybee foragers flying to flowers and their share of nectar.
- Habitat quality — wildflower diversity/abundance (0–100%); sets the total floral resource pool and native bees' baseline carrying capacity.
- Pesticide regime — None/Low/High sets the mortality term m applied to both bee groups.
- Reset meadow — restarts the native population at a low seed value to observe recovery or collapse trajectories.
This mirrors the real conservation tension: beekeeping supports crop pollination and livelihoods, but unmanaged hive density in resource-poor habitat can suppress wild pollinator diversity unless floral resources are abundant enough to support both.