Urban Honey Bees and Forage: The Ecological Dimension of Disinvested Neighborhoods in Philadelphia, USA

Abstract

With bee decline underway across taxa on a global scale, cities increasingly stand as a haven for bee conservation. Primary drivers of bee decline include habitat fragmentation and high-input agricultural and lawn management – both of which can make non-urban landscapes more hostile to bees than urban landscapes. In this analysis, I draw from urban ecological methods and political ecological framings to better understand the urban landscape as a bee socio-economic system. Using data from the unique honey bee foraging assay of Sponsler et al. (2020) which describes plant genera identified from pollen DNA samples from apiaries across the city, I offer a geospatial analysis to describe spatial patterns of bee floral resources. I ask the following: I) What spatial patterns exist in floral resources for bees across the landscape of the city of Philadelphia? II) Do these spatial patterns correlate with the socio-economic variables of income and racial composition? and II) To what extent can urban ecology and the critical social sciences inform one another in the context of this socio-ecological system? Although I find no strong correlation between plant richness and demographic variables, I examine the dominant plant genera in select Philadelphia neighborhoods, contributing to urban political ecological understandings of weedy ecologies, marginalization, and social control.