The ARC Beekeeping for poverty relief website states that beekeeping “is probably the only form of agriculture with an overwhelmingly positive impact on the natural environment. It is a valuable conservation tool, allowing people to derive economic benefit from indigenous forests and other floral resources in a non-destructive way, ensuring local participation in conservation efforts. It also makes a very significant contribution to other forms of agriculture by effecting the pollination of many economically important plants.”

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It is estimated that value added by commercial beekeepers, in terms of the additional production of crop plants (through commercial honeybee pollination) is at least R4.1 billion per anum (recent research suggests that this might be an overestimate - this is discussed further in the following section). Crops requiring commercial honeybee pollination include most deciduous fruit, some sub-tropical fruits, all oilseed crops, most oilseed and vegetable seed production, and many fodder plants.

The estimated value added by honeybees would increase if the pollination by honeybees of garden plants, exotic plants and indigenous plants is considered. It is estimated that honeybees are pollinators for approximately 60% of flowering plants in South Africa. Honeybees and the wild honeybee population are therefore vitally important in the conservation of floral reserves and in terms of biodiversity. It should be mentioned that the Conservation of Biological Diversity (CBD) Agreement (which came out of the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (1992)) later resulted in the conservation of pollinators being given priority in 1996.

The FAO have also launched the International Pollination Initiative (IPI) to preserve and prevent pollinator decline (National Agricultural Directory  2007).

Gibbs and Muirhead (1998) show that the effect of honeybees on insect pollinators and on competition with fauna for nesting hollows in Australia are absent or insignificant. No studies have in fact shown that honey bees eliminate native pollinators. In some cases the populations of native pollinators have been reduced but following removal of honey bees the native bees returned to normal levels in a few years (Mussen 2002).