> Promoting honeybee hives to save pollinators is roughly the equivalent to building more chicken farms to save bird biodiversity
The other problems you raise are important but are also a treat to others bee species and insects.
https://earth.org/data_visualization/bees-are-not-declining-...
I wonder if it would be possible to experiment a bit - ban honeybee hives in a 10 mile square radius, or perhaps in that area that bans all radio transmitters. See what happens.
That depends on how you draw the line. Most would consider buffalo[0] to be native to North America, but they arrived less than 200000 years ago. If you go far enough back, no life is native to anywhere except wherever abiogenesis occurred.
In most places honeybees are raised they couldn't even survive in the wild. Just like cows and chickens and pigs. As with most livestock, without human intervention they would probably be wiped out.
More dangerous in all these is the monoculture - a hundred years ago we would have a wide range of crops and livestock; now 90% of meat chickens are probably the same genetically; similar with cows and bananas and corn and rice and pigs, etc. That sets us up for a "wipe out 90% of chickens" risk.
No purpose to this other than this is a very long term problem that, I believe, will bite us in the ass at some point.
You're correct about "breeding more" not being trivial, but they do it on an industrial scale. In really broad strokes: in late winter, in preparation for pollination season, they feed their hives intensively (with sugar syrup) and add extra brood boxes for the queens to fill with eggs. Then they split the hives, leaving the old queen in one box, and adding new queens to the box(es) they take off. Voila! Double (or more) the hives.
Pollination is where commercial beekeepers earn their living, by renting out hives of bees to farmers. Honey production is not necessarily an afterthought, even though it doesn't really turn a profit - it's worth doing because you'll be putting the bees on nectar flows for the summer, anyway, so you won't have to feed them, and extracting (some of) the honey covers transportation costs - but all the money's in pollination.
I could keep going and going - queen production and hive splitting are fascinating topics on their own - but I'll stop before I risk boring people with an over-long comment. I have commercial beekeepers in my family, and I've worked (summer / vacation jobs, when I was a kid) every part of the process.
(This is all in a USA-ag context. Beekeeping is - very! - different in other parts of the world.)
Of course nobody cars about wild bees, our lives don't depend on them nearly as much.