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Urban beekeeping, the practice of maintaining hives on city rooftops and in small gardens, has expanded rapidly in recent decades, driven partly by concern over declining bee populations. Somewhat counterintuitively, several studies have found urban hives can outperform rural ones in honey yield, likely because cities offer a longer and more varied flowering season across parks, gardens, and street trees than the monoculture fields common in agricultural areas. This has led some researchers to caution against viewing urban beekeeping purely as conservation charity; in areas with limited flowering resources, a proliferation of hobbyist hives can actually increase competition among bee colonies for the same limited nectar supply, potentially harming wild pollinator populations rather than helping them.