Comment by jojobas
14 hours ago
To add, most farming relies precisely on honeybee for pollination, and losing 2/3 of them would be quite devastating.
Of course nobody cars about wild bees, our lives don't depend on them nearly as much.
14 hours ago
To add, most farming relies precisely on honeybee for pollination, and losing 2/3 of them would be quite devastating.
Of course nobody cars about wild bees, our lives don't depend on them nearly as much.
Is that really true? My layman's understanding was that ~10-20% of the calories in a typical American diet comes from crops which need pollinators: grains (which feed livestock too), legumes, root vegetables, leafy greens, mostly can be grown without them, using self pollination or wind pollination.
I mean, of those that do require insect pollination. Apples/pear family, almonds/cherries/plums, cucumbers/melons, some others in seed production (carrots). There are only few examples where non-honeybee pollinators are needed, like tomatoes in greenhouses (otherwise wind is enough).
It may be that agricultural mechanization requires honeybees simply because they're the ones we can farm themselves.