Domesticated Bees Vanish: Farmers Should Cultivate Wild Insects Instead

Bees, the makers of honey and crucial flower pollinators, are disappearing across the globe. For years, farmers have watched helplessly as millions of these domesticated insects have been wiped out due to a mysterious disease. Yet now, scientists suggest that in order to combat the lack of pollinators, farmers should make their crops more accessible to wild insects that, essentially, do the job for free.

The findings, published in the journal Science, encompassed data from 600 fields in 19 countries. In order to further examine the effectiveness of honeybees and what could be done to help pollinate important crops such as apples and almonds, researchers analyzed data from 41 crop systems around the world. The crops included everything from fruits to seeds to nuts to coffee, and allowed researchers to also examine the consequences of having abundant wild pollinators.

Overall, researchers found that not only are wild pollinators cheaper, but they also fertilize blossoms with much greater efficiency than domesticated honeybees.  In fact, wild pollinators were about twice as effective. In addition, the proportion of flowers that matured to fruit improved in every field visited by wild insects, compared with only 14 percent of fields visited by the domesticated honeybees. Researchers found that at 90 percent of the farms studied in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, native wild bees were pollinating the watermelon crop. However, farmers still rented bees; while they believed they needed the domesticated bees, they really didn't.

As monoculture--the creation of vast, single-crop fields and orchards--has risen in modern agriculture, the population of insect pollinators has declined. This has prompted farmers to "rent" honeybees during flowering season in order to help them pollinate their crops. Yet as honeybee populations decline, farmers are finding themselves with less fruit to show for their efforts.

Yet this new study provides an alternative-or at least shows the way to a solution. If farmers help cultivate wild insects, they may not have to rent honeybees as pollinators every season. Instead, they can rely on native populations to do the work for them.