There are increasing numbers of articles on alternative pollinators in the media and I will be posting links to some of them on this blog.
One problem is that many articles are simply hype, of The-Sky-is-Falling type. I’m going to skip these. Other articles have a lot of useful information, but still are unbalanced. I will carefully chose some of these for the information they offer, but also want to give a caveat, when they are unbalanced.
A good illustration is an article which appeared yesterday in The Minneapolis Observer Quarterly, entitled The Secret Strife of Bees. The article is better than most public media articles, but the editors damage it, by adding a question at the top:
“…to our mind, anyway, raised the question, why are we shipping bees across country when local native bees will pollinate our crops for free?”
To which I responded: Be careful of not reversing cause and effect! The reason honeybees are trucked for pollination is that local native bees were NOT doing the job. And the reason for that is two fold:
1. Fields and orchards are getting every larger, leading to a massive bloom all at once. The rest of the season, the area has no feed for bees, and even may be toxic to bees, because of pesticide use.
2. Wild bee populations are in worse shape than honeybee populations in many areas. The honeybees may well be the indicator of the problems that face all bees. But wild bees have no human keepers to defend and care for them, so they are even more vulnerable to pesticide misuse. Indeed, here in South Carolina (and I presume in many states), the pesticide cops specifically exclude wild bees from consideration in any pesticide enforcement.
Honey bee pollination has filled in the gap. Actually many of our food crops originate in the same home areas as honeybees, so they are ideal pollinators. Native bees can be better for some native plants like squash – IF they are present.
Commercial beekeepers have a struggle, if they try to make their living on honey production, which is viable only in some areas of the US, and which is in competition with cheap foreign imports.
Pollination cannot be imported, and there is a huge demand for it – which makes pollination service a better business model for commercial beekeepers. The bulk of our agricultural pollination is done by a few hundred beekeeping operations (mostly families), and we would face some severe food shortages if they ceased doing what they do.
Beekeepers have, at least for now, solved the pollinator shortage by becoming migratory, following the bloom from south to north, much as the combines follow the harvest for grains.
Visit this article at: The Secret Strife of Bees
A better and more comprehensive article can be found in an article entitled Plan Bee at the Audibon Magazine. The article still lacks some balance, as there is an underlying assumption that honeybees will disappear and wild bees will save the day. This fails to recognize that honeybees are the de facto workhorses of American agriculture, and will be so for the foreseeable future. Wild bees are needed to supplement this, no doubt, but are unlikely to replace honeybees.
Honeybee keepers are staying on top of the situation, and becoming ever better at their craft. Many of the better keepers are untouched by Colony Collapse Disorder. At the same time, we are just in the beginning stages of learning how to use wild bees in agricultural pollination – and in many cases we have a long way to go to make them cost effective.
Advisors who tell farmers that wild bees will take care of their pollination needs run a big risk. I’ve seen massive and costly crop failures from lack of pollination when the wild bees did not come to save the day. I’ve seen farm bankruptcies that I believe were largely caused by lack of pollination.
So read the Audibon article to glean the valuable information contained, while remembering that they are tending to demean honeybees just a bit too much, and to laud wild bees just a bit too much.
Categorical statements that are made are not always true. For example it is stated that honeybees will not work tomatoes. I have seen honeybees work tomatoes and I know some pollination was accomplished. I will agree that they are not reliable at visiting tomatoes, nor are they the most effective pollinators. I just want to add some truth to balance the hype.
It is also said that honeybees do not buzz pollinate. Likewise that is not true, though they use a different mechanism. Honeybees will clasp a flower then actually “fly” while holding the flower, in order to shake pollen loose. Folks who claim honeybees do not buzz flowers have not been watching honeybees for long.
Another misleading point is that tomatoes self pollinate. Actually they are very poor at self pollinating, as anyone who has tried to raise them in a greenhouse can attest. Tomatoes self pollenize; they are self fertile; but they need aid to move the pollen, so they do not self pollinate.
Wind can provide the motion to shake the pollen free and move it to the stigmas, but of course the best pollinator is a bee which can create resonance with the flower’s natural frequency. This will release large quantities of pollen from the anthers.
Some of this may be confusion of terms. To pollenize is to provide pollen. The pollenizer is the daddy, the sire, or the “John” if you wish. To pollinate is to move pollen from anther to stigma. A pollinator is the agent that does such movement; the artificial-insemination technician, if you are a breeder; or the “pimp” (if you in another field).
So plants are never pollinators, unless they actually bring together the anther and stigma to move self fertile pollen. Some legumes like peanuts actually do this. But it is rare in the plant world and does not happen with tomatoes. Likewise, bees are never pollenizers; they cannot produce pollen.
Again, I encourage readers to glean the good information available and balance it with other good information and reason.
So I say “Full Speed Ahead!” to the restoration of wild bees , and the study of their use as valuable pollinators, while also adding a “Hurrah” for our honeybees without which we would suffer some serious food shortages.
