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2013 Wild Bees Are Good For Crops, But Crops Are Bad For Bees
Originally published on Tue March 5, 2013 10:13 am Some of the
most healthful foods you can think of — blueberries,
cranberries, apples, almonds and squash — would never get to
your plate without the help of insects. No insects, no
pollination. No pollination, no fruit. A huge collaboration of
bee researchers, from more than a dozen countries, looked at how
pollination happens in dozens of different crops, including
strawberries, coffee, buckwheat, cherries and watermelons. As
they report in the journal Science, even when beekeepers
installed plenty of hives in a field, yields usually got a boost
when wild, native insects, such as bumblebees or carpenter bees,
also showed up. "The surprising message in all of this is that
honeybees cannot carry the load. Honeybees need help from their
cousins and relatives, the other wild bees," says Marla Spivak,
a professor of entomology at the Univ