Many of the things that threaten honeybees are also affecting wild pollinators

Many people have read about the decline of the honeybee in the news in recent years. Experts agree that a combination of changes in habitat, exposure to pesticides, mites, disease, and other factors have harmed them. But less attention is paid to wild bees and other pollinators, which are also extremely important.

Honeybees are not native to North America. Records indicate they were brought over by English settlers in the 1600s for honey and wax. But there have always been native bees and other pollinators who did the work of pollination before honeybees arrived and still do much of that work today. Pennsylvania has 300 different species of wild bees, alone. The honeybee is useful to us. They alone provide delicious honey and we need them for pollinating some of the cultivated landscapes we require to feed ourselves. Honeybees are considered to be the most valuable pollinators in agriculture, because they are well understood, relatively easy to maintain, movable, and able to communicate rapidly the locations of new food sources. Some crops are almost entirely dependent on the honeybee for production. Blueberries and cherries are 90-percent dependent and almonds almost entirely.

But in general honeybees do only some of the pollination required for food production. The US Fish and Wildlife Service reports that, “Honey bees pollinate approximately $10 billion worth of crops in the United States each year. However, of the hundred or so crops that make up most of the world's food supply, only 15% are pollinated by domestic bees, while at least 80% are pollinated by wild bees and other wildlife. (See http://www.fws.gov/pollinators/pollinatorpages/aboutpollinators.html)

A 2006 report by the National Academies of Science concluded that the populations of many other wild pollinators—especially wild bees—are trending downward. Many of the things that threaten honeybees are also affecting wild pollinators.

By learning more about honeybees and how we depend on them for some of the food we grow, we can start learning more about pollinators in general. Because of their usefulness to us, a lot of study has gone into better understanding honeybees. Much more so than wild bees and other pollinators.

Many people who care about honeybees and other pollinators believe that we can make a difference in their preservation by creating habitat for them in our yards. This Penn State Extension brochure describes what people can do in their own yards to make a positive difference to bees and other pollinators, including planting native flowers and reducing herbicide and pesticide use.

People who study honeybees and other pollinators have described them living together in a colony, which essentially functions as a single organism since they are constantly working for the good of the whole. Nature is stunning in its sophistication. Understanding more about the place of domesticated and wild bees in nature helps us understand more about our own place, which seems more and more important all the time.

Source:
http://blogs.mcall.com/master_gardeners/2014/02/domesticated-honeybees-…, Febrary 3, 2014