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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (719935)	6/7/2013 1:53:20 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578140

youtube.com

To: tejek who wrote (719935)

6/7/2013 12:07:26 PM

From: Bilow

Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 1578140

Hi tejek; I "included" hay and cotton because they were included in the only data I found. Ignoring them, there were zero foods pollinated by honeybees in that list. You haven't provided any real data to back up what you believe at all but you're perfectly willing to criticize the numbers I found.

You're basically a dumb-ass. Go look up reality. Honeybees are important for only a very few crops. Most of the crops that they tell you are "dependent on bee pollination" depend mostly on other insects. Here's some real data from University of Illinois:

Crop	Value in billions(2006)	% Bee Pollinated
Almonds	2.2	100
Apples	2.1	90
Cotton	5.2	16
Blueberries	0.5	90
Grapes	3.2	1
Oranges	1.8	27
Peanuts	0.6	2
Peaches	0.5	48
Soybeans	19.7	5
Strawberries	1.5	2
from:USDA; RA Morse & NW Calderone(Cornell University)

beespotter.mste.illinois.edu

So what happens to the apple crop when they don't use honeybees to pollinate it? They get fewer apples. How much fewer? The above chart shows that apples are 90% pollinated by honeybees so logic would suggest that apple production would decrease by 90%. But this isn't true. Apple production depends very little on honeybees. Here's the official Australian Department of Agriculture numbers on apples (which are listed in the above table as 90% dependent on honeybee pollination):

Review of bee pollination benefits

25 to 55 per cent increase in yield within 500 m of the apiary.

agric.wa.gov.au

But if the "90%" figure is to believed, the increase should be from 0.10 to 1.00, an increase of 900%.

So in actual fact, though apples are listed as 90% pollinated by honeybees, eliminating honeybees reduces apple production by 0.55/1.55 = 36% to 0.25/1.25 = 20%. Therefore, considered as an input to production, honeybees are only responsible for 20 to 36% of apple production, not 90% as estimated in the above link or the 100% as assumed in the alarmist literature.

But the fact is that honeybees are not about to die off. There's billions and billions of them.

And like I said before (and you've provided no links to show otherwise) there has never been a crop in the US that failed due to a lack of availability of honeybees as pollinators.

-- Carl

P.S. More links:
Native bees often better pollinators than honey beeErik Vance, University of California Research
Certainly the stakes are high, considering that 35 percent of the world’s crops — amounting to $216 billion per year — depend on various creatures to ferry pollen from one flower to another. And certainly, if scientists cannot help honey bees recover, it could dramatically affect the price of food.

What is not so certain is whether the familiar honey bee is really the only game in town.

vcresearch.berkeley.edu

Here's a nice powerpoint that repeats the 35% figure, but notes that the 35% is not all honeybees:
agresearch.umd.edu

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The above article also notes (you can google this to find the info verified on your favorite MSM / US government source) that "Almonds may be the most bee-dependent crop in America. Without pollinators, the trees simply cannot create fruit. Every February, almond farmers pay $300 per acre for beekeepers to pollinate their land — a price that has tripled since the 1990s."