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

To: tejek who wrote (720035)	6/7/2013 6:29:14 PM
From: jlallen	2 Recommendations Recommended By FJB TopCat Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578701

To: tejek who wrote (720035)	6/7/2013 8:07:40 PM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 1578701

There are 4000 species of native bees in north America. If honeybees disappeared completely tomorrow, native bees are capable of pollinating everything that grows here as they did before honeybees were introduced. Take a look at this list ... only a handful of plants are listed as only pollinated by honeybees (lemons and limes and a few more obscure plants). BTW "solitary bees" doesn't refer to a particular species ... it just means bees that live solitarily with no worker bees, every female is fertile and has her own nest somewhere or other. en.wikipedia.org A number of plants native to the Americas either aren't pollinated at all (tomatoes, for example) by honeybees. Others are more efficiently pollinated by native bees than by honeybees ( pumpkins, watermelons, blueberries and cranberries etc). A single Southeastern Blueberry Bee will pollinate enough flowers to produce $20 of berries. There are thousands of species of bees that pollinate specific species of plants. Collectively, these are called pollen bees. The big thing about honeybees is big numbers can be made to live in manmade hives that can be moved and they also supply honey. Most native bees live in individual holes either in the ground or in trees.

To: tejek who wrote (720035)	6/7/2013 8:30:21 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578701

Hi tejek; Yeah, all the silly disaster stories sold by the media as "news" are a real threat to human life. The academics, they would never tell you something that wasn't purely true, even if it meant they were able to attract funding and keep their jobs. Only in the liberal world. Here's some more peer reviewed literature on the anti-alarm side of the crisis in pollination (LOL): The role of native bees in apple pollination Pollination Biology Danforth Lab, Cornell University While honey bees (Apis mellifera) are widely viewed as the most important pollinators of agricultural crops, more and more evidence is suggesting that native bee species are in fact contributing significantly to crop pollination. Our surveys indicate that native bees may outnumber honey bees in many orchards and we are trying to determine what orchard management practices promote native bee abundance and diversity. danforthlab.entomology.cornell.edu An Assessment of Non-Apis Bees as Fruit and Vegetable Crop Pollinators in Southwest Virginia PhD Dissertation Major findings of this first study of its kind in the region were that non-Apis bees provided the majority of pollination — measured by visitation — for several economically important entomophilous crops (apple, blueberry, caneberry, and cucurbits); scholar.lib.vt.edu Twenty per cent of the overall crop production comes from crops that increase fruit and vegetable production with animal pollination ... These results support the contention of Richards (2001) and Ghazoul (2005) that primary food production, and especially our staple foods, is independent of insect pollination. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov Buzziness as usual? Questioning the global pollination crisis Jaboury Ghazoul TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution 20, 7 (2005) www2.unine.ch -- Carl P.S. But you don't have to decide which of the dueling experts to believe. Both sides agree that almonds are the crop that is most dependent on honeybees for pollination. So if there is a crisis in pollination, the first place it will appear is in the prices of almonds. Here's the last 20 years price of almonds, moron: staging.hilltopranch.com Almonds are cheaper now than they were 10 years ago. This is true even though the above numbers are not corrected for inflation.