Recently, ominous headlines have described a mysterious ailment: colony collapse disorder (CCD), which is destroying whole colonies of honeybees that pollinate many crops. Without honeybees, the story goes, fields will be sterile and economies will collapse.
The honeybee is a crucial cog in the system of industrial agriculture that delivers more food, and more kinds of it, more cheaply than ever before. But that system is vulnerable because making a farm into the photosynthetic equivalent of a factory also leaches out some resilience characteristic of natural ecosystems. Breno Freitas believes such a high degree of specialization 'usually is a very dangerous game: it works well while all the rest is in equilibrium, but runs quickly to extinction at the least disbalance.' When the human-honeybee relationship is disrupted, as it is by CCD, we see the vulnerability of this practice.
Freitas found that the native pollinator of wild cashew can survive in commercial cashew orchards if growers provide a source of floral oils, such as the Caribbean cherry tree.
In fact, a few wild bees are already being successfully managed for crop pollination. The problem is trying to provide native bees in adequate numbers on a reliable basis in a fairly short number of years in order to service the crop', Jim Cane says. For example, about 750 blue orchard bees can pollinate a hectare of apples, a task that would require 50,000 to 150,000 native honeybees. Nevertheless, millions of native bees would be needed to pollinate a large commercial orchard.
Winfree's team identified 54 species of wild bees visiting these crops, and found wild bees were the most important pollinators: although managed honeybees were present, wild bees were responsible for 62 percent of flower visits. 'The region I work in is not typical of the way most food is produced,' Winfree concedes. In the Delaware Valley, most farms are small and each farmer typically grows a variety of crops.
Questions
1. Headlines state that CCD
2. Freitas cautioned that severe consequences
3. Freitas's research revealed that native bees
4. In Cane's opinion, the population of native bees