Where have the Honey Bees gone to?

[Midnight Rambler]

quote:

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Originally posted by csgray

Again, Obie may get a bumper backyard crop of lemons and his tomatoes may be getting pollinated by bumblebees, but that is a far cry from commercial large scale agriculture needed to feed the 7 billion people on this planet the wide range of foods we are accustomed to eating.

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It's not that Obie's tomatoes are pollinated by bumblebees (we don't have any here, though the carpenter bees fill a similar role), but tomatoes as a whole are pollinated almost exclusively by bumblebees. Honeybees are extremely poor pollinators of tomatoes because they must be buzz-pollinated - instead of being exposed, the pollen is inside tubes with slits, and shoots out when vibrated at a specific frequency. Bumblebees do this by vibrating their wing muscles, honeybees don't.

Unfortunately, there is trouble here as well - many native bumblebees in North America are declining, because of a disease accidentally brought in from Europe as a result of (drumroll) rearing bees for use in greenhouse tomato pollination.