Sometimes, I about burst with pride anytime I get a chance to brag about my girls, the bees. Honey bees are perhaps our most efficient pollinators.
However, the media, as usual, gets to sensationalizing things when they want to scare people in order to sell copy. When the topic comes to bees and pollination, they seldom get it right.
Honey bees are not the “best” or most effective pollinators, per se. We depend on them for over 100 different crops because they are more efficient. The tendency they have in working only one flower type at a time means that their efforts at pollination are not wasted and the right pollen is carried to the right flower more often.
Having said that, other bees, even other insects, can be much more effective pollinators than honey bees. They roll their whole little bodies in pollen and shake it all over the next flowers. As long as those flowers are the same flowers as the pollen they carry, they have done a much better job at pollinating that flower than a honey bee would.
Most other bees and insects aren’t as selective as honey bees though, so the odds are, unless by design, the flowers are often too random and the insects too flighty.
Other creatures are great pollinators as well. Birds and bats are well known pollinators of the flowers where they find their food, be that food nectar or pollen or the insects collecting nectar or pollen.
Honey bees pollinate at least 100 different crops out in the field. Bumble bees are used to great extent in greenhouses for tomatoes and other such flowers.
Mason bees are used in ever greater numbers for those Spring fruit trees.
No my friends, if honey bees meet their demise, while we will face serious changes in how we achieve pollination and the volume of pollinated crops will decrease by a substantial amount, it is because of our own learned dependence on honey bees that our problems will arise.
There are many other insects and animals that pollinate as part of their natural behaviors. However, when we allow ourselves to poison one of those pollinators, somewhere down the line, we will poison them all and that’s where our trouble really sits.