Honeybees and Monoculture: Nothing to Dance About

With all the talk of honey bee decline in the news , you may already know that honey bees don't just make honey. They also give us almonds, cherries, avocados, raspberries, apples...pretty much everything delicious. Of course, there are plenty of native pollinators that can also do that job . But domestic honey bees (first brought to the American continent in the 1600s) are great for large-scale agriculture for a couple of reasons. First, they live in huge colonies of tens of thousands of bees: one colony can visit 50,000 blossoms in a single day. Second, those colonies can easily be picked up and moved around to wherever they're most needed. So the same bees that are used in February to pollinate almonds in California can be moved in April to pollinate cherries and apples in Washington state. Over a million honey bee colonies are moved around the US, going from crop to crop as they come into bloom. [More]