A recent paper on this topic (same general message as on the linked website):

> We found compelling evidence that honey bee introductions indirectly decrease pollination by reducing nectar and pollen availability and competitively excluding visits from more effective native bees. In contrast, the direct impact of honey bee visits on pollination was negligible, and, if anything, negative. Honey bees were ineffective pollinators, and increasing visit quantity could not compensate for inferior visit quality.

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy....

Also:

> Feral bee colonies usually just die after 18-24 months. That's long enough to swarm repeatedly, so mite pressure isn't really a threat to honeybees as a species in the wild. They live long enough to reproduce and almost nobody tries to harvest honey from them for sale. There's basically no chance that mites will make feral honeybees go extinct. Rather, mite parasitism's an economic problem that threatens commercial beekeeping [...]. Keeping bees alive with both mites and pesticides, especially in the face of climate change, is really hard if you need to make money doing it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Beekeeping/comments/10jtmgk/wild_be...

Yes - species becoming resistant to our efforts to contain them is the root problem. It's a weakness in an agricultural system that's dependent on pesticides. But we set up systems to address that problem. If those systems can't work as effectively anymore because they've lost the resources and the institutional knowledge, that is also a big, important story.

> Perhaps there's another organism that preys on these mites. Nature often provides the a cure with the poison.

Have we learned nothing from the old lady who swallowed the fly?

Are staple crops the bar though? Like, I love rice, wheat, and potatoes, but I would be real sad to not have all the vegetables that are not wind pollinated. We've survive, but I don't think that's the bar, imo.

Partially. Corn is the big one that requires wind or humans. Rest of the staples do not

Potatoes and sweet potatoes are tubers. I started growing this year and learned a lot about it just from my backyard. No pollination

For example cucumbers not staple nor are peppers. Cucumbers need a bee or insect to pollinate unless the type that doesn’t. But they are low in calories so not staple and more perishable

While fruits, vegetables and nuts can be pollinated by wind, that won't work at the scale and yields that our aggro-industrial complex needs. If it weren't required, almond growers wouldn't pay to have millions of hives transported to California each year to pollinate their trees.