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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

the funny thing is, honey bees are only one species of more than a hundred and there are plenty of bees that are solitary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee#Solitary_and_communal_bees

maybe i'm understating it a bit, but my guess is that if honey bees died off, efficiency drop in agriculture would be temporary, except for honey industry.

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And all the tasty fruits that require pollination would become a lot more expensive.

I didn't RTFA, so it may have been mentioned, but I recently listened to a year-old episode of RadioLab where they were talking about an apple-growing region in central China where in the 90s the bees just disappeared (probably due to pesticides). Being China, with the associated labor costs, the farmers paid people to go out on ladders and carefully pollinate all of the flowers on the apple trees by hand.

Long story short, the humans were WAY better at it than the bees (I forget the % increase, but it was significant), but it was so tedious that the labor costs still drove the end-user cost of the apples above what the market was willing to pay.

Is there any evidence that the solitary bees are faring any better than the honeybees? They're subject to most of the same pressures due to insecticides and loss of habitat. Others here have linked to problems with the bumblebee populations.

I suspect that hives are the only way to get sufficient population density for efficient agricultural use, and the drop in agricultural output would be permanent.

The article suggests that many/most native bee species are in trouble. An almond orchard is a great source of food, but it will only bloom once or twice a year - during the rest of the year it's famine for native pollinators since industrial farming has replaced/removed native flowers that might provide food in the interim.

However temporary it might be, it would still be long enough to have an appreciably adverse impact on us.

I doubt it. We're very flexible omnivores, and have acquired the capability to create supplements for whatever specific nutrients we lack.

The impact would be to the variety and tastiness of the food we have available, but I doubt it would significantly impact our ability to feed the population, or the health of that population. Oh, I'm sure that good access to fruits and nuts does make us healthier than we'd be without it, but it's a matter of small degrees, not life or death.

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