MrDarwin

Not sure just where this belongs, but according to this article:
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11354-2002May13.html" target="_blank">Honeybees in a Mite More Than Trouble
</a>
the plummeting populations of honeybees in North America due to parasitic mites would appear to be an unmitigated disaster:

There are a couple of problems here. First, flowering is independent of pollination; a lack of pollinators may result in reduced fruit set, but not reduced flowering. Second, and more significantly, they apparently don't realize that honeybees are not native to North America, and were introduced only after Europeans started settling in the Americas. (Maybe there's a Noah's Ark angle in here somewhere?)

While many of our food crops are also not native to North America, and may well depend on honeybees for efficient pollination, I'm sure our native bees could be pressed into service. But to go on to suggest that our native wildflowers are in trouble because there are no honeybees to pollinate them is pure poppycock. Until the last 400 years or so, all native bee-pollinated plants depended on entirely different species of bees (or flies, or beetles, or butterflies, or hummingbirds, or any number of other interesting creatures) for pollination. If anything, this should be a boon for our native bee populations, which have been out-competed by honeybees. Honeybees are very aggressive and efficient gatherers of nectar and pollen, they are generalists (i.e., visiting a wide range of flowers), and their populations levels were always kept artificially high by beekeepers who kept hives to pollinate crops and produce honey. I've always wondered what long-term evolutionary effect this might have on our native flowers, which are often more specialized in their pollinators.

[ May 14, 2002: Message edited by: MrDarwin ]</p>

theyeti

I think we should import lots of African bees. Yeah, that'd do the trick.

RufusAtticus

And Fire Ants!

Nic Tamzek

I think I heard somewhere that native bees (at least some species) were getting hammered pretty hard by foreign parasites also, so that might explain some of it.

The bit about less flowering though is pretty bad.

I'm beginning to discover that a lot of science journalism isn't very scientific...an awful lot of it is simply vague, usually ham-handed reprocessing of whatever a scientist or science-related person says or writes.

nic

fando

The more people that realize this, the better our society will be. It's important to treat science journalism as any other form of journalism: with ample skepticism and critical analysis. Does the author have a bias or agenda? Is he/she misinformed or misunderstanding? Too many people treat these sources of information as the gospel of science, the utter truth. It appeals to scientific authority, therefore it must be true!

Then again, the job of communicating science to laypeople is a daunting task. If scientific literacy were greater, it wouldn't be so bad. Alas.