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Moreover, the article entirely ignores wild bees. That's somewhat understandable as they're not as well studied, but they're a significant pollination force nev
by kaitai 11y ago
Moreover, the article entirely ignores wild bees. That's somewhat understandable as they're not as well studied, but they're a significant pollination force nevertheless -- according to this White House fact sheet [1], wild bees accounted for $9 billion of the economic benefit of pollination (compared to $15 billion for domesticated bees). The wild bees are not being replaced. This article really does have a lot of dodgy accounting (esp ignoring externalized costs).
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/20/fact-sheet-economic-challenge-posed-declining-pollinator-populations https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/20/fact-...
[PNAS] Bumblebees: http://www.duluth.umn.edu/biology/documents/MaKarrall2_000.pdf http://www.duluth.umn.edu/biology/documents/MaKarrall2_000.p...
- iak8god 11y agoI find it incredibly sad that the only way to make people care about the destruction of wild bees is to talk about how much economic benefit they provide.
- slavik81 11y agoShamelessly plugging a related project, I recently contributed to a game [1] designed to illustrate that wild bee populations have economic value. Jana Vamosi, a biologist from the University of Calgary, submitted the project idea to the Mozilla Science Lab [2] to get help building it. There's a lot of room for improvement, actually, if anyone wants to lend a hand. [1] http://www.diversibee.org http://www.diversibee.org [2] https://www.mozillascience.org/projects/diversibee https://www.mozillascience.org/projects/diversibee