Yeah -- individual orchard bees are significantly more efficient, but an individual honeybee hive crams in tens of thousands of bees; you make it up on scale.

Yeah -- individual orchard bees are significantly more efficient, but an individual honeybee hive crams in tens of thousands of bees; you make it up on scale. Honeybees also work well with mono-cropping because you can easily pick up and move the entire hive from massive field to massive field just in time for pollination. If you are relying on a wild bee population they'll do better when they have lots of plants in bloom across a wide spectrum of time so they have a chance to build up their population before the major blooms eg the orchard you want pollinated. Otherwise you run the risk of only have a small bee population that can't fully take advantage of (and pollinate) the suddenly massive resource glut of several square miles of orchards suddenly in bloom at once.