Except for the special case of the alfalfa leafcutter bee, useful in alfalfa
seed production, and to a more limited extent, in canola, the tangible
reality of native pollinators in agriculture has nothing to do with the
studies that include unsupported speculation like "with sufficient habitat,
they [solitary bees] can provide all the necessary pollination".

I seem to be one of a very tiny number of people who have actually produced
and cared for a base population capable of producing a "commercially
deployable" number of solitary bees (Japanese Hornfaced bees, thanks to
Suzanne Batra of the USDA) for multiple years, and I have been one of a
handful of beekeepers to try to make these bees work in actual commercial
orchard applications, so I'd love to see the ball moved down the field.  

But what I see is the same basic initial evaluation repeated over and over
by successive waves of researchers, who view the actions of a single
pollinator, and extrapolate that via multiplication into the fantasy of a
viable pollination option, while skipping over the hard part - how to raise
and care for these little creatures and keep them alive in sufficient
numbers to make them a viable option in the reality of modern agriculture.

The bottom line is that raising these bees in large numbers is fraught with
problems, even with individual inspection of every cocoon and culling of all
diseased or parasitized cocoons.   We don't know nearly enough about the
diseases of these bees, and while they are gregarious, cultivation in large
numbers is an exercise in futility - the population "crashes" every few
years with yet another unknown-to-science problem.  Of course, working on
this problem would be significantly harder than repeating the same work done
before, and may not produce publishable results, so we may not see anyone
pick up the ball and run with it.

Unicorns might also make good pollinators, but the problems they would pose
would be identical to that of most solitary bees - we do not know how to
raise them or care for them to make them sufficiently reliable for even
regular home garden use over successive years.


	

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