> The value of honey bees to commercial agriculture
> cannot be overstated.

Yes it can.
Yes it is.
Massively.
All the time.
It is an embarrassment.

It has been many times, in the oft-quoted but laughable
claims made in McGregors, and more recently, in the paper
"The Value of Honey Bees As Pollinators of U.S. Crops in
2000" (Morse and Calderone, Cornell, inexplicably printed
in "Bee Culture", March 2000).  The basic problem is that
beekeepers use these claims every time they approach elected
officials, even though the General Accounting Office debunked
the claims back in 1985, and no one has yet bothered to offer
a direct rebuttal of the GAO's clear and simple critique, nor
have they taken care to bring the "accounting" in line with
the points made in the GAO critique.

Elected officials are aware of the wide-eyed agarianist
propaganda touted by beekeepers and their third-string
"lobbyists", and they try hard to keep a straight face
so as to not dismay the beekeepers, who, after all, are
somebody's constituents, and are not to be laughed at to
their faces.  They wait until after the beekeepers leave
to laugh.  Such wild-eyed claims tend to undercut the
initial credibility of any/all individual beekeepers who
might want to attempt to peddle some influence to their
elected representatives with more rational statements.

To make matters worse, the claims are most often blindly
echoed by highly presumptuous "national" organizations with
fewer beekeepers in their memberships than some state-level
organizations, yet still claiming to represent "all US
beekeepers". (Yep, two different groups both overtly claim
to represent everyone, don't get along, don't work together,
and often take opposite positions on basic issues. One is
forced to wonder if they might injure themselves on sharp
cheddar at their annual banquets.)

For those who want chapter and verse on this, keep slogging.

Back in 1976, McGregor's "Insect Pollination Of Cultivated
Crop Plants"
http://www.beeculture.com/content/pollination_handbook/index.cfm
or http://gears.tucson.ars.ag.gov/book/econ.html
made economic claims, which were debunked by the GAO report
"Federal Price Support for Honey Should be Phased Out"
(U.S. General Accounting Office, August 1985)
http://archive.gao.gov/d11t3/127745.pdf
Which said (starting on page 8)...

"USDA's Estimate Of The Value Of Honeybees For Crop Pollination

The ARS Agricultural Handbook on insect pollination of cultivated
crops, published in July 1976, discussed the value attributable
to agriculture crop production attributable to insect pollination.
In an attempt to attribute a dollar value to honeybee pollination,
data. The analysis, entitled "Value of Bee Pollination to U.S.
Agriculture", was published in 1983 and attributed about $19
billion in crop value to honeybee pollination. Our evaluation of
this study indicated that the $19 billion estimate is misleading
because it included (1) the total crop value rather than the value
of increased production from honeybee pollination and (2) some
crops for which producers generally do not use honeybees but rather
let wind and native insects pollinate.

The Crop Value Attributable To Honey Bee Pollination Is Misleading

The following table lists those domestically-grown crops that
are not adequately pollinated by wind and require or directly
benefit from insect visits. The ARS scientist who was responsible
for the table told us the crops shown as requiring or directly
benefiting from bee pollination are those that have such large
planted acreages that honeybees are the only pollinating insects
in sufficient number to effectively pollinate them. The crops
shown include those that could be pollinated by honeybees rather
than those that actually are..."


The Morse/Calderone paper published in 2000
http://www.masterbeekeeper.org/pdf/pollination.pdf
said:

"For all of United States agriculture, the marginal increase in
the value attributable to honey bees - that is, the value of the
increased yield and quality achieved through pollination by honey
bees alone - was $9.3 billion in 1989 and is $14.6 billion today
(a 36.3 percent increase). Between 20 and 25 percent of that
increase is due to inflation. The rest is a result of an increased
demand for pollinated food by an increasing population."

The paper goes on to say:

"The value of honey bees to agriculture = V x D x P where:
V = an average of the last three years' value of the crop
(from USDA statistics, usually 1996 - 1998)
D = the dependency of the crop on insect pollination
(the same as was cited in 1989)
P = the proportion of the pollinators that are honey bees
(the same as was cited in 1989 except for pumpkins)"

So even the math used in 2000 inherently assumes that pollination
is the only input required to achieve the marginal increase in
crop yield and "quality", as if the farmer had no need to plant,
irrigate, fertilize, control weeds, etc.  A degree in
economics is not required to see this as the punch line to a
bad joke - one must at least admit that "increased yield"
implies that the farmer would have paid more for to harvest
a larger crop than he would pay to harvest a smaller one.

To accept this sort of "math", one would not only have to put
one's brain on hold, but also extract it from one's skull, toss
it to the floor, put several 30-caliber rounds into it, and
then stomp it into mush for good measure.

The major contributor to "increased yield" is modern high-tech
capital equipment, which, not surprisingly, requires massive
capital investment, which puts farmers into massive debt, which
puts them into bankruptcy if they get a run of poor growing
seasons, which allows their land to be bought up by the
conglomerates who then combine the smaller farms into large
tracts, and hire the farmers as employees to work what was
their own land.  (Ooops, no they don't. They hire "guest
workers" for less than a living wage in the USA, and the
farmer takes the only job he can get, as a "greeter" at the
Mall-Wart where the cheap corporate food is sold at "extra
low prices" right next to the even cheaper food from far
off places masquerading as US-grown crops.)

So, "increased yield" tends to lower commodity prices to
nearly the cost of production, which is a major part of
what puts farmers out of business, and accelerates the
triumph of massive corporate farms over smaller
"family farms", resulting in exactly the sort of
monocultures one sees stretching for mile after mile in
agricultural areas, land with no "weedy" areas around the
edges of the fields where native pollinators or honey bees
might make a living when the crops are not blooming.

Of course, the "good news" for large-scale pollinators is
that all these massive monocultures can't possibly be
pollinated at all unless bees are brought in at the proper
time, and then quickly removed before poisons are sprayed,
so what's good for corporate vertically integrated food
production is also good for the 1000 or so beekeepers who
do large scale pollination.

But its bad for the bees, bad for the other beneficial
insects, bad for the environment, and so on.
Very bad.

To summarize, the claims made about the "value" of
pollination have resulted in so much sh*t being tossed
at us so often that we have been forced to purchase
additional fans to keep up with the load.

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