> The $3M will benefit bees and beekeepers mostly by way of the attention it brings to the current condition of bees and beekeepers. 

So, it's PR? I fail to see how the money is well spent on that front. For the past 8 years we have seen documentaries, testimonials, and cover stores all trying to paint the picture of a world without bees. Which is ridiculous. Numerous publications have shown that the world's numbers of honey bee colonies are in fact increasing. Maybe not at the rate that plantings of almonds are, but that is a supply and demand issue, not a national security issue. 

> Less likely to make international headlines, but still instructive, are problems my colleague Lynn Dicks and I discovered when we reviewed the pollinator section of the United Kingdom’s National Ecosystem Assessment, a sprawling and influential report that fed into the British government’s white paper on the environment. It states, for example, that “since 1980, wild bee diversity has declined in most landscapes”. 

> This exaggerates the findings of the cited paper, which reports only that bee diversity is lower post-1980 than pre-1980 in 52% of 81 10 × 10 kilometre grid squares. The report asserts that “decreases in pollination services would, therefore, result in short-term economic losses for farmers”, but it fails to mention that this is based on indirect field studies of insect visitors to crops. 

> In fact, no economic effects of pollinator decline have been detected on a national or sub-national scale. A crucial table in the assessment report that estimates the value of insect-pollinated crops in the United Kingdom comes from a PhD thesis, and the analysis behind it has not yet been published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature; this is not made clear. 

Nature 503, 167 (14 November 2013)

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