Laura Downey wrote:
 
>As of late, there has been much discussion about the lack of honey
>bees.  We are all aware of the reasons - mites, disease, the hard winter, etc.
>
>Prior to the Europeans coming to the New World and bringing honey bees
>along, what was responsible for pollination?  Were there some kind of
>wild bees here before the Europeans' arrival?
 
There were and still are some 3,000 native North American bee species that
got along just fine before Europeans came along, including specialist
pollinators of things like blueberries, squash, sunflower, and many other
native crop plants. Historically, folks have found it simpler to (in
essence) assume that honeybees were the answer to everything, and work with
them, even if it's sort of a round-peg-in-square-hole sort of fit in many
cases. Alfalfa is one of the few crops where honeybees were so bad at
pollination that people *did* start long ago to utilize native pollinators
instead, and recently there has been increasing use of native pollinators
for blueberries and apples (and of course the use of bumblebees as
greenhouse pollinators). On the whole though, funding for research into
alternative pollinators has been quite scarce - perhaps now there will be
more pressure to investigate how to exploit or manage native pollinators
for commercial purposes, but one never knows - people may find it easier to
simply switch to different crops than to invest in research that might take
years to realize a commercial benefit (though one has to wonder how much
money has been sunk into disease control and such already). Ideal solutions
are not always expedient.
Sincerely,
 
Doug Yanega       Illinois Natural History Survey, 607 E. Peabody Dr.
Champaign, IL 61820 USA      phone (217) 244-6817, fax (217) 333-4949
 affiliate, Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dept. of Entomology
          http://www.inhs.uiuc.edu:80/~dyanega/my_home.html
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82