Allen quoted:

> No one has shown that colonies of wild bees are collapsing any more frequently than they used to.

Sorry, that isn't at all true:


The rusty-patched bumblebee was one of five or six common bumblebees
in the southern half of Ontario.

"It was pretty common in the 70s and 80s, and all of a sudden it's not
found anywhere," said Sheila Colla, a PhD candidate in biology at York
University. Colla has searched through 43 sites from Ontario to
Georgia to trace the bee's history in eastern North America. These are
all places where it used to be common. Bumblebees pollinate some
plants that honey bees do not, including tomatoes, raspberries and
sweet peppers. And many bumblebee numbers are declining for unknown
reasons.

"Bumblebees have this buzz pollination technique where they rapidly
vibrate flowers and honey bees can't do that. So when people plant
tomatoes in their back yard or cucumbers or sweet peppers, without a
bumblebee you will get no fruit. Like, zero. So people are more
reliant on them than they realize, because they have this behaviour
that is irreplaceable by any other bees."

* Her studies find fewer bumblebees overall in Ontario than a couple
of decades ago. Half the 14 species found in the 1970s are either
missing or in decline.

By 2005, searchers found 9,000 bumblebees in an annual survey, and
just one of the 9,000 was a rusty patched. That one was in Pinery
Provincial Park, on Lake Huron, and none has been seen in Canada
since. Today it's not extinct, but the closest known specimen seems to
be in Illinois, and even there it's incredibly rare. There are other
bumblebees, but they don't all pollinate at the same time of year. If
we lose one species, this may leave a gap in the pollination season.
Tomato growers in southwestern Ontario have begun rearing bumblebees
indoors to get large numbers of them for pollinating.

"But because they're reared in really artificial conditions, we get
the same problems we see in farmed salmon," Colla said. Crowding can
breed disease, and she suspects the farmed bees spread disease to wild
ones. "It hasn't been proven that that's the reason for decline," but
the decline came shortly after the bee-rearing practice began.

-- 
Missing bumblebee buzz a concern: Biologists
BY TOM SPEARS, OTTAWA CITIZEN MARCH 9, 2009

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