Agriculture in the Americas did not reach the level of that in Europe or 
Asia before the honeybee. Why?

Because Man and the honeybee do not follow nature's rules. You have a 
continuous, transportable pollination source so can plant non-indigenous 
crops and get good yields.In a native pollinator area, you are stuck 
with what is there and the plants they naturally pollinate. You are also 
stuck with the number of pollinators available so need to keep things 
small. If you follow the NP arguments, they agree the scale must be 
small for NP to work. Most of the NP crowd is also organic. Small is good.

Why no NP for mandarin oranges? Because they were not there in the first 
place.You do need plants to pollinate and usually NP and the plants have 
a symbiotic relationship A newcomer, like oranges in a semi-arid region, 
will be ignored since the NP has all it needs with what was already 
there.Plus, the NP may not be fitted to pollinate the newcomer. A NP can 
be a bat. Doubt if they are interested in pollinating oranges.

It was not always agriculture and the honeybees that displaced NPs. 
There was nothing there to displace. Think deserts transformed to 
cropland by irrigation. Or fruit trees planted in prairies.If you wanted 
everything to be just like it was when nature set down the plan, you 
would have to eliminate NP along with the honeybees and revert to 
grassland and desert.

Plant diversity is wonderful, and it is in BIG Agriculture more than you 
might expect. Just do a search for soybean seed on the Internet and you 
can get many different varieties. We are not mono-culture in the sense 
of only one seed variety. We have large stands of a single variety, but 
they are right alongside another that ripens earlier or later or has 
some other feature that increased yields for the farmer.

I am more concerned with shifting to native pollinators and stands of 
weeds that can harbor just the pathogens that we are supposedly worrying 
about. Often, another plant will carry the killer of the agricultural 
crop. Too often, when we think we are getting back to nature, we forget 
just how cruel the result can be.

I have nothing against NP. My gardens and orchard teems with them. But I 
am not feeding a nation and parts of the rest of the world.

Bill Truesdell
Bath, Maine

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