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Date: | Mon, 20 Sep 2010 19:51:50 -0400 |
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Let me be blunt. I find this approach promoting native pollinators
disingenuous. To cite sunflowers which are native American plants
first cultivated in America 8,000 years ago, being effectively
pollinated by native bees is fine... for sunflowers and other
natives. But the fruits and produce that originated in Europe, home
for millennia with apis m. are in fact adapted to the European bees.
Perfectly matched, one might say, in the case of Almonds and Apples.
This is why it's unwise to suggest (using sunflowers as an example)
that natives can adapt to fill the gap?
Take red clover. Apis M. has a tongue too short to reach the nectar
in the plant. It's not the bee the plant was made to fit. And to
presume that some adaptation is all we need is like insisting that
Apis M would adapt (what? by tongue exercises?) to reach the nectar.
It would starve first.
So when the Minnesota poster bowed to political pressure and showed a
native bumblebee in every panel of the poster of "bees", they did a
huge disservice overall.
As politically unpopular as it is, it's still a fact that nothing
perfectly replaces apis m. And while our birdseed production
(sunflowers) may not suffer, a lot of perhaps more critical food crops will.
At 12:00 AM 9/20/2010, Peter L Borst wrote:
>Actually, there is a groundswell of interest in native pollinators.
>The old notion that only honey bees can do pollination economically
>is being disproved:
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