I received this comment:
> I’ve seen numbers like these before (i.e. increasing numbers of colonies in the US and Europe).  Have also seen the opposite.   

My point is that there is so much emphasis on declines that not only do people repeat that emphasis without supporting data, they are resistant to any new data that suggest otherwise. For example:

We found that extensive species
richness loss and biotic homogenisation occurred before 1990, whereas these negative trends became
substantially less accentuated during recent decades, being partially reversed for certain taxa (e.g. bees in
Great Britain and Netherlands). 

These results highlight the potential to maintain or even restore current
species assemblages (which despite past extinctions are still of great conservation value), at least in regions
where large-scale land-use intensification and natural habitat loss has ceased. 

Carvalheiro, Luísa Gigante, et al. "Species richness declines and biotic homogenisation have slowed down for NW‐European pollinators and plants." Ecology Letters 16.7 (2013): 870-878.

Interestingly, the phrase "large-scale land-use intensification and natural habitat loss has ceased” accurately describes this region (upstate NY). 100 years ago, it was completely farmed over, and now it’s mostly mixed use and naturalized habitat. 

But beyond that, the tendency to emphasize the benefit of pollinators to humans ignores the intrinsic importance of pollinators and wild nature in general:

Highlighting the economic benefits people might obtain from biodiversity can be an effective instrument to motivate people or institutions to support biodiversity conservation. However, too much focus on the services delivered by pollinators may lead to adoption of practices that will not benefit species that could potentially contribute under changing agricultural conditions nor species that will never contribute to crop pollination. 

Benefits of biodiversity should therefore not be used as the sole rationale for biodiversity conservation as, for example, is currently done in the new strategy of the Convention on Biological Diversity and in the EU biodiversity strategy to 2020. Moral arguments remain pivotal to supporting conservation of the larger portion of biodiversity including threatened species that currently contribute little to ecosystem service delivery. 

Such arguments are powerful and define many human actions, from taking care of the elderly to preserving historical buildings or art. Ecologists and conservationists need to make these distinctions clear if we expect policy makers or land owners to defend species with no clearly defined economic value to humans.

Kleijn, David, et al. "Delivery of crop pollination services is an insufficient argument for wild pollinator conservation." Nature communications 6 (2015).

Peter Loring Borst
Ithaca, NY 14853

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