It has been more than ten years since Roger Morse left us. I thought y'all might be interested in this short piece from his pen
Honeybees Forever by Roger A Morse
TREE vol. 6, no. 10, October 1991
Sarah Corbet's recent news article on honeybees is typical of some ecological thinking but is not consistent with changes taking place in world agriculture. Her theme is that honeybees have dominated the pollination scene and that we have overlooked other bees. This is true, and to the public's benefit. Our ability to manipulate, multiply and move honeybee colonies has made them the pollinator of choice.
When free trade with Mexico and Canada is enacted, we will take colonies of honeybees to the Yucatan or southwest Mexico in October and split each one into five parts. Some will be trucked to the Peace River District of northern Alberta, the world's second best honey-producing area, in the following spring. Many of the colonies grown in Mexico will go to California to pollinate almonds. California had 100,000 acres of almonds in 1960. Today, there are 400,000 acres using 650,000 colonies from at least 14 states for pollination. In the east, 9,500 colonies were moved from Florida to Maine in 1981 for the pollination of apples and blueberries. In 1991, the number was 31,000. Other bees can't fill those bills! Over one million colonies are rented for pollination each year in the United States. We know that honeybees are not efficient pollinators of some crops, such as alfalfa or blueberries. The answer is to use more colonies. That is pollination by brute force, and it works.
Costs are lowered and quality is improved when we select the best place on Earth to grow each food item. Unfortunately, in this free-trade, free-enterprise system, farm families have been uprooted and forced to leave homes that were occupied for generations. The alternative is to subsidize agriculture and charge more for food.
The direction modern agriculture is taking is clear. There are now 2,087,000 farms in the United States. This is down from over 5,000,000 in 1950. About 75,000 farms produce half of our food and 270,000 grow three quarters. In that time the US population has nearly doubled.
Food in the United States is delicious, nutritious, abundant, diverse, safe and cheap because of research by the US Department of Agriculture, founded in 1862, the land-grant college system, founded in 1864, and the extension service, founded in 1914. These, and several supporting institutions, were sold to the public on the basis of being of help to the American farmer. That goal was an illusion. The American consumer became the beneficiary of free agricultural research and the farmers were put out of business. I predict that this will occur in Europe.
Our knowledge of bees is pitiful. We know the biology of fewer than 5% of known species. In a recent lecture by one of our leading bee biologists we were told that there are not 20,000 species of bees in the United States, but probably 30,000. No one present argued with that figure.
Corbet's thought that "the honeybees-or-nothing phase" of agriculture is a thing of the past is not borne out by the statistics cited above. But these figures do not reveal all of the facts. In the United States, 25% of our fruit and 10% of our vegetables are grown outside the country in Mexico, the Caribbean Islands and elsewhere. The end is not in sight.
Let us not oversell the antique idea that other bees will substitute for honeybees. In most pollination situations, moving honeybee colonies for pollination is the simplest, easiest and cheapest solution. There are too few bee biologists who know too little about the biologies, diseases and practical culture of other bees for the situation to be different.
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