Pollinator Decline - Consequences

Consequences

The value of bee pollination in human nutrition and food for wildlife is immense and difficult to quantify.

It is commonly said that about one third of human nutrition is due to bee pollination. This includes the majority of fruits, many vegetables (or their seed crop) and secondary effects from legumes such as alfalfa and clover fed to livestock.

In 2000, Drs. Roger Morse and Nicholas Calderone of Cornell University, attempted to quantify the effects of just one pollinator, the Western honey bee, on only US food crops. Their calculations came up with a figure of US $14.6 billion in food crop value.

There has not been sufficient study to quantify the effects of pollinator decline on wild plants and wild life that depend on them for feed. Some plants on the endangered species list are endangered because they have lost their normal, native pollinators because of displacement by invasive honey bees. Honey bees are not native to the Western Hemisphere, so the loss of honey bees may not represent a threat to native plants; the role of honey bees in the Western Hemisphere is almost exclusively agricultural. To the extent that honey bees compete with native bee species, a decrease in the honey bee population may be beneficial to native plants and pollinators.