A new study of wild bees that is facing an alarming inconsistency between falling wild bee supply and rising crop pollination demand was indicated in 139 counties in the key agricultural regions of California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the West Texas and in the Mississippi River valley. These counties tend to be the places which grow specialty crops which are highly dependent on pollinators such as almonds, blueberries, and apples. They are also the countries that grow less dependent crops in large quantities just like soybeans, canola, and cotton.
According to the Science Daily, the crops with the strongest pollination mismatch which has a concurrently drop in wild bees supply and increase in pollination demand show some crops that are most dependent on pollinators including the pumpkins, watermelons, pears, peaches, plums, apples, and blueberries."These are the crops most likely to run into pollination trouble," says the Director and a conservation ecologist of the University of Vermont Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, Taylor Ricketts, "whether that's increased costs for managed pollinators or even destabilized yields."
During the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Ricketts briefed some scholars, policy makers, and journalists on how the national bee map was first published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last 2015. It could help in protecting those wild bees and point out the habitat restoration efforts as reported in the Long Room. Ricketts also established and launched a new mobile app that he was co-developing to help farmers upgrade their farms to superior support wild bees at that event.
Every year, it is over $3 billion of the U.S. economy depends on the pollination from the native pollinators like wild bees. It indicates that farmers could be facing increasing costs and that this problem would even damage the nation's crop production if there is a continuous decline from wild bees.
