The Birds and the Bees (and Bats and Butterflies)

As I write this, the most-emailed story in today's New York Times is about the disappearance of honeybees and the impact it is having on beekeepers and the crops that depend on bees -- primarily fruits, nuts and vegetables, but also some oilseeds and forage crops -- as pollinators. The lucrative California almond industry is the chief focus of the story.

It's an interesting story and one that crops up periodically in various forms and at odd intervals. I highly recommend the article but would add a couple things I think are of interest:

• Honey bees are not native to North America. While there were many species of bee that were native and were important pollinators in their own right, they were not the prodigious producers of wax and honey that the European bees were. So, the early settlers brought them to the colonies. Indians reportedly called them "the white man's fly."
  
  
• Honey bees are not the only important pollinators, nor are they the only ones in trouble. Last year, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report stating that populations of bats, hummingbirds and bees were all in decline and that other wild pollinators, such as butterflies and moths were also at risk due to increasingly scarce habitat. The report urged better census taking and more funding to study underlying causes of the decline, including the possibility that climate change has played a role.