Check
out this interesting story that was on NPR recently. It illustrates the challenges we increasingly face as the dominant management stewards of the planet. Almond growers in CA rely on large numbers of domesticated honeybees to pollinate their crop. Their reliance on this one species is partly a function of the giant almond orchards themselves. The orchards replaced the diverse vegetation that supported large numbers and diversity of local native bees, requiring the farmers to turn to commercially supplied replacements. However, once the almonds stop flowering, the region suddenly becomes a floral desert for bees. So bee wranglers move the bees to where there are flowers. Amazingly, all the way to North Dakota! However, as commodity prices have risen for things like corn, Dakotan farmers are replacing flowers with corn. This is beginning to put the bee wranglers in a bind.
The story itself is brief, but there are a lot of issues embedded here, from payment for ecosystem service schemes, to the impact of large scale agriculture on biodiversity, to our reliance on a handful of species and their expert management for our global food supply.
