The female carpenter bee will tunnel into wood to create a nest for her offspring, and over time, these tunnels can cause damage to wooden structures. Potts, Pollination services in the UK: How important are honeybees?, Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, published online, doi:10.1016/j.agee.2011.03.Carpenter bees and bumblebees are two types of bees that are commonly found in North America.Ĭarpenter bees are large, solitary bees that are known for their ability to bore into wood. Please help by spreading the word and forwarding this link to your friends and colleagues. ![]() “All my articles and videos, available free, are funded by my teaching and sales of award winning bumblebee nest boxes, solitary bee boxes, and wormeries. ‘This study challenges the long held beliefs surrounding the importance of honeybees as the major pollinators and could potentially result in a paradigm shift in people’s thinking,’ says Science and Innovation Manager Dr Andrew Impey from the Natural Environment Research Council. He says the next step for this research is to do the same thing on a Europe-wide scale to compare different countries with the situation in the UK and to go into fields to see which pollinators are pollinating. ‘There was a seminal study in 2006 which found that you get the best pollination, best yields and best fruit when you have both wild pollinators and honeybees,’ says Breeze. ‘Bumblebees, hoverflies and red mason bees are key wild pollinators, but there are at least 250 bee species alone in the UK, which we thought almost certainly contribute more than honeybees do,’ Breeze says.Īlthough Breeze and his colleagues found that honeybees don’t provide the same level of service that other species do, they point out that it’s not one pollinator or the other that’s important both types are crucial. ‘There was a seminal study in 2006 which found that you get the best pollination, best yields and best fruit when you have both wild pollinators and honeybees.’ This is the first time anyone has looked at the contribution from both honeybees and other pollinators on such a grand scale. So Breeze and colleagues from the University of Reading set out to learn how important insect-pollinated crops are to UK agriculture and – using data from an earlier study – to figure out the real contribution from honeybees. Indeed, there is a complete absence of large scale research that backs up the assumption that honeybees are the main pollinators. ‘Honeybees have been in decline for years, so it didn’t make sense.’ ‘We had an inclination that this wasn’t an accurate figure at all,’ says Breeze. And until now, people have widely assumed that honeybees are the most important pollinators, with a figure of around 90 per cent of pollination services coming from honeybees bandied around. Insect pollination is estimated to be worth around £400 million per year to UK crop agriculture. ‘Our finding suggests that wild insect pollinators make a much bigger contribution to UK crop pollination than previously thought,’ says Tom Breeze from the University of Reading, lead author of the study. So if honeybees aren’t pollinating the crops, what is? The researchers think that other important pollinating insects, such as bumblebees, hoverflies and solitary bees must be making up the shortfall. This means that honeybees can’t be solely responsible, or aren’t the only important pollinator. And over the same period, yields of insect-pollinated crops, which include oil seed rape and field bean, have gone up by 54 per cent. Paradoxically over the last 20 years, the proportion of UK crops that rely on insects for pollination has risen from just under 8 per cent in the early 1980s to 20 per cent in 2007. At worst, that figure could well be more like 10 to 15 per cent. ![]() Where honeybees used to provide around 70 per cent of the UK’s pollination needs they now only pollinate a third. ![]() ![]() They found that honeybee populations have nose-dived so dramatically in recent years that they can only do half as much pollination as they did in the early 1980s.
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