This spring, my partner and I planted a small orchard on our new property. We ran into some confusion when deciding how far apart to plant our chestnut trees. Turns out there isn’t a simple answer, because of pollination!
What Is Pollination And Why Is It Important?
Briefly, pollination is how plants sexually reproduce, how they exchange DNA. Flowers are the reproductive organs of plants. Like animals, plants have ovaries and produce eggs, which need to be fertilized by pollen to create a new seed.
All fruiting plants, including fruit and nut trees, berries, tomatoes, and others, need pollination. Even more importantly, all plants need to be pollinated—by insects, by wind or by hand—in order to produce viable seeds that can be planted next year. Without pollination, not only would human crops stop producing food, but wild plants that feed all the other animals in the world would also stop growing.
The problem with our chestnut trees was that they needed to be growing close enough to each other to cross-pollinate, or the tree won’t produce nuts. But chestnut trees grow so large that trees planted too close together eventually shade each other and produce fewer nuts. This isn’t such a big deal in a small, household orchard. But if you’re a nut farmer, fewer nuts could put you in the red.
Pollination is valuable to everyone, not just farmers. Pollinators contribute tens of billions of dollars yearly to the global economy.
This video by “We The Economy,” called A Bee’s Invoice, uses the value of bees to explain the value of all natural systems on Earth.
If pollinators disappeared, the total financial loss to agriculture and the world economy would be staggering. Many plants can be pollinated artificially by hand, but the labor costs involved would be massive. This potential doomsday scenario spurred Harvard scientists to develop robot bees. Clearly, the best option is to protect and support the pollinators we already have!
Honeybees And Commercial Pollination
The European Honeybee, Appis Mellifera, is the commercial staple, both for their pollinating and for making honey.
Honey is a miraculous natural sweetener, and the profession of beekeeping is an ancient, revered, even mystical practice. People harvested honey as least as far back as 17 millennia ago. Honey has been used both as food and medicine and is mentioned in religious texts around the world.
While many other aspects of ancient life have changed and vanished, beekeeping is still a vital part of food and agriculture today.
Large commercial operations truck hives of A. Mellifera from farm to farm to provide pollination services. In 2015, a bee truck rolled over on the Interstate near Seattle, spilling almost $100,000 worth of bees. As ridiculous as that sounds, similar traffic disasters have occurred in Idaho and North Carolina.
Traffic accidents are not the biggest problem with trucking bees, however. Bees that travel a lot are more stressed and more susceptible to disease. Since they are generally going between large monocrops, they get less nutritional variety. This interrupts their natural patterns of foraging.
Wild Pollination
A. Mellifera is not the only bee in the game. Commercial and human-managed hives can only pollinate a small fraction of all the crops that rely on insects. Native bees act as vital pollinators for native plants and commercial crops. Not all of them produce honey, though, which is why they have not achieved fame in human cultivation systems. North America alone hosts four thousand species of native bee.
Bees are not the only important pollinators. Other bugs, like wasps, flies, beetles,and butterflies—even bats and birds—pollinate the world’s plants. One study found that although bees are the most effective pollinators when they visit a flower, other pollinators visit flowers more often than bees. Bees and non-bees are equally important to global ecosystems.
Threats To Pollinators
Over the last decade, the welfare of pollinators has become a matter of worldwide concern. Bees and other wild pollinators like wasps, flies, birds and bats, are dying. Colony collapse disorder (CCD) gets lots of attention, but it’s only one of a multitude of coinciding factors threatening honeybees.