This is what your supermarket would look like if all the bees died off

[happyslug]

18. Not quite true, you would still have native and bumble bees to do the work.

The problem with Native Bees and Bumble Bees is they have small colonies (Often just one small nest) and thus can not be moved around like Honey Bees can be. Thus mono-culture will have to be replaced by multiple crops in a given area, with each crop coming into flower one after each other, Ike in the days before mono-culture. Instead of acres and acres of Almond trees, you would have an acre of almonds (Flowers in February and March). An acre of Apples, plums or cherries (All Flower in April), an acre of Blueberries, blackberries or raspberries which tend to flower in May. Cucumbers, Melons, Sunflower or Pumpkins flower in June. Buckwheat, Soybean and Alfalfa all flower in July. Melons and Pumpkins have blooms till October. Sunflowers are a source of nectar till September, Soybean till October.

Of the "Species", Chives is good from May to October, Carrots till September. On small farms, you have borders where wild flowers and trees grow, all of which come into flower throughout the year. Thus you can have all of the products you remove, providing you are willing to pay a small farmer to grow all or most of them on various parts of his farm. Multi-Culture NOT Mono-Culture. You lose economy of scale, but the amount of product will be about the same.

Bees go dormant in October or November (Depending on what is in flower AND the temperature) and go active in late March (again depending on temperature and what is coming into Flower, Maples and other trees flower early and if it is warm bees help pollinate them.

Some comments on Wild Bees:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/03/01/173167125/wild-bees-are-good-for-crops-but-crops-are-bad-for-bees

Nectar Sources for Bees (Why old Farmers keep flowers around their homes, it provided bees Nectar when the crops were note):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_American_nectar_sources_for_honey_bees

Mono-culture is so bad in Almonds that, except for bees brought in to pollinate the Almonds, there are no native bees, or wild honey bees in the Almond area of California due to the lack of any source of nectar once the almonds flowers died out.

Just pointing out there is a solution, but it is a solution that today's large corporate farmers do not want to hear, i.e. go to a multi-crop system so that bees and native pollinators have flowers all year round so they can survive. In such a system the economy of scale of having a large farm just dies out.

Please note, a hive can travel many miles to search for nectar but it takes about one hive per acre to pollinate that acre.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollination_management