Trends In Insct Pollinated Crops 1992-2009: The role of honey bees in food production continues to expand

摘要

Last December, I presented a summary of the production and value of insect pollinated crops to U.S. agriculture in 2010 along with a discussion of some of the issues involved in arriving at good estimates. That report was based on an addendum to a much larger study that examined trends in the production and value of insect pollinated crops from the period 1992 through 2009. There are several reasons for doing trend analysis. First, a single-year study may not be representative of the degree to whichagriculture depends on pollination, suggesting values that are either too high or too low. Second, trends reveal changes in our dependence on pollination and provide some insight into the level of our dependence on pollinators in the future (here, I refer only to our reliance on pollinators for the production of agricultural crops; pollinators also provide a vast wealth of non-agricultural services often referred to as ecosystem services, including, among others, the pollination of plants that limit soil erosion as well as those that provide food and shelter for wildlife). Lastly, we can examine trend data for evidence that the decline in the number of honey bee colonies has limited the production of insect-pollinated crops. In this article, I want tofocus on the first two of these reasons.