Chapter 19 - Production of solitary bees for pollination in the United States

Abstract

Many of our most valuable crops require an insect, usually a bee, for pollination. Bees pollinate some 400 crops worldwide and 130 in the United States. In addition, agriculture is becoming more dependent on the services of bees because the proportion of crops that require insect pollination has increased in recent years. When a managed pollinator is provided, most often it is the familiar honey bee, Apis mellifera L., which is employed to do the job. For centuries, the honey bee was cultured for its production of honey and wax, and, more recently, intensive monoculture crop cultivation has made providing bees for a pollination fee an important aspect of beekeeping. Europeans brought the honey bee everywhere they settled, and it is now employed as a crop pollinator on every continent except Antarctica. But the ubiquitous honey bee is just one of about 16,000 described species of bees in 1200 genera worldwide. North America alone has 3800 species, of which 21 are introduced. Bees are most diverse in the warm-temperate, drier parts of the world; for example, California has 1985 species. The bees range from specialists that visit only one species of plant to generalists like the honey bee, and from solitary to eusocial, again like the honey bee. They are grouped into seven major families. The most familiar are the Halictidae (sweat bees), Megachilidae (leafcutting bees and mason bees), and Apidae (carpenter bees, bumble bees, and honey bees). Many of the solitary species visit crop plants, and some are now managed for their pollination services. The value of insect-pollinated crops in the United States was estimated to be $15.1 billion in 2009, $3.4 billion of which was attributed to non-Apis bees.