The honey bee, remarkable as it is, doesn’t know how to pollinate a tomato or an eggplant flower, while some native bees are masters at this. The same thing happens with a number of native plants, such as pumpkins and squash, blueberries and cranberries, which are more efficiently pollinated by native bees than by honey bees. Let us take a closer look at this forgotten treasure of native bees.
Native bees come in a wide range of sizes; they are also varied in their shapes, life styles, places they frequent, nests they build, flowers they visit and season of activity. They remain unnoticed by most of us and yet they provide valuable services to all kinds of flowering plants, from wild flowers to some important crops. For instance, the Southeastern blueberry bee is a hard working little creature, capable of visiting as many as 50,000 blueberry flowers in her short life and pollinating enough of them to produce more than 6,000 ripe blueberries worth about $20 at the market. Not every bee that you see flitting about may be worth $20 but all of them combined keep the world of flowering plants going; flowering plants are a key component of most land ecosystems.
Bees are descended from wasps. Most wasps are carnivores; they either prey upon or parasitize other little creatures, mostly other insects, and use this rich protein source to feed their babies. Many millions of years ago, when the first flowering plants begun to bloom, some wasps made a switch from hunting prey to gathering pollen for their brood. Perhaps they were hunting for insects that visited flowers and ate some of the pollen along with their prey. It didn’t take much to find the advantages of consuming pollen over hunting. Pollen is also rich in proteins and doesn’t fight back so it is easy to imagine why they were happy to become vegetarians. Gathering pollen and nectar requires certain adaptations different from those of hunters; so they started to change to meet these requirements and consequently became bees.
Most bees have very furry bodies and the hairs are feathery, better for trapping loose pollen. If you observe bees or bumble bees visiting flowers you will notice that some are totally covered by pollen grains.
https://bugguide.net/node/view/475348I love honey, but I have always believed that North America, could grow food with out Honey bees.
Foods like Almonds may have great losses, but food in general, would grow.