ABSTRACT
Three quarters of all the crops we grow benefit from insect pollination; many would produce little or nothing without pollinators. Hence humankind should be deeply troubled by the ongoing decline in wild bee populations, and by the rising mortality of domestic honeybee colonies. Farming needs bees, but paradoxically it is wiping them out; industrial farming involving large monocultures of crops treated with perhaps twenty different pesticides per year has made vast tracts of the globe into a hostile environment for wildlife of all sorts. There have been a number of scientific papers published discussing the possibility of building miniature flying robots to replace bees and pollinate our crops for us. Do we have to always look for a technical solution to the problems that we create, when a simple, natural solution is staring us in the face? We have wonderfully efficient pollinators already, let’s look after them, not plan for their demise.
