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Mar 02, 2013, 12:26 PM
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Member Since: Feb 2013
Location: -
Posts: 630
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Quote:
Farmers who have watched helplessly as a mysterious disease wiped out millions of domesticated bees needed to pollinate their almonds, apples and other crops may have an easy solution: make their crops more accessible to wild insects that do the job for free.
Not only are they cheaper, they fertilize blossoms with much greater efficiency, new research shows. After observing bees in hundreds of fields on multiple continents, scientists calculated that free-living bees were twice as effective as domesticated honeybees at prompting flowers to produce fruit. In addition, the proportion of flowers that matured to fruit improved in every field visited by wild insects, compared with only 14% of fields visited by rented honeybees, according to a report published online Thursday by the journal Science.
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Full article - Farmers' lack of bees might be solved by going wild
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