PARIS: Wild bee diversity is declining worldwide at unprecedented rates, and steps must be taken to conserve them — and not just those that are the main pollinators of agricultural crops — agreed 58 bee researchers in a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, an open-access journal based in London.
“This study provides important support for the role of wild bees to crop pollination through a comprehensive global summary,” said co-author and pollination ecologist Neal Williams, associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
Wild bees, or non-managed bees, include bumble bees, sweat bees and small carpenter bees.
The study, led by David Kleijn of Wageningen University in The Netherlands, found that of the almost 80 percent of crop pollination provided solely by wild bees, only 2 percent are by the most common species. This indicates that the benefits of conserving only economically important organisms are not the same as the benefits of conserving a broad diversity of species, the researchers said.
Among the co-authors are native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis, and conservation biologist Claire Kremen of UC Berkeley, a longtime associate of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
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