https://www.wired.com/2014/05/will-we-still-have-fruit-if-bees-die-off/

Article courtesy of Wired.com

A PHOTO HAS been circulating for a while that suggests our grocery stores will look like this in a world without bees. Is that true? Will our food choices be radically limited, come the future Beepocalypse?

We already know what raising fruit without honey bees looks like. In a remote area in China, humans pollinate 100% of fruit trees by hand. Armed with pollen-loaded paintbrushes and cigarette filters, people swarm around pear and apple trees in spring. The reason why they hand pollinate is not what you think, though. Honey bees are still present in these areas of hand pollination, and many fruit growers also keep bees for honey.

Hand pollination in China has as much to do with economics and fruit biology as it does with bees. In the early 1990s, farmers of marginal lands in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region–an area spanning parts of Nepal, China, Pakistan, and India–realized that apples could be a major cash crop. Their land was mountainous and hard to farm, so tree fruits were ideally suited to the region. A major shift occurred from subsistence farming to fruit crops. The payoffs were large – in some areas, farmers quadrupled their income. Now they had cash on hand to send kids to school and build roads. Quality of life improved.

With that early success, farmers found that certain varieties of apples and pears sold better than others. As new orchards went in, more and more of the same cultivars of apples were planted. And that is when things started to go wrong.

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