Honeybees aren't the only pollinators. There are many different types of bees. Beetles, bats, moths, flies, butterflies and more.
'"Honeybees were part of a massive transformation of landscape now called the Columbian Exchange," Bergmann says. From the 15th to 18th centuries, Europeans relocated animal and plant species around the world via trade and travel at an unprecedented rate in Earth's history. That's how honeybees got here. They were purposeful imports from Europe. Then they escaped and went feral into the landscape (they were called the white man's fly by Native Americans). Remarkably, after a while people just thought of them as natural.
But then the story shifts again. These days, almost all honeybees are working for Big Agriculture. Trucked in boxes with road trip "pollen patty" food, they make their way across the country, stopping in different states as the agricultural season progresses.
So for Bergmann, modern honeybees are part a wave of purposeful design.
"It was the global scaling up of agriculture," she says. "We designed a system that required an outside pollinator in order to produce food, because, by design, these landscapes [of Big Agriculture] have no biodiversity."...'