[科学美国人60秒] SSS 2015-12-03

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 The widespread death of honeybees has some farmers fretty because if honey bees disappear, who will pollinate their crops.

  " Almost any kind of insects you can think of." Marggie Mayfield, an ecologist at the Universtiy of Queensland in Australia." Globally speaking, flies are probably the second largest group of crop pollinators,I mean, particular a  group called Hover¹  Flies or Surface Flies, and these are the sort of large-eyed flies. If you take a hike, you sometimes see them hovering² in front of your face. Along with Hover Flies, the army of under-appreciated pollinators includes butterflies, moths³, beetles⁴ and some wasps⁵. Mayfield and her colleague s analyzed⁶ more than three dozen  studies on pollination⁷ covering seventeen crop plants grown on five continents. And they found some of these underdog insects accounted for around forty percent of the flower visits, and some of the crops in their review, especially tropical ones like mangos and custo apples did not rely on honeybees at all. Even commodities like corolla did fine without the bees. They made analysis in the procedings of the national academy of sciences. Mayfield says part of the difficulty engaging the importance of the bees starts with the research methods. A third of the studies initially⁸  considered, for example, ignored every thing but bees.

  You know, the European honeybees are obviously from Europe,so there is a lot of focus on European honeybees there. Another issue, she says, is just raising awareness⁹ among farmers.

  I have encountered farmers in California, in Australia and in South Africa who spray their pesticides¹⁰ largely at night because that's when the bees have gone back to their hives, and they do that with the idea that they will spare the pollinators and will be able to control the pests, but that very much takes the assumption that only bees are important pollinators.

  Of course we should still do our best to save honey bees, the celebrity¹¹ pollinators. But agricultural practices should consider the rest of these tiny farm workers, too.

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