So what’s with them bees?

Overall, we must conclude that claims of a global crisis in agricultural pollination are untrue.

That’s from a New Scientist digest of a Current Biology paper by the authors themselves. ((Thanks to Michael for the headsup.)) Roughly, the argument is that (1) bees are responsible for the production of a lot of our food, yes, but not that much; (2) pollinators are declining, yes, but not worldwide, and probably not irreversibly; and (3) pollinator decline can threaten agricultural yield, yes, but it hasn’t actually done so yet. The data come from a huge FAO dataset of “yield, and total production and cultivated area of pollinator-dependent and nondependent crops.”

But not so fast. The relatively small proportion of agricultural production that depends on pollinators has quadrupled during the past 50 years. So if there’s no pollinator crisis now, there may well soon be one.