Pollination economics explained

Five different numbers, routinely confused

Almost every article about the money in pollination adds together figures that measure different things. Two of them record money paid to beekeepers. One is a customs record. One is the sale value of crops. One is a model's estimate of how much of that crop value is owed to pollinators, which nobody pays at all.

What growers actually paid

The pollination fee is the only one of these that records money changing hands, and the United States is the one country with a long official series of it. The USDA's Cost of Pollination survey asks farms with crops that bees can pollinate how many acres they paid to have pollinated, how many colonies they used and what they paid — about fifteen thousand operations a year. It ran for 2015 to 2017, was suspended in December 2018 for budget reasons, and resumed with estimates for 2022 onwards. The tables show the four missing years as a row of their own, because 2017 and 2022 are not neighbours.

Almonds dominate everything else. Growers in California, Arizona and Hawaii paid for 1.63 million colonies in 2025, on just over a million acres of almonds, at an average of $209 a colony — up from $165 in 2015 and the highest price per colony of any crop in the survey. The almond fees alone came to about $341 million in 2025, more than four-fifths of the fees recorded across all six survey regions combined. The number of colonies used has not simply grown with the orchards: 1.76 million in 2015, 1.48 million in 2017, 1.88 million in 2022 and 1.63 million in 2025.

Outside California the sums are small and regional, and the rates differ crop by crop and region by region — which is why no single figure for 'the' pollination fee exists. Cranberries are the largest pollination market in the Northeast and Midwest, blueberries in the Southeast, watermelons in the South and apples in the Northwest, each worth a few million dollars a year at most. Alfalfa and clover appear because growers pay to set their seed: the hay and forage need no pollinator. A fee recorded for 2016 is a 2016 fee; none of these is a current rate for any farm.

Pollination money and honey money, measured two ways

In June 2025 the USDA's Economic Research Service reported that growers spent more than $400 million on pollination services across 1,730,000 paid acres in 2024, and that beekeepers have reported earning more from pollination than from honey since 2022. That comparison sets the growers' fee survey against the value of honey production. Ask the beekeepers instead, in the separate NASS Honey survey, and their own reported pollination income — about $225 million in 2025 — is smaller than the value of their honey, in every year from 2018 to 2025.

Both statements are accurate about what they measure. The two surveys have different respondents, different coverage and different definitions, so they should be read side by side and never reconciled by subtracting one from the other. And neither is a statement about all beekeepers: they describe the United States, and operations above the survey thresholds. Many beekeepers never rent a colony; for a migratory operation working almonds, pollination may be most of the year's income.

How pollination is valued: five methods

The dependence-ratio method dominates because it needs only production statistics and published ratios. Its output is an attribution — a share of observed production credited to pollinators — not a loss. Market models answer a different question, about a hypothetical future in which pollinators decline and prices respond. The two kinds of number are kept apart in the table below.

The headline figure, and what it is

The widely quoted global pollination value comes from a 2009 paper in Ecological Economics. Its method is transparent: take each crop's dependence on insect pollination, multiply by that crop's market value, and sum. It came to €153 billion for 2005, 9.5% of the value of world agricultural production used for human food. It was widely reported as about $216 billion in 2008 — a currency conversion the paper itself does not make, and one that changes with the exchange rate chosen.

The IPBES pollinator assessment reviews this literature and is the better citation for the state of the field, precisely because it reports the range and the assumptions rather than a single headline.

Same crops, different ratios

A dependence ratio is a biological estimate of how much of a crop's yield is owed to animal pollination. For seventeen years most valuations used one set, built on a 2007 crop-by-crop assessment that put crops into classes. In 2024 a new set gave continuous values for 141 crops from pollination experiments worldwide, and found that open-pollination studies tend to underestimate dependence because the plants are often short of pollen.

A 2026 study applied both sets to the same 35 Spanish crops, regions, years (2010–2021) and constant prices. With the older ratios, pollination accounted for 12% of Spain's agricultural production value; with the newer, 18%. Citrus and tomatoes drove most of the rise; peaches, nectarines and plums fell, so Aragón and Catalonia came out lower while Valencia and Murcia came out higher. Nothing about Spanish farming changed between the two numbers — only the coefficients.

A 2025 French study shows what a geographically resolved estimate looks like: about 12% of crop production value (€34.8 billion in 2022) attributed to insect pollination, or €4.2 billion for 2022, highest per hectare where fruit and vegetables are grown. It is a French figure for one year with fixed ratios. Neither it nor the Spanish result is a European total, and neither transfers to another country.

Wild pollinators, managed bees and a modelled collapse

Valuations by dependence ratio credit pollination by any animal. Honey bees are part of it — the part that can be delivered by lorry and paid for — but wild bees, hoverflies and other insects contribute substantially, unpaid and unmeasured in any market. A value for all insect pollination is not the value of honey bees, and the studies here do not isolate honey bees.

A 2025 study did the reverse and modelled the loss of wild pollinators alone. In its scenario, at least 90% of Europe's wild pollinators disappear by 2030 while managed honey bees stay as they are. The model projects European crop yields 7.8% lower, prices of pollination-dependent products 18.6% higher and a global welfare loss of about €34 billion in 2030 — with farmers as a whole gaining, because prices rise more than output falls, and consumers losing more. The authors describe the collapse as an extreme what-if. These are a model's projections under that assumption, not anything that has been observed.

Seed crops: the blind spot

Carrots, onions, cabbages and alfalfa hay need no pollinator to produce what is harvested — but the seed they are grown from does. Valuations that count only the harvested crop miss it. A 2024 analysis for Germany found the value of pollination services about a third higher once seed production was included. The 2026 Spanish study, like most, left seed out and said so.

The same distinction runs through the paid market: in the US fee survey, alfalfa and clover are paid for to set seed. The crops guide keeps the harvested product and the seed crop apart for each crop.

What the biology says about food

The crop-by-crop assessment behind all of it has a finding worth stating on its own: the crops supplying most of the world's calories — wheat, rice, maize and the other cereals — do not depend on animal pollination at all. Dependence is concentrated in fruit, nuts, vegetables and some oilseeds, which matter enormously for dietary diversity, micronutrients and farm income, and much less for bulk calories.

So 'a third of our food depends on bees' is a claim about the diversity and value of what we eat rather than about whether we would starve. Trade complicates it further: pollinator-dependent crops are heavily traded, so a decline in one region can raise prices and shift supply elsewhere, as the 2025 European model shows. That is a reason for care in reading such models, not a forecast of hunger.

And honey bees are not the whole of it

Managed honey bees are the pollinator that can be delivered by lorry, which is why they dominate paid pollination. They are not the most effective pollinator of every crop. A market price exists for the manageable service and not for the rest, which is a fact about markets rather than about ecology.