How much is bee pollination worth?

Four numbers wearing one label

• The pollination fee: what a grower pays to rent colonies for a bloom. A negotiated market price that moves by crop, region and year.
• Beekeeper revenue: what operations actually earn, reported in government agricultural statistics.
• Crop dependence: the share of a crop's production attributable to animal pollination. A biological proportion with no money in it.
• Modelled economic value: dependence ratios times crop market values in a reference year. This is the source of the headline figures.

What the headline figure actually says

The biology behind it, which is more interesting

The crop-by-crop assessment underlying this literature finds that the cereals supplying most of the world's calories — wheat, rice, maize — do not depend on animal pollination at all. Dependence is concentrated in fruit, nuts, vegetables and some oilseeds. So the honest version of 'a third of our food depends on bees' is a claim about the diversity and nutritional quality of what we eat, not about whether we would starve.

And managed honey bees are not the whole of it. They dominate paid pollination because they can be delivered on a lorry; wild bees and other insects contribute substantially, unpaid and largely unmeasured. A market price exists for the manageable service and not for the rest, which is a fact about markets rather than about ecology.