I thought thats why we have markets for - the price mechanism is tells us (mostly true) stories of the world.
If bees are dropping like flies and we can't come up with an alternative way to get plants to have sex, then the price of watermelons should creep up. (
http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/AA091)
So go to your supermarket and see where this story is going by the price of your melons.
The good news is wheat and corn are mostly wind pollinated and soy doesn't need pollination.
Maybe what we need is a bee bank to ensure we keep more species of bees alive than the market can economically support at present. They provide future insurance value that falls through the cracks in a classic long term/short term market failure problem.
I understand there are seed banks in Scandinavia where we freeze seeds in vaults, just in case we do something incredibly stupid to our global food supply like drop nukes on it. A sort of "restart" or "play again" button for world agriculture.
Apparently flies are going through genetic changes as well, as a result of rising temperatures it seems. But unfortunately they aren't dying, just a rearrangement of the "top dog" strain. Which is the likely outcome for bees as well IMHO.
One more important thing to note : bees have been around for longer than humans have. They used to annoy dinosaurs. As a species, they survived multiple ice ages, intercontinental drift, comets hitting the earth with gigaton impact, reversing magnetic polarities - all the shit God threw at Planet Earth for the past 100mm years. They've outlasted a lot of other species.
So lets try to keep a 100 million year perspective here - so far the bees have a better track record for survival than humans.
