Robbin W. Thorp

TL;DR: It was found that diversity was essential for sustaining the service, because of year-to-year variation in community composition, and conservation and restoration of bee habitat are potentially viable economic alternatives for reducing dependence on managed honey bees.

TL;DR: This work investigated how crop pollination services provided by native, unmanaged, bee communities varied on organic and conventional farms situated along a gradient of isolation from natural habitat, allowing prediction of the area needed to produce a given level of pollination Services by wild bees within this landscape.

TL;DR: It is shown that, while the contribution of wild bees to crop production is significant, service delivery is restricted to a limited subset of all known bee species, suggesting that cost-effective management strategies to promote crop pollination should target a different set of species than management Strategies to promote threatened bees.

TL;DR: Although honeybees are the main and most important pollinating insects for many plants, wild pollinators may be necessary to ensure high fruit set and the restoration of high quality habitat strips along the edges of crop fields in highly intensified agricultural landscapes should be encouraged to conserve pollinators and to determine whether benefits for agriculture can be realized.

TL;DR: The authors reviewed 59 publications on urban bee ecology with the following goals, to assess current knowledge, to highlight areas in need of further research, and to suggest applications of study findings to bee conservation.