Bee 'pastures' could help agriculture

Seed Daily: Human-tended "bee pastures" of wildflowers are an environmentally friendly way to produce generations of healthy bees to aid agriculture, U.S. researchers say. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture say pesticide-free human-tended pastures of a half-acre each can be easily established and would be easy to maintain, a department release said Wednesday.

Bee pasturing isn't a new idea, researchers say, and two bee businesses are already using the findings to propagate more bees. One species of bee that pastures would help is the blue orchard bee, a gentle variety that helps the nation's premiere pollinator, the European honey bee. Blue orchard bee populations could increase four- or five-fold annually in a well-designed, well-managed bee pasture, researchers estimate….

A bee on a chrysanthemum in England, shot by Photo2222, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license