Approximately 80 per cent of all flowering plant species are specialized for pollination by animals and mostly by insects. These crops account for 65 per cent of global food production, still leaving as much as 35 per cent depending on pollinating animals (Klein et al., 2007). These food crops include delicious products such as many of our tree fruits (e.g., apples, cherries, mangos, and avocados) and nuts (e.g., almonds, peanuts, macadamia nuts, and cashew nut), squashes, cucumbers, melons, citrus, and berries. In addition, many of oil seed crops benefit from bee pollination, such as mustard, coconut, canola, safflower, and many more.
The honey bee (Apis mellifera) is the most commonly used insect in agricultural crops as managed pollinator in North America and Europe, Japan, China, India and many other parts of the world as well. Farmers in the United States rent more than 2.5 million honey bee colonies every year for fulfillment of pollination deficit but today, the honey bee is threatened by colony collapse disorder (CCD). The demand for honey bees in California almond orchards rapidly increased due to increasing acreage, while on the other side, bee colonies decreased due to CCD, but that occurred during a time when honey bee colonies were not easy to procure and as a result, the cost of renting bees shot up from US$50 per hive in 2003 to US$140 per hive in 2006 (Sumner and Boriss, 2006). The rental charge increased about 3 times within 4 years.