We don't have to guess or extrapolate from anecdotes; the price of pollination services are tracked, and have grown low single-digit percentages over the last several years, just like prices in general.
In my strange corner of the world that hasn't been "agronomically optimized", there aren't giant monoculture farms spraying insecticides, and there are dozens of species acting as pollinators.
No one pays for "pollinator services".
I suppose there's a business opportunity for someone to capture all the rainfall, dam the rivers, and sell it back to me as well.
Herbicides and pesticides aren't necessary for agriculture. They are necessary for a very specific type of agriculture that has been lobbied for and subsidized, starting with the Nixon administration's "get big or get out out" message to farmers. It's been successful by metrics like 'food produced per man-hour of human labor', and appears cheap because we are all forced to partially pre-pay under threat of violence (overly dramatic way of saying its subsidized through taxes), and ignoring massive externalities of ecosystem destruction.
You're missing my point. I'm saying there's no natural ecosystem for honey bee pollination in the US because there are no natural honey bees in the US. They're not a native species.
Okay, if that was your point all along then I understand.
Not to move the goalposts, just to share some food for thought. Making a distinction between native and invasive species implies there is some particular snapshot in time when things were "right", when evolution was "done", when new species stopped being introduced into ecosystem by various means and competing with each other.
I think we're concerned with different points. You're saying the pollinator services business is fine and profitable despite the use of insecticides.
I'm saying it's sad that a diverse ecosystem consisting of many pollinators which allowed trees and bushes to bear fruits and berries without paying for a company to truck in a bunch of bees has been replaced by something more profitable, but less resilient and healthy.
Yes, the subtext of my point is that there's a narrative that the American food supply depends on a natural resource of pollinating insects, and that it is threatened by an unnatural collapse of native pollinating bees.
In fact:
* the parts of our food supply that are heavily dependent on pollinating agents rely entirely on commercial pollination services, not native ambient pollinating species.
* there is strong evidence that no threat exists to commercial pollinators and that standard bee husbandry practices are working just fine. That evidence includes the price of commercial pollination, which would (obviously) rise if collapsing bee populations were making commercial pollinating hives scarce, but which are in fact possibly not even keeping up with inflation, along with the price of new queens (nuc prices have grown over the last 5 years, or at least seemed to be last time I checked, but beekeping has grown immensely in popularity over the last few years as well --- but queen prices haven't really budged at all; granted: my research method here is "find companies that sell queens, follow their prices on archive.org", so I'm ready to be rebutted).
* the honey bees that tend to dominate this conversation are a non-native invasive species. There's a pretty widespread and well-documented belief that the US "feral" honey bee population was wiped out in (IIRC) the mid-80s --- not by pesticides but by another invasive species, the Varroa mite --- and that subsequent to that event, every honey bee you've seen "in the wild" since then is technically somebody's property. That may be changing? There may now be a significant number of feral colonies? Nobody's crop depends on them.
* the entire reason honey bees exist at all in the US is to support at-scale agriculture. They're livestock.
* it is entirely legitimate to worry about things we're doing to threaten native insect species! My objection to the conversation about native pollinators is twofold. First: I think it's disingenuous to imply that threats to native pollinators are the existential threat to our food supply that people claimed CCD was. Second, and much more importantly: neonicotinoid pesticides are not the major threat to native pollinators; they're just a cosmetically appealing villain we insert into this narrative to reassure ourselves that there's a "big pesticide" bad guy we need to organize against. The reality of species loss in the US is that it's a consequence of habitat loss, which implicates all of us, not just some shadowy faceless corporation.
Complete outsider to this: any chance that is due to external factors, such as increase in number of competitors (perhaps foreign), or reduced demand (e.g. new alternatives)?