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by tptacek 2965 days ago
Are commercial pollination services perhaps using robotic bees? Because pollination services went up by something like 1% since that article was published.
2 comments

I am not an expert in the field or anything, but it's not necessarily the case that, because pollination services have gone up slightly, the problem is solved. It could be that they've been able to work through this problem so far but will not be able to do so indefinitely.
Are the bee sources still the same? Bees are often imported from other regions to meet supply.
I have no idea. Why does that matter?
If all the bees keep dying perhaps you'll eventually run out of bees to import.
The argument here being that there is a reserve supply of latent bees not used for commercial pollination, backfilling the commercial supply?

I think robot bees are a more plausible explanation.

According to the article you yourself linked to support the claim that there's no problem, that's exactly what they do -- purchase extra bees. That and split colonies (which creates weaker colonies which are more susceptible to death). And this same article admits a substantial price increase in products requiring bees for production.
How would you reconcile "substantial price increase due to bee requirements" to "sub-inflationary increases in pollination prices"? Again, you don't have to guess about this: pollination prices are tracked and published. We don't need the axiomatic method to figure this out; Google does just fine.