[emodendroket]

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.

[tptacek]

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.

[emodendroket]

If you are participating in a debate and you want to argue for something, usually you post the sources for your claim instead of asking your interlocutor to find them for you. Especially when you've just shared a source that actually contradicts your claims.

Specifically, this is the passage I am referring to in, again, the article you yourself provided as evidence for your claims:

> The price of some of that extra work will get passed on to the consumer. The average retail price of honey has roughly doubled since 2006, for instance. And Kim Kaplan, a researcher with the USDA, points out that pollination fees -- the amount beekeepers charge to cart their bees around to farms and pollinate fruit and nut trees -- has approximately doubled over the same period.

> "It's not the honey bees that are in danger of going extinct," Kaplan wrote in an email, "it is the beekeepers providing pollination services because of the growing economic and management pressures. The alternative is that pollination contracts per colony have to continue to climb to make it economically sustainable for beekeepers to stay in business and provide pollination to the country’s fruit, vegetable, nut and berry crops." We have also been importing more honey from overseas lately.

[tptacek]

Since you can literally just Google [<year> pollination price] and the first hit will contain a table, not following up on this point seems like willfulness on your part.

[headsoup]

Regardless of that, the article does not support your argument of robot bees being more likely and demonstrates the former to be true.

[tptacek]

Robotic bees are a joke, not a serious proposal. The reality is: these are insects, and bee husbandry provides commercial pollinators with an essentially limitless supply of them.