[fixedd]

I didn't RTFA, so it may have been mentioned, but I recently listened to a year-old episode of RadioLab where they were talking about an apple-growing region in central China where in the 90s the bees just disappeared (probably due to pesticides). Being China, with the associated labor costs, the farmers paid people to go out on ladders and carefully pollinate all of the flowers on the apple trees by hand.

Long story short, the humans were WAY better at it than the bees (I forget the % increase, but it was significant), but it was so tedious that the labor costs still drove the end-user cost of the apples above what the market was willing to pay.