The Optimal Supply of Crop Pollination and Honey From Wild and Managed Bees: An Analytical Framework for Diverse Socio-Economic and Ecological Settings

Hiring pollination services has become an important strategy to secure fruit set in many pollinator-dependent crops, especially in monocultures such as the Californian almond (Prunus dulcis) groves, where the European honeybee (Apis mellifera) is frequently deployed to compensate deficiencies in the natural provision of insect-mediated pollination. Such beekeeper-farmer cooperation has been the focus of many economic models, although it is only one in a variety of setups under which bees (wild and managed) contribute to agriculture. Based on a thorough literature review and on our own research, we generalize the basic model by Rucker et al. (2012) to describe farmer-beekeeper interactions as determined by diverse agro-ecological, institutional and socioeconomic conditions. The generalized model serves as an analytical framework to classify real world farmer-ecosystem-beekeeper interactions, to identify possible causes for a suboptimal crop pollination and to formulate informed policy recommendations.