"Many of us are now aware that bees are in trouble due to manmade changes to the environment. Large-scale industrial agriculture, of course, means that often there are no floral resources over very large areas of farmland, and bees' flexibility in locating food sources of course can cope with that to some extent because they're very good at locating patches, but this ability only goes so far. Of course, if there are literally no flowers left or very few, then their learning ability won't help them very much.

In addition, of course, there is very heavy usage of pesticides and herbicides in industrial agriculture. And these substances in many cases have been designed to be lethal or at least harmful to insects because they are meant to keep herbivores at bay. And of course often, even if insects don't eat the leaves, flower-visiting insects s ...