Many a slip (Image: Duncan P Walker/iStock)
EVEN without climate change and even without the decline of bees, pollination is in a downward spiral. And nobody knows why.
James Thomson of the University of Toronto in Canada has studied yellow avalanche lilies growing high in the Rocky mountains in Colorado since 1993. Bumblebees are their main pollinators. Each year he pollinates some plants by hand to ensure they produce fruit, and compares them with plants that fend for themselves. At first the two groups did equally well, but from 1999 onwards the unassisted plants did consistently worse, suggesting that…
