She adds that for a healthy environment you need all kinds of bees because they pollinate different plants.
"You cross-pollinate one business with another one, and then you have something going, " says Wirtz.
"They pollinate at least 30 per cent of the food crops we consume, " he said.
But they also pollinate nearby apple trees, a useful service that is not purchased or priced.
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Bees-for-hire pollinate many of the nation's crops, including alfalfa, apples, almonds, tomatoes and a range of citrus fruits.
It was also a bad year for insects, with knock-on impacts for fruit and crops which they pollinate.
Yes, there is the argument that they gather best practice from across an industry and can thus pollinate, cross-fertilise.
Design often comes about through a network of ideas--some borrowed, some stolen--that cross-pollinate.
Bumblebees are less studied than their honeybee cousins, but they also pollinate many commonly eaten crops, including strawberries, raspberries and runner beans.
"There are honey farmers, but using hives in the field to pollinate crops is not at all common in India, " he said.
As a teenager, Mr. Alvarez joined the Sonoma County Beekeepers' Association and learned that local farmers would pay beekeepers to pollinate their crops for them.
Initially popular among start-ups and freelance workers, co-working spaces are gaining traction among bigger employers who want their staff to cross-pollinate, or interact with employees from other firms.
You'd think that by now scientists would have invented some sort of gizmo or chemical spray that would pollinate more efficiently than bees do, but that's not the case.
In industrialised nations, such as the US and in Europe, many farms employ the services of commercial hives to pollinate fruit trees and food crops, and ensure they harvest adequate yields.
In fact, Sony has made it a point to spread their teams around even internally, so that the people behind God of War: Ascension and Journey or Sound Shapes can cross-pollinate ideas.
To get the seeds to breed true the farmers have to cross-pollinate the plants, a laborious task that keeps a peak of a dozen workers busy for several months on just one acre.
There are many people with spring allergies who seem to react to just about everything else too--weeds such as goldenrod that pollinate in late summer and fall, and pet dander and mold all year round.
Since no plausible evidence has yet emerged of risks to human health from eating GM food, the environmentalists' main remaining objection is that GM plants may cross-pollinate others, spreading their alien genes to other species with unpredictable environmental effects.
As the almond trees of the San Joaquin valley go into their February bloom, turning the plains white with their buds and abuzz with millions of bees who are temporarily imported to pollinate them, it may be hard to see devastation in the making.
Some evidence has emerged suggesting this could happen, though a breakthrough announced this month by a group of Canadian scientists may overcome the problem: they have developed a sort of agricultural contraceptive, in which GM plants that pollinate their non-GM relatives produce only sterile offspring.
The plan is to allow product lines like HD camcorders and displays cross-pollinate with the cameras, eventually producing more models like the NV24HD pocket cam and HMX20 camcorder -- and hopefully for cheaper prices, since Sammy will be able to better manage suppliers and the retail channel.
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ClearStory Data, a startup that has not revealed its capabilities, has declared that it will be in the business of providing a platform and user model that makes it easy and intuitive to find high value external data from numerous trusted sources and cross-pollinate this data with private and corporate data for fast, richer analysis.
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