In a commercial raspberry field outside Osorno, Chile, bee biologist Marina Arbetman of the National University of Comahue watches buff-tailed bumblebees, Bombus terrestris, fly in and out of cardboard hives of about 100 workers and a queen each — the European workhorses behind the raspberries, blueberries and strawberries Chile grows for export to North America, Europe and Asia — in a report by Jude Isabella for the Food and Environment Reporting Network, produced with bioGraphic.

Less than 20 years ago the bees here would have been Bombus dahlbomii, the giant Patagonian bumblebee, the region's only endemic species, now classed as endangered by the IUCN: its population had fallen more than 50% by 2016 and some estimates now put the decline at 90%. Chile approved B. terrestris at scale in 1998, first in greenhouses; within a few years farmers released them into open fields. Documented records show 1,633,011 colonies and queens imported from 1997 to 2022, and tens of thousands of colonies still arrive each year; only one supplier, Biobest, has stopped selling the species to South America over ecological concerns.

Canada, the United States, Australia, China, South Africa and Argentina prohibited the imports, but Argentina's ban did not matter once Chile embraced the bee. In 2013 Argentine biologist Carolina Morales and colleagues warned that B. terrestris was displacing B. dahlbomii, through competition and through parasites, fungi and viruses. In December 2018 ecologist Cecilia Smith-Ramírez of the Universidad de Los Lagos helped file a complaint alleging companies had imported animals carrying pathogens; researchers at the University of Sussex and a Chilean government study she led documented bees shipped with EU certificates declaring them pathogen-free. Chile tightened sanitary rules in 2020, which she calls insufficient.

Her research questions whether imported pollinators were ever needed: Chile has around 6,000 native pollinator species, and a study she conducted found native bees, including B. dahlbomii, pollinate blueberries better than B. terrestris. Field manager Jaasiel Caucaman Barra of Berries Junquillar bought 30 boxes last season at about US$30 each; the seller is supposed to collect and euthanise remaining bees in March or April but returns 'when she remembers', he says — boxes can sit for a year with no monitoring — and there is no calculation of how many pollinators a hectare needs. A nearby hazelnut grower has never bought bumblebees; B. terrestris simply turns up, a sign of feral hives.

'All the things we've been investigating, and all the things we do to preserve nature, this … is totally wrong,' Arbetman says, spreading her arms across a square kilometre of berries. Flooding fields with domesticated pollinators will not raise yields forever, the report argues: newcomers crowd out the wild bees, flies and birds that do more of the work than most farmers realise, while Chile's agricultural agency keeps its gaze on B. terrestris and the honeybee.

Source: Food and Environment Reporting Network (with bioGraphic)