history of pollination

So - honeybees (Apis mellifera) are not native to North America. What, then, pollinated the fruit before they were brought to this continent? No such thing as a dumb question, right? How many different types of bees are there?

There are many hundreds of species of bees, wasps, flies, and other insects which engage in pollination in the course of feeding, just like honeybees. In areas where there is enough general biodiversity and some wild land, the lack of honeybees might hardly be noticeable in the yields of fruit and other things which depend on pollinators. The problem comes with vast monocultures, which often have a brief period of blooming, and are then devoid of providing bees of any sort with a food source at other times of the year. Honeybees live in large colonies and the conventional practice has been to truck hives in on pallets and set them out there for the flowering season, and then move them to the next place. So a problem with honeybee populations, while detrimental to beekeeping, will actually impact large commercial farms much more severely than small growers.

Supposedly there are 20-some thousand species of bees.

soooo they would actually have to create year round bee habitat if they wanted there crops pollinated instead of mono cropping huh,that would work now I'm pretty sure.go figure

sorry just a thought!

Does anyone know what pollinated the fruit before they were brought to this continent? In my research I haven't been able to find the answer to this.