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by m-i-l·4y ago·view on hn ↗
Random trivia I learned from a visit to a fruit farm a few weeks back: Fruit farmers much prefer bumble bees to honey bees because they're much better fruit tree pollinators - bumble bees start much earlier in the day than honey bees (e.g. 07.30 vs 12.30), will work at much lower temperatures, and will pollinate 6 flowers in the time a honey bee takes to do 1 (because the honey bees tend to stick around longer on a flower to get more nectar out).
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They're loved by crop farmers where I live too (I also learnt recently), but they're illegal to cultivate because they're an introduced species.

(Now that I write that, I assume honeybees are too, but perhaps the honey industry is well entrenched)

> They're loved by crop farmers where I live too (I also learnt recently), but they're illegal to cultivate because they're an introduced species.

Unlike the crops?