Not to mention the loss of all that lovely Mead......

"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left."

Just 'cos we've proved some of his other hypotheses, let's not rush into this one, eh?

...honey bees do.

And they've got (disease) problems of their own

I agree bumblebees are important but they probably comprise less than 2% of the pollination force. Honey bees probably comprise more than 50%. There are about 250 species of bee that pollinate plus many moths and butterflys that contribute and more than 2000 species of wasp that also form part of the food chain along with a similar number of fly species. All of them are affected by short sighted farming policies and all contribute to the necessary biodiversity.

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife/article2449968.ece

...the year they said wasps were disappearing....we had 6 nests of the bloody things that year and at least 2 or 3 every year since.

'conservationists' just look in the place they expect to find what they are looking for and 'deduce' from that how many bees / wasps / ferrets or whatever there are elsewhere, and thus when wasps choose to fly 100 yards down the road one year there's suddenly "'fewer wasps this year' say conservationists".

Now all that remains is assessing the damage to other species the tree huggers going to cause to every other species in their vanity to 'fix' this, and guessing [not difficult really] who their left wing fears will blame for the problem "Mobile phones" "Large corporations" "Noel Edmunds" "it was some bigger insects from another school miss"

Bees aren't responsible for the majority of pollination. The common housefly, as well as various other flies contribute more to pollination. Domestic honey bees aren't even used all that widely for pollination of many crops, nature takes care of it. Consider this; leaf cutter bees have been used to great effect in commercial pollination, and there populations aren't collapsing at all, except in the U.S, and this is due to parasites. Some how I doubt that they navigate all that differently, either.

I'm allergic to rapeseed, so any reduction would be nice.

"The end result could be the end of many rare plants and a sharp reduction in the "production of crops such as raspberries, oil-seed rape, runner beans, and broad beans"."