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Amusingly, propagate has a horticultural, and non-horticultural meaning, and it's not obvious which one you're using there, because the bee's role is long over by the time the seed is ready to go out into the world.

Pollen can be carried (as noted by sibling and you) by lots of different insects, and there's myriad solitary and other (by conventional standards) weird bee species around, plus lots of plants are happy to pollinate themselves (tomato is a good example) or rely on wind (corn/maize is the famous example there).

When the common honeybee landed in the continental USA, about four centuries ago, the same people also brought in lots of (other) european plant species that had co-existed with Apis mellifera for millennia.

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Thanks for the detailed comment! I always heard that bees pollinate the vast majority of plants, so in the parent comment, I assumed incorrectly that the meaning was for bees in general being non native.
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Yeah, there's a claim I've seen about 'every third mouthful of food' that humans eat needs honeybees, and that may well be true.

I'm in Australia, and we only got Varroa in 2022, and it was suppressed for about a year before a regrettable 'oh well' attitude overwhelmed us. The last couple of years has seen a breathtaking impact.

Anecdata - one of my five hives is still struggling on.

Australia's experience since 2022 had (I thought) laid to rest a lot of the 'It's not varroa that's the problem' claims from armchair analysts.

But yes, per my earlier point, lots of our tree crops require honeybees to be shipped in - just because of broadacre / monoculture style farming. Well, along with honey production being its own industry - so they need to follow the nectar, and change up the flavours a bit, but also some trees just don't produce useful amounts of nectar but absolutely require a lot of pollinators for a few weeks only (almonds / peaches I think fit this category).

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Native bees. Apis mellifera are introduced bees across most of the world.

But yes, there are other pollinators like butterflies, moths, flies, birds, etc.

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Makes sense, thanks!
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