The Unwilding of Patagonia’s Pollinators

Marina Arbetman stands in the middle of a raspberry field with a look of disbelief. Though she knew what to expect, to actually see it is, by turns, baffling, outrageous, and saddening. Her expression eventually settles into one of sorrow.

I watch as the bee biologist wanders between a row of thriving raspberry canes in a commercial field outside Osorno, Chile. There are a lot of sorrowful things in the world, and maybe in the scheme of human affairs, Arbetman’s sadness is out of proportion. But most people would understand her frustration: She is confronting a problem that was avoidable. All around her are agents of destruction—perfectly legal, intentionally released, non-native bumblebees that are upturning natural ecosystems in the southern stretches of Argentina and Chile collectively known as Patagonia.

Those agents are buff-tailed bumblebees, Bombus terrestris, native to Europe. Darlings of the agricultural world, they are insect workhorses that diners can thank for myriad foods including these raspberries, as well as blueberries and strawberries—all lucrative crops produced by farmers throughout Chile mostly for export to North America, Europe, and Asia.

A B. dahlbomii queen on a rhododendron bloom in early spring shows signs of
wear—a little bald patch in her ginger fur indicates she’s been out of hibernation for a while.

Less than 20 years ago, the bees buzzing around this field, pollinating the last spring blossoms as the season slips into austral summer, would have been giant Patagonia bumblebees, Bombus dahlbomii. Now, not a single one is in sight. Called mangangá in Argentina, moscardón in Chile, and duillin or diwmeñ by the Indigenous Mapuche, B. dahlbomii is Patagonia’s only endemic bumblebee, and it’s classified as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The population had plummeted over 50 percent by 2016. Today some estimates put the decline at 90 percent. This giant—the queen is as long as a AA battery and chubbier than a caterpillar—has lost much since this century began. B. terrestris, noticeably smaller, outcompetes B. dahlbomii for nests, nectar, and pollen. To add insult to injury, B. terrestris has spread diseases novel to the native bumblebee. Think of Spanish conquistadors bringing smallpox to South America and decimating human populations. B. terrestris is the conquistador of the pollinator world. “I’m trying to think of the producers [of the berries],” Arbetman says, as she surveys the scene around her. The rows and rows of raspberry canes on a flat, crop-covered landscape conflicts with the popular view of Patagonia as a place of peaks and pumas. This is farm country. “It’s all very well to talk about nature, but when you have to make a business decision …” She trails off and pauses. “But then I look around and think, ‘Oh my God, they have no idea what they’re doing.’”

Along with Arbetman, I’m here with journalist Matías Avramow of Argentina’s La Nacion, who lends regional expertise and translation skills, and Canadian photojournalist Kat Pyne. Together we’re prowling fields looking for bumblebees in this berry-rich corner of northwest Patagonia, trying to better understand the perils reshaping the reality of B. dahlbomii. The region hosts a robust and globally significant fruit and vegetable industry.

The blueberry fields we visited are already past flowering. So we wander among raspberry canes, waiting to chat with the manager, who has kindly agreed to answer our questions. We wave and call out “Hola!” to the busy fruit pickers who pause to wave back. Every person in this field is working for pay. Some of us might have lofty goals, but we all have bills that come due. It’s the way the largely-homogenized human world works. But on planet bumblebee, things work differently. Something like 265 different species of bumblebee roam various habitats around the world. Different populations overlap and share traits, but they vary significantly in size, color, tongue length, and even the frequency of their buzzing. For the majority, where they live; what and who they live alongside; and how they make a home, eat, breed, and reproduce is special to their habitat. The appellation “bumblebee” contains multitudes.

Bee biologist Marina Arbetman examines bumblebee specimens in her lab at the University of Comahue’s INIBIOMA institute in Bariloche, Argentina. Arbetman and her colleagues are tracking the rapid decline of Patagonia’s only endemic bumblebee, Bombus dahlbomii.

Arbetman, a scientist at the National University of Comahue (UNCo) in Bariloche, Argentina, has been working with bumblebees since 2005, a time when she could visit field sites and hear the buzz of B. dahlbomii, hundreds strong, swarming meadows rich with native flowers.

At the moment, Arbetman is practically buzzing herself. In 1998, Chile approved the adoption of B. terrestris at scale, though at first confined it to greenhouses. Within a few years, farmers released the bumblebees into open fields. In this raspberry field, we watch B. terrestris fly in and out of commercial hives—cardboard boxes about the size of a banker’s box, each containing roughly 100 worker bees and a queen. Like many countries forged from European colonization, Chile invested in a foreign answer to a domestic issue: in this case, the need to produce more fruit. “I’m really angry now, can you tell?” Arbetman asks. A ceiling of clouds blocks the sun, and southern lapwings zip through the air, their grating voices suiting the mood. “If [something is] from Europe, it must be better,” she remarks sarcastically. “We are still colonized.” Chilean scientists have been trying to breed B. dahbomii, but it’s gone poorly, mostly due to the novel diseases.

B. terrestris is colonizing Patagonia, and the high-value crops the bumblebees pollinate are colonizing our plates and palates. Native bumblebees here and around the world are the losers in a game involving global markets, short-term agricultural gains, and anemic ecological oversight.

In the 1980s, a Belgian veterinarian named Roland de Jonghe, who bred bumblebees as a hobby, became the first person to produce B. terrestris for commercial use. European food growers, particularly greenhouse tomato growers, quickly reaped the benefits, and soon de Jonghe was operating a multinational corporation. With their vibrating thoracic muscles, bumblebees can shake pollen loose from tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers more effectively than honeybees—the infamous European insects that are the cornerstone of commercial pollination, helping produce everything from apples to almonds to avocados.

Honeybees don’t vibrate like bumblebees, but they make up for that inefficiency with their abundance. In Chile, their arrival preceded B. terrestris by centuries. They’re considered exotic, but not invasive; if their arrival had a negative impact on the ecosystem, no one documented it.

Chile began importing B. terrestris in 1997, joining several countries around the world. Canada and the United States prohibited importation citing concerns about invasiveness, the potential for hybridized species, and ecological competition. Mexico allowed B. terrestris in for a couple of years until putting on the brakes. (All three countries rely on domesticated bumblebees native to North America.) Other countries also prohibited B. terrestris, including Australia, China, and South Africa. And Argentina. But Argentina’s brake-pumping didn’t matter; as Chile embraced B. terrestris, the bee has advanced into the neighboring country with impressive speed, expanding its habitat by roughly 200 kilometers (124 miles) per year.

In 2013, Argentinian biologist Carolina Morales—Arbetman’s PhD supervisor at UNCo—and her colleagues warned that B. terrestris was displacing the giant, ginger-furred B. dahlbomii. They knew that aside from the problem of competition, B. terrestris shared novel health-busting diseases: parasites, fungal infections, and viruses that can attack a colony via larvae, overwintering queens, or foraging workers. The Chilean scientists grappled with a question: When bumblebees arrive from Europe carrying pathogens, who is to blame? The importer, Chile? Or the European Union, which issues certificates to clear exports? When borders are involved, determining where to apply what law to hold a perpetrator accountable gets complicated. Chilean scientists tried anyway.

B. terrestris colonies are kept in boxes in berry fields near Osorno, Chile, where many commercial growers raise blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries. The boxes are often left behind at the end of the season, allowing this invasive bumblebee to establish feral colonies.

On December 20, 2018, Cecilia Smith-Ramírez, an ecologist at the Universidad de Los Lagos in Osorno, helped file a complaint at the Chilean government’s environmental protection office, alleging that certain companies violated a provision in the Chilean Penal Code prohibiting the importation of animals carrying pathogens. Specifically, it focused on B. terrestris. With the assistance of an environmental lawyer, the complaint moved into the judicial system. Chile’s environmental police conducted an extensive investigation, gathering evidence for the case. When the matter eventually reached a judge, however, it was dismissed on procedural grounds. Because the alleged crime dated back to 1998—the year when large-scale importation of B. terrestris began—the judge ruled that the five-year statute of limitations had expired. But, notes Smith-Ramírez, the complaint explicitly stated that B. terrestris imports have continued year after year, making it an ongoing offense.

Smith-Ramírez and her colleagues have also critiqued EU countries involved in exporting the bumblebees. They allege that these countries have sold bumblebees carrying pathogens while providing certificates stating that the insects were pathogen-free. This issue was documented by researchers at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom and by the Chilean government, in a study led by Smith-Ramírez.

Chile strengthened its regulations in 2020, introducing stricter sanitary requirements for imported bees. These measures, says Smith-Ramírez, remain insufficient. B. terrestris continues to arrive carrying pathogens, and the diseases introduced by earlier imports remain. The extra aggravation for the ecologist and her colleagues is that, in their estimation, foreign pollinators were never necessary. Chile’s rich diversity of native pollinators includes species that are as effective as, or even more effective than, their European counterparts. If scientists had scaled up their populations instead, either through breeding or habitat creation, there would have been enough to support commercial agriculture and the native ecosystem.   

Meanwhile, producers continue to import tens of thousands of colonies each year. Documented records show that from 1997 to 2022, the country imported 1,633,011 B. terrestris colonies and queens. Only one company, Biobest, no longer supplies this species to South America because of its concerns about the ecological impacts.

In Chile’s berry-growing region near Osorno, some farmers try to balance the economic demands of industrial farming with the ecological consequences of invasive pollinators.

So here we are, surrounded by close to a square kilometer (almost 250 acres) of berries with B. terrestris zipping about. Despite the non-stop conveyor beltof B. terrestris into South America, Arbetman says she’s never actually seen the bumblebee in action. “This is the first time I am in a real field with commercial bumblebees,” she says. “I’ve never seen them working. All the things we’ve been investigating, and all the things we do to preserve nature, this…” she spreads out her arms, “…is totally wrong.”

When we catch up with the field manager, a fundamental problem with the pollinator industrial complex comes into focus: Many people working for “Big Ag” are ecologically unaware.

Jaasiel Caucaman Barra, who manages Berries Junquillar, a supplier to export companies selling berries around the globe, is forthright in conversation. Neither he nor Vitafoods, the nearby processing plant, are doing anything wrong—at least not in the human world. An agricultural technician, Caucaman Barra has worked with berries his entire professional life and with this company for seven years. He grew up in this region around Osorno. These days, his main concern is the damage to berries from an invasive fly, the spotted-wing drosophila. Productivity, on the other hand, is great. “[B. terrestris] have given me good results,” Caucaman Barra tells Arbetman. “This is the third year I’ve tested the results, so that’s why I keep buying bumblebee boxes.”

A study shows that native bees, including B. dahlbomii, are better pollinators of blueberries than B. terrestris.

He bought 30 boxes from a seller this past season, for about US $30 a box. The seller delivers the boxed hives in October or November and is supposed to return in March or April to remove the boxes and euthanize any remaining bees. In reality, she returns “when she remembers,” says Caucaman Barra. “The boxes can stay for a year and absolutely nothing happens to them,” he adds. There is no monitoring. By contrast, honeybees, which Caucaman Barra also brings to the field in November and December, are managed by a beekeeper who delivers them, monitors them, and picks them up when their job is finished. If no one is collecting B. terrestris queens at the end of the season and destroying them, the queens are likely leaving their boxes, going into hibernation, and then establishing feral colonies come spring. If the online prediction market had a feral bumblebee category, I would bet on B. terrestris establishing populations across South America.

Just before our visit here, my colleague Avramow chatted with a hazelnut farmer a few kilometers away who said she has never bought bumblebees—B. terrestris just show up on her land. Perhaps they wander over from an adjacent field, but it’s just as likely that B. terrestris have already established feral hives nearby.

Now, Arbetman asks Caucaman Barra if there’s some calculation behind the company’s use of B. terrestris to determine how many pollinators are necessary per hectare farmed. No, he answers, it’s by feel, and in the three years of using B. terrestris, the company has enjoyed a bumper crop. But flooding fields with domesticated pollinators won’t increase yields forever. Eventually the newcomers crowd out other pollinators, wild ones—bees, flies, birds—who actually do a lot more of the heavy lifting than most farmers realize. Studying wild pollinators is tricky, but the existing research shows a clear pattern: Where there’s a diverse community of wild pollinators, agriculture does better than if served by only domesticated pollinators.

Chile’s federal agricultural and livestock agency maintains that imported pollinators are vital to the fruit business, but its gaze is squarely on B. terrestris and the honeybee. “In Chile alone, we have around 6,000 pollinator species, including flies, beetles, bees, and native bumblebees,” Smith-Ramírez says. Her research assesses whether farmers need imported pollinators at all. A study she conducted has already shown that native bees, including B. dahlbomii, are better pollinators of blueberries than B. terrestris. She and her collaborators have since partnered with a producer who stopped purchasing domesticated pollinators. In 2025, he reported a 20 percent increase in his crop.

B. terrestris (top) and B. dahlbomii working the same blooms. Close encounters like this can transfer pathogens from the domesticated bee to the wild bee. Photograph by Marina Arbetman

Caucaman Barra tells Arbetman that he remembers the big, furry, orange bumblebees of his youth, but he rarely sees those B. dahlbomii anymore.

Unlike other transitions in human lives, often marked by ritual to ease the burden of change, ecological transitions can slip by unheralded. And although the 21st century is awash in mindfulness reminders, our collective gaze is more often on a time well beyond the present. For ecologists, it’s on B. dahlbomii’s future. For the farmers around Osorno, it’s on the future berry market, expanding it and making fresh and frozen blueberries a staple. Blueberries are everywhere around here, Caucaman Barra says, waving his hand in all the cardinal directions. Chile only began growing blueberries on an industrial scale in the early 2000s. In just a decade or so, it went from exporting US $30 million worth of the fruit to $380 million, muscling in on a market once dominated by Canada and the United States. Today, it’s a top producer, primarily for export, supplying distant consumers. Caucaman Barra and the fruit pickers can’t afford to buy their own berries. And as berry production has ramped up, the wilderness that Patagonia is legendary for doesn’t seem so wild anymore.

The berry fields, the mountains, the temperate rainforest—the landscape in northwest Patagonia is much like my home in coastal British Columbia. The comparison feels especially apt at a lakeside resort a 20-minute drive from the commercial berry field, where we’ve rented a cabin. Here, close to the Andes Mountains and the border with Argentina, the scene feels and looks familiar, but the native flora and fauna are different. It takes work to identify the species.  

An incessant hectoring of birds around the lake—sounding like an old-school synthesizer emulating the squeak of wet rubber—turns out to be black-faced ibises. Wind shakes the small, serrated, glossy leaves of a species of southern beech known locally as coihue (Nothofagus dombeyi), drowning out more subtle noises. The resort is umbrellaed by coihue, with bursts of flowers below the canopy, including natives like fuchsia, vetch, and Peruvian lily, along with ornamentals like planet-spanning rhododendrons. I’m certain Pyne, the photojournalist, is hallucinating when she asks, “Does anyone else just hear buzzing all the time now?”

Near their field station in Puerto Blest, Marina Arbetman and her students search Patagonia’s forests for native bumblebees. The region remains one of the last refuges for Bombus dahlbomii.

Pyne’s question makes Arbetman laugh. Then the scientist points and calls, “There!” A low thrum. The sound is like the drone of a faraway float plane: B. dahlbomii takes center stage on a large rhododendron. It’s no hallucination. We eye the queen—her orange cloak covers the length of her body—as she buzzes up and down a shrub as tall as a one-story building. This lone creature, sipping nectar, gathering pollen for her hive-to-be, transfixes us. Arbetman tells us she’s probably been foraging and nest hunting for a while: The giveaway is her coat. “I don’t know why, but they have a bald patch back there and look paler,” she says, pointing to a shiny, worn patch just behind the queen’s head on her sunset stole. “Just coming out of hibernation, they look more vibrant.”

At the resort, we see a few more B. dahlbomii queens on the fuchsias, of which there are plenty. B. terrestris workers, longer and fatter than those in the boxed hives at the berry farm, also show up on the blossoms. Arbetman wonders if they’re feral and have grown into such robust minifauna because they have no competition from boxfuls of working colleagues. She shows us how B. terrestris, with its short tongue, can’t reach way inside the fuchsia’s long, tubular flower and instead must chew a hole behind a blossom to rob the nectar. This strategy is a total cheat—it means the flower remains unpollinated and the plants can’t reproduce. This can be a problem for the fuchsia, Peruvian lily, and other native plants, like Chile’s national flower copihue (Lapageria rosea), also known as the Chilean bell flower, which is endangered in the wild. Nectar-robbing is not unusual in the insect world—all sorts of creatures take shortcuts, even in their native environments. What’s wild is that B. dahlbomii learned from B. terrestris that they, too, can cheat and rob flowers for sweet profit—they’re still vital pollinators to the ecosystem at large, but the plants that depend on them suffer where they overlap with B. terrestris. Bumblebees, apparently, are into optimizing their daily workload just like tech bros.

The city of Bariloche stretches along the shores of Lake Nahuel Huapi beneath the Patagonian Andes. At center stands the Cathedral of Our Lady of Nahuel Huapi, one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks.

Later that day, over a 3.5-hour drive that takes us across the Andes to San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina (commonly “Bariloche”), I think of that optimization. The border between Chile and Argentina follows the mountains and reaches altitudes much higher than the 2,600 meters (8,530 feet) that B. terrestris is known to fly. But life, in general, is often lazy, following the law of least effort for maximum gain, and both the bumblebees and the road engineers have found gaps between the formidable peaks, making border-hopping from Chile to Argentina possible.

One of those gaps is Hua Hum Pass, which rises a mere 650 meters (2,132 feet). It’s close to where researchers first recorded B. terrestris in Argentina. We wind our way through another pass, 1,305 meters (4,281 feet) in elevation, called Cardenal Antonio Samoré Pass. This still-impressive section of the Andes acquiesces to passage, allowing people, animals, and plants to flow in both directions. Along the road are endless clumps of a flower familiar to me, a species of lupine (Lupinus polyphyllus).

The lupines’ tall, spiky flowers splash purple on a muted canvas of earth tones. Native to western North America and introduced to Patagonian Chile in 1994, the flowers now thrive here. Bumblebees are attracted to them. As a legume, lupines offer high-protein pollen, and they typically bloom at the same time that bee queens—both native and invasive—emerge from winter sleep. In this way, invasive flowers beget invasive bees.

The ecosystems around us, like so many others, have been remodeled by other newcomers, too. Once it reaches Argentina, the road east winds around Nahuel Huapi National Park, which employs the southern river otter as its mascot. Around 80 years ago, entrepreneurs started raising American mink in this region. Like bumblebees, mink are escape artists, and they’re now more plentiful than the southern river otter—huillin in the Mapuche language—of which only about 500 remain across Patagonia.

Continuing to Bariloche, we cross over a river that winds through the steppe. Almost a century ago, fishing organizations introduced brown and rainbow trout to this river and many others, establishing a lucrative catch-and-release fishery. The invasive fish—top predators—upturned native insect, snail, worm, and other spineless minifauna populations. Biological alterations create empty niches and enfeeble native species: They’re like a virus invading and weakening an immune system and leaving a body open to infection.

As we zip along, the mountains become more distant; the gigantic sky ahead looks as if it will swallow us if we keep driving straight. “There was nothing here 30 years ago when I moved here,” Arbetman says, looking out the window as the unpaved suburb of Dina Huapi just outside Bariloche streams by. Dina, a derivative of the Spanish word for Denmark, alludes to the Danish who settled this area. Their settlement invaded the steppe, which is too dry for urban development.

The steppe is also too dry for B. dahlbomii, but B. terrestris, a generalist like most successful invasives, happily descends on all sorts of blossoms, including its compatriot, the yellow-blossomed broom lining the roads, far from its native habitat in western Europe.

To use the word “invasive” can sound like a battle cry to keep an ecosystem static. Anyone who spends time outside, whether a professional ecologist or not, knows that ecosystems are dynamic. But our perception of ecological changes tends to depend on what’s driving them. When birds drop non-native seeds from afar and those plants take root, it’s just life. When people are the ones to bring novel species to a landscape, it’s evil incarnate. The division is too simplistic, of course. Most introduced species are not that problematic—life most often finds a way to coexist. Humans have always spread flora and fauna around the world, unintentionally and intentionally. But modern invasions are shocking in their speed and unruliness, in part because the invaded ecosystems are often struggling to begin with. An intact biosphere can often adapt to change; a fragmented one quickly descends into chaos.

The motivation behind intentional introductions has also changed. Once, the benefit was food or shelter. Today it’s often market share. And the collision between short-term economic logic and long-term ecological cost is an ongoing disaster that activists and some scientists are fighting piecemeal.

The world grows more than enough food to feed the human population. It’s not distributed equitably, which is a significant matter, but the ways we grow that food and the reasons we grow it are also deeply problematic. The battles that Arbetman, Smith-Ramírez, and their colleagues are waging over B. terrestris and B. dahlbomii are symbolic of the larger struggle over these issues.

Industrial agriculture offers food at scale, though with far less choice than traditional farming offers. Globalization lends supermarkets cornucopian illusions, when in reality they typically offer only one or maybe a few different varieties of each fruit and vegetable—bananas, broccolis, and beets, for example—out of the dozens or hundreds of varieties that exist. That’s because food is just one more commodity in the global marketplace and large-scale producers only want to invest time and money in products with high yields and durability. For producers, the goal is unlocking consumer demand to match their ever-expanding supply and to create markets where there were none—preferably for foods that people will pay a premium for, like fresh blueberries available year-round in the world’s wealthier countries. Big agriculture is the Costco of retail: offering a tight selection of products of consistent quality that are almost always available.

Read any trade publication about produce and you might be stunned by the research that goes into the markets for tomatoes, blueberries, eggplant, cucumbers—you name it. There are many articles about pollination and pollinators, including robotic pollinators. But they don’t dwell on the very large bumblebee in the room: the ecological cost of using exotic pollinators.

Marcelo Aizen has studied pollination for decades. An ecologist, Aizen has a lot to say about what people in general get wrong about pollination, and he tells us as he sits in the shade of a tree at UNCo in Bariloche where he still researches and teaches. “The idea, that without pollinators we are going to starve, is a fake statement,” he says. Often attributed to Albert Einstein, the quote is repeated in books and papers and on websites of university bee programs: “If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years left to live.”

Among greenhouse flowers in Chile, Marina Arbetman speaks with longtime friend and agricultural engineer Maria Elena Wittice Schlageter. For scientists studying pollinator decline, conversations with growers and gardeners are increasingly part of the work of conservation.

Aizen scoffs, waves his hand, and shakes his head. A research paper published in 2007 by German ecologist Alexandra-Maria Klein and colleagues led many researchers, including Aizen, to evaluate more fully the role of animal pollinators in agriculture. Klein’s work revealed that at least 60 percent of food grown doesn’t need pollinators. Around 35 percent does, though not necessarily exclusively. Another study led by Aizen a couple years later, showed that just 10 percent of crop production would be lost if animal pollinators went on strike or died.

Great, we won’t starve, right? Correct. But we will eat less nutritious food.

Wheat, rice, corn, and potatoes feed the world. These staple crops are wind- or self-pollinating. Nutrient-dense foods—berries, apples, hazelnuts, cashews, sunflower seeds—rely on pollinators. Over the past few decades, industrial agriculture has been shifting toward those pollinator-dependent crops. These foods are richer than the staples in vitamins, fiber, flavonoids, and antioxidants, and they fetch higher prices from consumers. And that trend is growing faster in the Global South, where land that locals may have used communally or land that was once considered “marginal” becomes desirable as new technologies make it possible to grow food there. That’s why Chile, Peru, Zimbabwe, Morocco, and other countries have become such big players in exporting crops like blueberries. But there’s one problem: Just as the world’s diet shifts toward pollinator-dependent crops, populations of wild pollinators, like B. dahlbomii, are in decline—victims of pesticide use, habitat degradation or destruction, and a changing climate. Relying solely on domesticated pollinators to pollinate these valuable crops is inherently risky in the long run. B. terrestris is like a mono-crop itself: the epitome of “all your eggs in one basket.” Disease could easily wipe out generations of the bees and present an ongoing problem—like Varroa mite infestations in honeybees—that requires constant vigilance. Boxes of the same pollinator species is no substitute for a diverse portfolio of pollinators.

“We have this paradigm that more pollinators is always better, which is not true,” Aizen says. “You know, there is an optimality.” Diversity, not just quantity, matters in getting the right pollinator mix, just like a balanced investment portfolio.

As berry farmers in Osorno place more and more boxes of B. terrestris in their fields, eventually the yield plateaus and then declines as native pollinators fail to find enough food and die off or look elsewhere. To make up for that loss in productivity, growers will likely need to plough more land to grow the same amount of food. The sacrificed land is likely wild pollinator habitat. The result is fewer wild pollinators—and pollination suffers again. It’s a death spiral.

No alarm bells ring in the marketplace; they only ring among ecologists and biologists for the most part.

Originally brought to Chile for industrial agriculture, Bombus terrestris has escaped into the wild and spread across Patagonia. Scientists say the invasive pollinator outcompetes native bees for nectar and nesting sites while introducing novel pathogens into fragile ecosystems.

A couple of years ago, I interviewed the director of research at one of the world’s largest commercial breeders of bumblebees and bio-control insects, Belgium-based Biobest, for a different bumblebee story, and he said something that has stuck with me. The director, ecologist Felix Wackers, spent much of his career in academia, working on ways to enhance wild pollinators and pest control by using natural insect predators rather than pesticides. He sounded exasperated at the willful ignorance of the agribusiness world. “There is nothing out there anymore for wild pollinators to survive,” he told me. “It’s a really worrying thing.” Peppering the agricultural landscape with flowering shrubs and trees would have a powerful effect on wild pollinators and pest predators, he said, but the big business of food is single-minded in its focus on intensifying crop production. Any diversification is undervalued. “Because it doesn’t help their business,” Wackers said. Not in the short term, anyway.

The business world and the natural world—the world of bumblebees—exist in parallel realities. But only one is tangible and lives within fixed laws, and it’s not the business world. Money is faith-based. The natural world is fact-based. The business world is competitive with a built-in assumption that winners-take-all, or as much as they possibly can. In the natural world, competition is biologically expensive—adaptation and mutual benefits are more effective strategies when it comes to coexistence. As botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “All flourishing is mutual.”

For B. dahlbomii to prosper, to proliferate, to propagate—to flourish—into the future will take a community.