Latif Nasser

Really?

You mean the people were doing it better than the bees had been doing it?

A lot better.

Fruit production went up 30%.

That's what the farmers told Yinsun Chen, which is kind of... Amazing.

And bees don't pollinate every flower?

Bees are a little bit, you know, they're a little bit uneven when it comes to pollinating.

You're so polite.

They don't like it if it's cold.

They don't like it if it's damp.

They don't like it if it's windy.

But you send people out there and tell them to pollinate every damn blossom and they're going to do it.

And there was the additional benefit of the people that you paid, they'd go to the bar, they'd buy groceries, they'd spend those earnings in their local communities in a way that obviously bees never did.

So here you had this whole story that was supposed to be about how important the bees are, and this whole parable of biodiversity.

And it turns out maybe the lesson's just the opposite, that actually we don't need bees, and maybe we never did.

If we only measure things economically, then we might conclude that

that some species or some ecological processes just aren't necessary in certain places, or that we might even do better to take care of those processes ourselves.

But there's one more chapter to the story.

Harold Thibault told us that when he visited Nanchen... I talked with one farmer.

Apparently, as China's economy has continued to grow, workers have started demanding better pay.