It's worth noting there are wild pollinators, some more efficient than others. Orchard bees are like 200x more efficient than honeybees on an individual basis when pollinating apple trees, for instance.
The main advantage of honeybees is that they are domesticated, and we can take them where we want. If your orchard has a healthy population of orchard bees, great, and there are ways to promote orchard bees, but the honeybees can actually be brought in on demand.
The main advantage of European honeybees is that they can pollinate introduced European crops efficiently, and native pollinators can't.
The flip side is that European honeybees can not pollinate native crops very well. For that, the native pollinators are very efficient. Native pollinators are threatened by the feral colonies of European honeybees and their introduced diseases like nosema, varroa, mites, and foulbrood. It's like smallpox blankets all over again as infected honeybee colonies are trucked all over the country to spread pollen and disease on various introduced European cops.
I suspect this is moving around the issue at hand here because it's likely the murder hornets will target orchard bees as well. They just aren't conveniently located in giant boxes by the hundreds.
Orchard bees are domesticated and used as pollinators. They're solitary bees, which I'm guessing prevents usage for mass pollination of crops.
That being said there are lots of animals that can't be domesticated. Zebras are the classic example, being very similar to domesticated horses but are much more aggressive and unpredictable.
Yeah -- individual orchard bees are significantly more efficient, but an individual honeybee hive crams in tens of thousands of bees; you make it up on scale.
Honeybees also work well with mono-cropping because you can easily pick up and move the entire hive from massive field to massive field just in time for pollination. If you are relying on a wild bee population they'll do better when they have lots of plants in bloom across a wide spectrum of time so they have a chance to build up their population before the major blooms eg the orchard you want pollinated. Otherwise you run the risk of only have a small bee population that can't fully take advantage of (and pollinate) the suddenly massive resource glut of several square miles of orchards suddenly in bloom at once.
> That being said there are lots of animals that can't be domesticated. Zebras are the classic example, being very similar to domesticated horses but are much more aggressive and unpredictable.
Interestingly, we have records of contemporary impressions of tarpans and aurochs, back when they weren't extinct. They tended to be described in terms like "absolutely untamable".
Well, neither are most of the crops the Europeans started growing in America. They brought everything from apple species to wheat.
Not all of these are self-pollinating, so they had to bring bees too.