For instance, if you were trying to reestablish some some native pollinator, reducing honey bee pressure might be part of that plan. Even possible a critical one. But just killing them and walking away? That probably won’t end well. It would be irresponsible to do so.

Even removing invasive species of plants involves a succession plan, so the same thing doesn’t happen again, or something worse moves into the vacuum. I know a couple people who could fill a whole workshop on what people often get wrong here (and I’ve encouraged one of them to do so, but no luck), but they would both agree that what gets done, flawed as it can be (especially in walking away too soon) is better than the status quo, or removal and neglect.

Odds are, insect populations would also adapt to their disappearance.

I’d imagine from what I’ve read that a significant chunk of bees are already artificially produced and distributed for crops.

That plus of course combined with a general ongoing attempt at eradication of the hornets. Or at least significant population control.

Or is agriculture simply too widespread and complicated (or ‘naturally’ dependent) for such a thing?

We could make lasers driven by ML to identify the hornets and shoot them down as they approach a hive, but that would be really expensive :)

It would be an excellent grad CSS project. Identifying the Giant Wasps with 99.9% or whatever accuracy and deploying some defensive mechanism.

The problem like you said would be(e) infinitely expensive to deploy to all of the many thousands of randomly placed hives. But maybe useful for the industrial pollinator companies, which is a big thriving industry.

Anyway, I just like these sort of clever tech solutions.

There has to be plenty of solutions to this (major) problem we haven't thought of yet.

I don't think the bees really have any input.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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".

But of course they weren't.

https://gardeningsolutions.ifas.ufl.edu/plants/ornamentals/p...