alt Hacker NewsThe catch is that native North American pollinators are adapted to native North American flowers and have a great deal of difficulty pollinating introduced species that are native to Eurasia. Given the vast majority of commercial crops are not native plant species, the only way to mass pollinate them is to use non-native pollinators.
Also, few native North American bee species are eusocial. That's another quality one would need to be able to use them the same way as commercial honeybees are used today.
The there is the issue of honey production.
That's not true. We have a lot of generalist bees (and other pollinators too! bees aren't the only ones that pollinate!) that can pollinate the Eurasian crops. This is also true for any other crop on any other continent. And I am dubious as to your claim about major crops. Soybeans, for example, are self-pollinating, so it would seem any generalist bee can pollinate soybean crops for better yields.
This is an issue of biodiversity. If we rely on a mono-species for pollination and that mono-species goes extinct or its population plummets, then our crop yields are down 20% until we can build up other bee populations.
This is about giving back to Nature so that She may continue to cradle us. And She does tend to punish us for "optimizing" toward one specific species.
We do enough already taking crops from one part of the world and putting them elsewhere. In exchange for that, we really ought to be trying to support the native wildlife as much as possible. The Europeans can have their honey, and I will have my maple syrup. On occasion, of course, so as not to upset Nature.