-So here on the outside?

-Yes. These are an* that actually produce the pollen.

-OK. Where should I go?

-Let's try this flower here. So right on the center.

-Right on the center.That one?

-Yep. And you dust on there gently, and you'll rub some pollen onto the stigmas and that will help develop a fertilize and you'll start strawberry.

-I can see straightaway, though. That is not the exactly same intricate talents that bee would have.

-We are clumsy. We are clumsy.

What the bees do very perfectly is spread the pollen very precisely and evenly across the stigma of the flower, which is extremely important when it comes to the finished product.

-So as consumers, what would we like to have? Like nice, large, perfectly formed fruit. That's what we are after and you need good pollination to get that. And here's an example, a quite extreme example,  but this has been pollinated properly. Is that appetizing?

-No.

-Not really, so given the worldwide, we've got the colony pollinators. We wanted to ask the question how much would it cost to replace that service that the bees are giving. So we train up some students, and we give them paint brushes, and we time them to pollinate different crops, strawberries, apples, oil seeds, and so on. And then we calculated how many those flowers there are flowering in a year in the U.K., and putting that together, working out what would be the mininum wage we can pay them. We came out with a figure of 1.9 billion pounds a year to replace the service that bees do.

So it's pretty clear hand-pollination isn't practical and we really can't do without bees.