I see that Peter Melchett of the Soil Association believes that the fields of peas on his farm would need armies of manual labour to get pollinated should the bees all die. The only bees I've ever seen on peas were pinching pollen from the edges shrivelling flowers, as they routinely self-pollinate and usually bees can't be bothered going in for pollen when there are better things to visit locally. He then later talks about the 'catastrophic decline' in honeybees and other bees since the neonics came in, contrasting with massive habitat loss in the decades before that which caused earlier declines.

Murray McG on the Beekeeping Forum the other day was mentioning the best estimates of Giles Budge of the NBU showing that since the 1980s honeybee numbers are up maybe 20%, but with large error bars. Even that modest increase was probably quite dramatic in recent years as numbers of beekeepers continued to fall in the 1980s and 1990s.