Giving Compass' Take:

• Bees are critical to the success of our crops. But the connection flows both ways. The New Food Economy discusses how plant chemicals affect pollination — and how genetic modification could help.

• The article mentions how CRISPR — precision gene editing technology — could make flowers more attractive to bees. How would this influence other agricultural practices?

• Here's more on preserving the benefits of bees and their pollination habits.

Domestication of plants has been a triumph for humanity; shaping crops to fit our needs made farming possible, which in turn laid the groundwork for civilization as we know it. But we’ve also discovered that our history with domestication is something of a pyrrhic victory. As we breed our crops to grow bigger, faster and more palatable than their wild counterparts, we might also be causing other essential traits to erode. We know, for example, that domestication has weakened the chemical defenses of certain crops against pathogens and plant-eating insects. Now there’s evidence that our tinkering may have caused other crops to become less attractive and beneficial to bees.

Paul Egan from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and a team of fellow researchers recently completed a study of blueberries and bumble bees. They had a hunch: Because the chemicals that help a plant defend itself are widely found in both pollen and nectar, the weakening of these compounds might also have an effect on the plant’s connection with pollinators.

Read the full article on bees and pollination by Matt Kelly at The New Food Economy.