In old days every farmer in our village had a beehive - the honey and pollination services were both much appreciated. My father has always taught me that killing a bee is a horrible crime.
Forget old days - in modern days there are entire businesses dedicated to renting out and delivering mass quantities of beehives to pollinate fields for farmers.
The technology and industry has changed indeed. I wanted to emphasize how man used to treat bee as a companion - nowadays however we seem to disregard its share in getting us to where we are. We used to fight to keep them alive.
This describes the important of pollinators, but honey bees are not the only pollinators. I don't see enough evidence supporting the case that honey bees exclusively are responsible for pollinating 1/3 of all food, nor that the absence of honey bees would reduce food production by the same amount (which seem to be the positions you have put forth).
Honeybees are so important that huge colonies are trucked around the US to pollinate fields.
Which is to say: they're so important that local populations of pollinators are inadequate to requirements, so they have to be supplemented by these mobile colonies.
Can you support a contra position? That bees are not significant pollinators? Please do not forget other Apidae family members - they probably don't benefit from pesticides either.
The contra position would be that honey bees are responsible for supporting less than 1/3 all food production (which is a bit easier to prove). Bees are important pollinators but there are other pollinators and the case that the absence of honey bees would result in the absence of 1/3 of crop production is very weak, since the absence of competition from honey bees would likely result in some degree of compensation from other pollinator species (such as wasps).
The 2nd reference is the best so far, it provides some quantitative information about how dominant the honey bee is as a pollinator of commercial crops.
Personally I think bees are hugely important and it's quite sad the way bee populations have been mistreated, but it doesn't help to overstate the case (the case for being kind to bees is already very strong).
Why would it be odd? When Europeans arrived they imported European agriculture and cuisine, most of which is non-native.
For instance I had pancakes for breakfast this morning. The eggs were from non-native chickens, the milk from non-native cows, the flour from non-native wheat, the canola oil I cooked it in from non-native rapeseed, and the butter I put on it from non-native cows. However all is not lost, I used maple syrup from native maple trees, and put blackberries in it that might have been native. (The baking powder and salt are chemicals that to the best of my knowledge do not come from animals or plants, native or otherwise.)
Edit: When I looked up blackberries I found out that there are several hundred species, and some of the popular ones for cultivation are not native. So I don't know whether that was a native berry.
You have to realize that our food supply is a horribly unnatural beast, not reliant on anything "native" to anywhere. Native species could easily pollinate the amount of food required to support the Native American population in 1450 -- the New York City population of 2010, not so much.
To be clear, there were bees in North America before the European Honeybee was introduced, and they did the pollinating and still do today to a small extent, but the European variety is simply more productive and domesticated. That's not to say that native bee species still around are anymore resistant to this systemic pesticide. You're splitting hairs here.
Important is the life cycle of a swarm. Unlike wasps, bumble-bees and lots of other insects a bee swarm survives the winter as a whole and can start the pollination cycle earlier than other insects. Furthermore honeybees have a structured way of flying "on: plants, meaning that they do commonly not change pollination rate.
Bees are actively used for guided pollination, which is not possible with most other insects (not withstanding some experiments with bumblebees in greenhouses). Interesting fact is that you will often find the phrase "crop xxx requires yyy hives" while describing the role of bees in pollination.
citation needed