THE DALLES — It couldn’t have been a nice way to wake up on a cold spring day.

After an entomologist dug it up from its comfy underground home overlooking a cherry orchard, the longhorn bee was placed in a tiny glass vial and passed among a crowd of curious onlookers.

To the orchardists, university extension agents and others in attendance, the sleepy insect was proof that a patch of bare soil on a scraggly hillside could serve a worthwhile purpose: as a home for native pollinators.

“There’s all sorts of different places where you can squeeze habitat in,” said Matthew Shepherd, conservationist with the Xerces Society, a nonprofit invertebrate preservation group that is organizing a series of native pollinator workshops in Oregon.

The problems plaguing commercial honeybees have attracted a lot of attention since late 2006, when roughly one-fourth of U.S. beekeepers lost about 45 percent of their hives, he said.

Mites, protozoan parasites and the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder threaten honeybees — and thus crop pollination — but native species, like several types of bumblebees, are also in trouble, said Shepherd.

Diminished habitat, disease, improper pesticide use and other factors have reduced the populations of such native pollinators, according to the Xerces Society.

This is bad news for pollinator-dependent farmers, since native species can greatly improve crop production, said Shepherd. Each year they contribute about $3 billion to the U.S. economy, according to the Xerces Society.

Studies on sunflowers and cherry tomatoes, for example, have linked native pollinators with a doubling and tripling in yields, respectively, he said.

Native pollinators are unlikely ever to replace commercial hives, but they can obviously be a useful supplement, said Shepherd. As demonstrated in sunflowers, their presence during pollination compels honeybees to fly among a larger number of flowers instead of lingering amid just a few, he said.

“The native bees kept the honeybees moving,” Shepherd said.

Whereas honeybees might not venture from the hive in cooler temperatures, native pollinators are more apt to collect pollen and nectar in spite of the weather because they don’t have a honey supply to fall back on, he said.

“If they don’t go out during the day, they go hungry,” Shepherd said.

Farmers also stand to benefit from the lack of rental fees for native pollinators, he said.