Albert Einstein was misquoted once in saying: “If the bees disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.” Even if Einstein might of not said these exact words, there is some truth to them. We won’t necessarily die without bees, like Einstein once supposedly said, but we will live in a world without kiwi, watermelon, cantaloupe, macadamia, etc (palmer). Honey Bees came from Europe in the 1600s, and have become quite important to the United States’ agriculture. The bees have produced honey and pollinate our crops for many decades and it’s been argued that two-thirds of our crops depend on pollination (history). However, the honey bee population has declined by about 70 percent in recent years, and biologists are pretty sure it isn’t because of disease or predators. Biologist believe that chemicals, radiation, and global warming may have a negative effect on the honey bees and are the cause of the …show more content…
She first finds a flower, eats the nectar and collects the pollen on her hind legs. She then moves on to the next flower, pollinating it, which gives the flower the ability to keep growing and drop seeds. When the worker bee drinks as much nectar as she can hold in her cheeks, she returns to the hive and passes the nectar on to another worker, who holds it on her tongue. In doing so, the water evaporate and only honey is left. This is stored in the honeycombs for the larvae, other workers, and the winter (fcps).
Within the foragers are scout bees, who spend their time looking for good sources of food. Once they find a place, they go back to the beehive and do a small dance to tell the other bees where to find it to save time. Since the hive is dark, the others feel the dance with their antennae interpret the information (gears). Bees are quite amazing in their ways of communication and are unique creatures that need to be
...l; Retired, formerly apiculturist, U.S. Department of Agriculture. BEEKEEPING IN THE UNITED STATES; AGRICULTURE HANDBOOK NUMBER 335 Revised October 1980; Pages 2 – 9
Throughout The Secret Life of Bees , there is no shortage of symbolism, coming directly from its namesake, bees. Each connection draws upon the deep and rich meaning behind this wonderful composed text. The bees, however, never are a scapegoat. Similar to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird character Atticus, they never allow for shortcuts or disillusion with reality. They force you to see the world as it is, and to accept it, and send love to it, for it is all you can, when you are as insignificant as a
Intro: Working around the hives; dedicated and faster with each movement. Honey drizzling in golden crevices; a family unit working together, buzzing in harmony. Bees and beehives is a significant motif in the novel Secret Life of Bees: By Sue Monk Kidd because it represents the community of women in the novel. It also represents Lily Owen’s longing and need for a mother figure in her life. And finally, it was significant because the bees lived a secret life, just as Lily and Rosaleen did in the novel.
The life of a hive depends upon the bees knowing and preforming their specialized roles. The queen lays the eggs and oversees all the bees, the drones serve the queen and the worker bees b...
What do you think when you think of bees? I think of honey, pollination, and soon, new life. According to Walt D. Osborne, “Bees are vital for the pollination of more than 90 fruit and vegetable crops worldwide, including almonds, peaches, soybeans, apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers, and strawberries,” (Osborne 9-11) but each year a large percent of hives have vanished due to many different factors such as stress. Most people would declare that the average honey bee is insufficiently important to the world because bees are pests to home owners everywhere, but bees are extremely important to earths’ survival than any other pollinator in the world; they help pollinate most of the world’s agriculture; yet in the recent years bee populations have plummeted rapidly. I am writing this paper to create awareness that the agricultural society ought to stop or lessen the spraying of pesticides/ insecticides on crops, unnatural diets and overcrowding in the hives.
Honey bees, or Apis mellifera, are social insects, despite what preconceptions there are about them. They are commonly divided into three divisions of class. The first is the worker bees. They are born from fertilized eggs and are the females that are not sexually developed. They are the ones that people usually associate with honey bees. Their main job is to search for food, and build and protect the hive from predators. They have one stinger that, when used, the worker will die. Next is the queen. Her job is to lay the eggs that will hatch into the new generation of bees. Queens also controls the hive and the activities within the hive by producing chemical pheromones the steers the behavior of the bees. She possesses a stinger and can sting and kill multiple times and not be killed herself. (Hoover, S, et al. 2003) In most hives, only one queen is present and if that queen dies, the workers will create a new queen by feeding one of the workers with a special diet called “royal jelly.” This allows the sterile worker to develop into a fertile queen. The last class division i...
Kephart, Beth. “The Secret Life of Bees.” (undetermined). Book (Summit, N.J.) 20 (2002): 61-62. Reader’s Guide Full Text Select (H.W. Wilson). Web.13 Nov. 2013
Though communication within the hive is a very important aspect of the western honey bee,...
guards to take care of the beehive. These bees are usually very old and with a lot of
On day’s one-two, they clean cells. After the worker bee emerges and grooms herself, she cleans her own cell and others so they can store new eggs. Once the cells are tidied up, new eggs can be placed in the cells so more honeybees can be born.
By pollinating flowers, the honey bee produces honey, a vital product that we humans use every day as a form of food, medicine, and beauty products. Honey is highly nutritious; it has several vitamins and minerals including antioxidants that delay ageing (Kumar). In the U.S. a...
“Crop pollination is, by far, the most important and profitable of bee services.(The Economic Importance)” As bees go about collecting pollen and nectar for their hives to make honey, some of the pollen sticks to the bees’ fine fur. The bees will travel from plant to plant spreading the pollen where it needs to go so the plants will produce offspring. Foods such as the ones listed earlier, along with other national favorites such as avocados, cashews, and watermelon, will no longer be able to grow once all of the honey bees die, according to Christina Sarich in her article "List of Foods We Will Lose If We Don 't Save the Bees,” written for the website HoneyLove. This fact poses as a huge threat, not only on our economy, but also on our well being as a species. Fruits and vegetables should be half of what we eat everyday as found on ChooseMyPlate.gov, the nation’s recommended dietary allowance as approved by the United States Department of Agriculture, also known as the USDA. In a world that already has the extremes of some countries being obese and others completely undernourished, the globe can not risk having an extinction of honey bees, which is where we are
Flowering plants have two main reproductive parts; the male part is called the stamen and produces pollen, while the female part is called the pistil. For pollination to occur, the pollen must be transferred from the stamen to the pistil. This transfer can occasionally be caused by wind, but it is most often facilitated by animals called pollinators. Pollinators do not intentionally set out to fertilize flowers; rather, they unintentionally spread pollen while roaming from plant to plant in search of food. There are many different species – including birds, butterflies, and bats – that act as pollinators, and many of these species are also suffering declines in population. However, honeybees are the most pr...
All around the world honeybees are vanishing at an alarming rate, according to the documentary Vanishing of the Honeybees. This film features two commercial bee keepers and their fight to preserve their bee numbers. David Hackenburg was the first commercial bee keeper to go public the bee population was decreasing. Approximately two billions bees have vanished and nobody knows the reason why. Honeybees are used all across America to help pollinate monoculture crops like broccoli, watermelon, cherries, and other produce. Without the honeybees the price for fresh and local produce would be too much money. According, to this film commercial bee keeper’s help fifteen billion dollars of food get pollinated by commercial
Over the past decade bee populations have been dropping drastically. A 40% loss of honeybees happened in the U.S. and U.K. lose 45% of its commercial honeybee since 2010. This is a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) in which worker bees from a beehive abruptly disappear in a short time. These data are definitely not meaningless since bees are a crucial part of the reproductive cycle of many foods. The impact bees have on the agriculture and the environment is far more crucial than we may think. Crops rely on bees to assist their reproduction and bring them life. Bees are renowned in facilitating pollination for most plant life, including over 100 different vegetable and fruit crops. Without bees, there would be a huge decrease in pollination, which later result in reduce in plant growth and food supplies. On the other hand, without the pollination progressed with the assistance from bees, the types of flowers According to Dr. Albert Einstein, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination…no more men”. That’s why bees’ extinction affects people more than we ever think, and could even forebode the doom day of human race.