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Implications of decline in bees worldwide
The decline in the bee population essay
The decline in the bee population essay
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Recommended: Implications of decline in bees worldwide
Honey bees are interesting and work very hard during their lifetime. Some say we owe our survival to the honey bee. They help pollinate everything from ornamental flowers to our food supply. They have become very efficient and effective at pollination unfortunately, honey bees face many dangers in their daily life to survive. They have to defend from predators in flight as well as in their hive, not to mention the wide use of pesticides. Honey bees also produce delicious honey that some use for medicinal purpose and human and animal food production. Honey bees are important to our society, from evolution through the pollination process. Unfortunately, the bees face many dangers, however, humans need them to help pollinate crops and assist …show more content…
Scientists believe that the honey bee evolved “35 million years ago, but older ones are probably still hidden in the rocks of Southeast Asia” (Chadwick et al. 15). Over the years, the honey bee has changed to help better pollinate and even cross-pollinate flowers and food. “Early bees resembled their carnivorous wasp cousins and had short tongues and sleek bodies” ( Wilson-Rich 15). The bees began to change over time. “Bees became better at collecting pollen, evolving hairier bodies, and a greater ability to recognize different flower types” (Chadwick, et al. 16). With this change …show more content…
“The result was some of the incredible diversity of flowers and bee species we see today” (Chadwick, et al. 16). It appears that we need to thank the bees for all the beautiful flowers on our earth. “Bees pollinate over 130 fruit and vegetable crops and produce many other things that benefit humans-honey, wax, resins, propolis, royal jelly, and even venom” (Wilson-Rich 10). If bees did not exist, we may not have the flowers or crops that we have today. They are extremely helpful when pollinating gardens and farms. Some farmers have become beekeepers. By having bee hives on the farm the bees help pollinate and produce more crops on the farms. “The yield of these crops would decline to less than 10 percent of its current level if bees disappeared” (Wilson-Rich 96). We need the bees to help pollinate our crops, not just for humans, but for animals too. Animals eat fruit and plants to live as
The organization of each honey bees job is fascinating, for each job is assigned to a bee in accordance to its age.
Think for a moment of a world without bees; a world without our buzzing friend. They might look like they barely do much to help our ecosystem. However, bees are a vital part of our agriculture and this makes it vital that we keep them around. The bee population decline in recent years is troubling for both us and our little friends. As their friends, we must do all we can in order to ensure their survival which in turn will ensure our own.
The best action the public can take to improve honey bee survival is not to use pesticides indiscriminately. In particular, the public should avoid applying pesticides during mid-day hours, when honey bees are most likely to be out foraging for nectar and pollen on flowering plants. In addition, the public can plant pollinator-friendly plants—plants that are good sources of nectar and pollen such as red clover, foxglove, bee balm, joe-pye weed, and other native plants.
The unknown bees wing-lengths were scattered throughout the ranges of European bees and African bees (Figure 1). The unknown bee wing-lengths were not clustered around either the typical range for African bees or European bees, therefore, falling in neither category (Figure 1). The greatest frequency of unknown bee wing-lengths
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
Our livestock depend on bee-pollinated plants like grain. Poorly pollinated plants produce fewer fruits and seeds, leading to higher prices (New Agriculturist, n.d.). Some crops are entirely dependent on pollinators such as almonds and others are 90 percent dependent on blueberries and cherries (ABF, 2015). Bees give us honey and we use this honey in food, shampoo, and moisturizers (Mercola, 2015). Bees pollinate 70 out of our 100 major crops; that includes apples, cucumbers, pumpkins, and many more.
The lives of humans and honeybees have been intertwined for millennia. For at least 8,000 years, humans have sought honey for applications in disciplines ranging from medicine to the culinary arts. But while humans love honey, honeybees provide a much more valuable service: pollination. As the world’s most prolific pollinator, honeybees are essential to the reproduction of many plant species, which in turn benefits other animals and plants. In fact, humans heavily rely on honeybees to pollinate our own food source, a service that is worth billions of dollars a year. Unfortunately, the honeybee population is in a severe and prolonged decline, often in the form of colony collapse disorder, in which entire colonies are seemingly abandoned by adult bees overnight. Honeybees are an indispensable component of modern agriculture, and a failure to discern and address the many causes of honeybee population decline – both manmade and natural – could have disastrous consequences for the environment and human society.
honeybee’s means of communication there was no change in the number or diversity of the pollen types that each colony collected each day(Donalson, et al, 2013). The group originally hypothesized that communication would focus all or the majority of the colonies foraging efforts on a highly productive natural pollen resource. Instead, the group found that impairing dance communication resulted in the honeybees returning with rare novel pollen types instead of foraging on the same pollen resource types from day to day( Donalson, et al, 2013). The authors suggest that the communication dance enables colonies to maintain their foraging efforts on previously discovered rewarding pollen resources, while exploring fewer newer sources each day (Donalson, et al, 2013). The honeybee communication dance is
Just how important are honey bees to the ecosystem? Typically, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Honeybees pollinate eighty percent of our crops, or about a third of our diet. Honeybees cross-pollinate different plant species, by carrying pollen, which it uses to spread throughout an area of flowers. On a larger scale, one bee colony is able to pollinate 300 million flowers each day (Greenpeace). Grains, like rice and wheat, are primarily populated by wind, however, the healthiest foods, such as fruit, vegetables and nuts are pollinated by bees. In order for humankind to grow the honeybees must be able to live.
Main Objective: This study focused on determining the ecological relationship between evolved bumble bees with longer tongues, particularly the Bombus balteatus and Bombus sylvicola, and floral sources with elongated corolla tubes.
The bees reached an apparent climatic limit to their southern range in the middle of Argentina, and their range is expected to be similarly limited to the southern and coastal states in the United States. They have hybridized to some extent with resident wild and hive populations of European honeybees. However, many of the basic African honeybee traits remain, including rapid population growth, frequent swarming, minimal hoarding of honey, the ability to survive on sparse supplies of pollen and nectar, and a ...
One out of every three bites of food we eat is a result of pollinators like honey bees, and crops like blueberries and cherries are 90 per cent dependent on pollination. The bee population is doomed unless we, with our advanced technologies and our new bettering-the-world stunt, can try and prevent it. Growing gardens to support the ever lessening bee community has become a new trend and an old conservation topic. In the past months I was living in a house surrounded by plant life, and the bee population visibly benefitted just from this tiny spec of yard. The flowers were almost always abuzz in the sunlight with little pollinators, butterflies included.
Winfree, R. . The conservation and restoration of wild bees. Annuals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Volume 1195, 3 May 2010, Pages 169 – 197.
Honeybees or Apis Mellifera as they are known to the scientific world, are very unique animals. Unlike most pollinating insects, Honeybees are highly social, and tend to live in large nests in the wild. There are three types of Honeybees that live in these nests: The Queen Bee, the Worker Bees, and the Drone Bees. The Queen is the parent of the hive. There is usually one queen per colony. Her sole purpose is to lay eggs so the colony is continuously populated (Flottum 33). She is the only able-bodied bee to lay eggs. The Worker Bees are female bees that work to carry out daily hive functions. Their jobs depend on their age and they do not live for very long, their life expectancy averages about 6 weeks during the spring and summer and about 6 months during the winter. There is five main jobs worker bees do: Nursing, Comb builders, Hive maintenance, Guarding, and foraging. These jobs go in order of age. The younger bees will be the nurse bees that will tend to the young and feed them and as well as keep them warm. The comb builders are slightly older and build comb for storage of honey or pollen and the storage of more young the queen will produce. Beeswax comes from special wax glands located underneath the Worker bee’s abdomens (Flottum 37). Hive maintenance ...
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.