Flower Morphology And Honey Bees

Whatever the proximate cause, it increasingly appears that the bees are succumbing to a long-ignored underlying condition — inbreeding. Decades of agricultural and breeding practices meant to maximize pollinating efficiency have limited honeybees' genetic diversity at a time when they need it the most. Addressing CCD may therefore require more than a simple fix. "We need to have a diverse set of genetic raw material so we can find bees resistant to disease," says Steve Sheppard, an entomologist at Washington State University. "Genetic diversity is an important part of the solution."The problem is hardly trivial. A third of the total human diet depends on plants pollinated by insects, predominantly honeybees. In North America honeybees pollinate more than 90 crops with an annual value totaling almost $15 billion. Indeed, that importance lies at the root of what went wrong. In trying to make bees more productive, apiarists have torn the insects from their natural habitats and the routines they mastered over millions of years. As a result, today's honeybees are sickly, enslaved, and mechanized. "We've looked at bees as robots that would keep on trucking no matter what," says Heather Mattila of Wellesley College, who studies honeybee behavior and genetics. "They can't be pushed and pushed."In the beginning, honeybees and their partners, the flowers, drove an

Furthermore bees specifically are particularly efficient with it being estimated that they are the sole pollinators for 50% of the approximate 80% of flowering plants which rely on insects for pollination (Bradbear, 2009). Their efficiency is further illustrated by the fact that a single colony containing 25,000 forager bees is able to pollinate 250 million flowers per day (Bradbear, 2009). As a result of this it can be seen that bees are hugely important as pollinators with many species of flower being completely dependent on them. Furthermore, the importance of bees extends beyond ecological diversity; certain types of bees are hugely important economically. In addition to pollinating a large variety of fruit and vegetables, bees produce Honey; together this results in them having an estimated value of service of £200m a year in the UK (National Audit Office (NAO), 2009). Overall it can be seen that bees are of significant importance that any decrease in population should be treated with concern, as a result of this a large quantity of research has been conducted into identifying possible

Pollination is essentially plant reproduction - without help from animal pollinators, our everyday food supply would look much different

What you may not know is that honeybees play a huge roll in America’s agriculture, whether it is pollinating alfalfa hay to feed your horse or pollinating that apple you eat every morning for breakfast. Honeybees pollinate about one-third of crops species in the U.S. (Vanishing Bees, 2008). Bees pollinate a lot more than you would think a few more examples are almonds, avocadoes, cucumbers and peanuts.

The European honey bee (or western honey bee, Apis Mellifera) is a species of bee that naturally occurs in Europe, but has been introduced by humans to a variety of foreign ecosystems, including Australia and New Zealand. It is of ecological importance because of the effect that this introduced species has on the biodiversity of native wildlife, in particular native bees, hollow-nesting native birds and mammals, honeyeater birds and native flora.

Bees pollinating crops produce every third mouthful of food we eat. Bees contribute to thirty- five Percent of global food production, 87 of the leading 115 food crops are dependent on animal pollinators, including bees. (The United States White House, 2014). Without bees pollinating plants, there would not be very many fruits or vegetables to eat, Bees transfer pollen between the male and female parts, allowing plants to grow seeds and fruit. In the last decade scientist and beekeepers have observed remarkable decline of bees, in the US alone 30% of the national bee population has disappeared and nearly a third of all bee colonies in the U.S. have

These species include bees, such as the western honey bee, along with flies, beetles, moths, and butterflies. Pollination, as far as honey bees are concerned, is a process where honey bees legs get coated in pollen which they transfer from flower to flower to fertilize the plant. Plants rely on pollinators to grow and produce offspring. Without pollination, many plants would die off and would not be around the next growing season. Pollination is the sole reason the U.S. has as many fruits, vegetables, and nuts that it does. The western honey bee is one of the many important pollinators that have become a huge part of North American agriculture, but they might not be necessary.

Bees provide us with pollination services for our agricultural crops. “Bees are the most important pollinators of our fruits and vegetables and flowers and crops like alfalfa hay that we feed our farm animals.” (Spivak) We rely on them so much that more than one-third of the world’s crop production is dependent on bee pollination. Without bees we wouldn’t have specialty crops like: asparagus, cantaloupes, cucumbers, pumpkins, cherries and blueberries. We also rely on the bee’s honey, “Made by bees regurgitating nectar and passing it back and forth in their mouths to one another before depositing and sealing it in a honeycomb, it’s intended use is for the bee’s winter food stores.” (Tucker) Honey is also valued in our economy, “Humans are quite fond of this amber liquid as well- the 2013 honey crop was valued at $317.1 million.” (Tucker) We need bees for their economic value just as much as we need their pollination for our crops. Honey

(2007) upwards of 75% of the leading crops grown worldwide are dependent on or benefit from animal pollination, where as wind and self pollination is responsible of only 24% of pollination. Klatt et al. (2014) studied the affects of bee pollination and strawberry fruit yield the study showed that bee pollination not only improved fruit quality and quantity but also market value compared with wind and self pollination. The fruits pollinated by bees were heavier, had less malformations and reached are high commercial standard. The colour and texture was more vibrant and firmer with sugar to acid ratios reduced enabling a long shelf life to be obtained and over all fruit loss to be reduced by 11% (Klatt et al., 2014) These results showed that pollination by bees increased the commercial value per fruit by 38.6% compared with wind pollination and by 54.3% compared to self

When the number of bees in North America began to decline, affects being to take place such as poor pollination of plants and poor plant produce. Since bees supply the pollination workforce much of the food North Americans eat is the product of their work, "every third bite of food we eat comes as the result of bees" (Hagopian). Therefore the proper pollination would give the best outcome, entomologist James Cane set to verify this idea. In his study he found that red raspberry plants that had been visited by honey bees grew 30% larger raspberries than those not visited by honey bees (Wood). From those findings one can infer that if the condition of low pollination was uniformly extended, to wildlife across the continent and across the agricultural

The beetles are originally gathered from infested honey bee colonies, and harvested for future generations. For the purposes of this experiment, nothing is used passed Generation 2 in order to keep the natural characteristics of the beetle. The beetles were also differentiated between male and female so that there could be equal amounts of males and females in each of the pollen doughs for more accurate results. There was a total of 740 beetles (370 males and 370 females) and each pollen substitute contained 240

In centuries, the honey bee has a very important role in our agriculture. According to Watanabe, Honey bee approximately benefits $10 billion of crops, including almonds, apples, and alfalfa every year in the United State (Pollination Worries rise As Honey Bees Decline, 1170). In addition, The National Agriculture Statistics Service (NASS) had estimated 2660 million honey producing colonies in 2015 (2017). Based on honey bees’ behavior, they can expand nearly all habitable corners of the globe which made them highly adaptable species (Dennis, 80). With adaptable capability and high productivity, our beekeepers can able to maintain their life

The honey bee is the substructure of the human population. It is imperative that the world knows about the decline of honey bees and work together to save the honey bee population. Nearly one-third of the world's crops are dependent on honeybees, but over the last decade the black and yellow insects have been dying at an unexpected rate in the United States. Pesticides, disease, poor weather, and the stress of being taken from one orchard to another to pollinate different crops all play a role in the decline of the honey bee. The honey bee as a species is not in danger of extinction, but a large portion of our food supply is, because the honey bee no longer has the ability to support the industry of commercial pollination. Without honey

Bees are some of the most feared insects on the planet but aside from their sting they are quite a complex and beneficial creature. There are over 20,000 species of bees on the planet (Spivak,2013). They are often associated with honey however, they play a far more important role, they pollinate. Bees are responsible for about 80 percent of pollination worldwide and a single colony is able to pollinate upwards of 300 million flowers each day (Greenpeace.org). Although there are ways for human pollination it is often a painstaking and time-consuming process. Studies have also shown that human pollination is not as effective (Spivak, 2013)). With 90 percent of the worlds nutrition dependent upon bees we need to support the bees with pollination (Greenpeace.org). If we want to continue enjoying the many foods bees provide for us we

Bees aren 't the only insect pollinators in the world, but they are by far the most widespread ones. Despite this, non-bee insect pollinators have a contributing factor to the success of pollination that the bees themselves don 't. There have been studies on the success of the pollination and 'seeding ' of flowers and plants. Bees have a fairly average success rate, focusing more on spreading the pollination farther afield than the success of the 'seeding '. Non-bee insects tend to stay in a small ranged area that allows them to visit the same flowers more often, thus increasing the success of their visits.