Honey Bee Pollinators

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.

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

Although it is difficult to directly exemplify the impact of invasive European honeybees on native bumblebees through floral resources, many studies prove there is an indirect relationship between the species concerning overlapping of their ecological niche (Thomson 2004). Diane Thomson conducted an experiment measuring the impacts of the invasive honeybee on the native bumblebee through competition for nectar and pollen resources. Each summer from 1998 through 2000, two to three Apis colonies (each consisting of 10,000-15,000 workers) were introduced into three sites from early June to early September (Thomson 2004). Each Apis colony was placed 2 km apart. For the native bumblebees, B. occidentalis colonies were located at 10 m, 500 m, and 1000 m away from each site. Since there are three distances, and three different sites, there were nine B. occidentalis colonies in total. The B. occidentalis species was placed in the same location every year; however, the distance treatment was altered (Thomson 2004). To reduce the factors that may alter the results, laboratory-reared colonies were used to minimize any differences in the Bombus colonies and weighed to keep the amount consistent (Thomson 2004). Overall, Thomson’s experiment exemplified the direct effects of the invasive Apis species on reproductive success and foraging activity of the native Bombus.

The article begins with the statement of how falling population in bees will lead to a decline is crop production for the united states of America. This statement was announced at the American Association for the Advancement of Science or for short the AAAS. The United States relies on these bees for pollination as it is a big part of the economy bringing in over 3 billion dollars annually. It is mention how it is possible to reverse the decline in wild bees by habitat restoration. Bees are a huge part of the crop production in the united states which helps with the income and rotation of crops. In the article maps of troubled zones where placed in over 139 counties in agricultural regions of California, Pacific Northwest, the upper Midwest and Great Plains, West Texas, and Mississippi River Valley. All those places are known for their specialty crops such as almonds blueberries and apples. Those specialty crops

Today, the need for honey and honey products are at an all-time high. With such a

Bees play an important part in the world’s food web. Much of the food we eat has grown because of bees. Bees travel from flower to flower collecting nectar to take back to their colony. In the process of visiting these flowers, pollen sticks to the bees—but some of it also comes off in the flowers. This activity of bees is the primary way that plants are pollinated. Some types of fruits and vegetables must be pollinated to produce food. Without bees, we would not have the variety of foods that humans and animals depend on.

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

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

Since the mid 2000s, bees have mysteriously vanished and have not been returning to their honeybee hives and as years go by much of society has become unconscious to the situations occurring in our environment. Although, bees are small in size, they are big providers for sustaining our food system. The honeybee pollination is the key role in the development of food we humans grow and the overall relationship of bees is what helps us receive that food. Bees are clear indicators of showing how our environment is producing and by their extinction will

The presence of ample pollinators such as carpenter bees has significant impacts on productivity. Without sufficient levels of pollinators to ensure all flowers are pollinated, production can be severely limited (Bee Aware,

For example, bees have been found to play a significant role in the pollination of crops and the use of this technology is a blow to the environment considering many bees die when they are exposed to these chemicals (Newell, 2009).

Honey bees are generalists. They can collect pollen from over 100 families of plants, and they have even been observed to collect pollen from the surfaces of vehicals (Danforth; vanEngelsdorp and Meixner, 2010). Yet they require a certain abundance and diversity of resources within a specific foraging range. Beekman and Ratnieks (2000) have shown that honey bees forage within a range of 0.5 km to 10 km, with an average range of 2.3 km. To some extent, foraging distances are genetically determined (Oldroyd et al., 1993), but they are also determined by the quality and abundance of resources near the hive (Steffan-Dewenter and Kuhn, 2003; Baum, 2003). It has been repeatedly shown that honey bees forage

Whether they like it or not, bees are the center of attention in the world of scientific studies. This be may be due in part to fact that so many earthly ecosystems depend on bee pollination to thrive, or because bee behavior is simply fascinating. Either way the focus has led researchers to place trackers on bees in a hive, and the results reveal that some of these bees have completely lost their ability to pollinate, leading experts to panic about the future of bees, and ecosystems which depend so heavily on them.

As someone that likes to eat fruits and vegetables, there is also a process that the fruit and vegetables had gone through. “Our supermarket produce aisles would look very, very bare without bees”(blog.Ted) said Marla Spivac, a bee researcher and a biologist as she started her TED talk explaining the reason of the importance of bee pollination and three different reasons of the decline of the bees along with a solution to this problem. Spivac believes that if each of us contribute by planting bee friendly flowers and avoiding using pesticide, not only helps bees but also help us in acquiring natural food. For those interested in improving the environment should plant flowers free from pesticides on their front yard, back yard or anywhere that

Honey bees, feared by the misinformed and admired by the intelligent, are dying. The interest in bees from many environmentalists is not for a sudden cause, as this issue is not new to the world. Honey bees as a population have been in decline for years but have yet to reach the endangered species list anywhere in the United States except for Hawaii. Many people kill bees that buzz around joyfully, simply because they are afraid of being stung by them; however, a vast majority of bees do not sting and the others do not care. This unfortunate commonality is not even one of the top causes of the worldwide epidemic of honey bees. Although bees are jokingly idolized on the internet in pictures and videos as a result of a popular children’s movie, their population decline is in fact quite serious. Honey bees and other pollinators like birds and insects ensure the pollination of flowering plants and crops all around the globe. Not only do honey bees pollinate plants that produce the foods that humans eat, but they also pollinate trees that produce clean oxygen for Earth. Without honey bees, the world as we know it could soon end, due to carbon dioxide pollution and lack of farmable foods. The population of honeybees and other important pollinator-bee species is dwindling due to a dilemma known to scientists as colony collapse disorder (CCD) because of the use of bee-killing pesticides, known as neonicotinoids, the decrease of flower meadows in the world, and the general increase