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How Do Honey Bees Affect The Environment

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Imagine having a picnic in the middle of a beautiful meadow. The meadow is filled with flowers of all different kinds, and your picnic basket is full of some of your favorite foods, such as apples, strawberries, or maybe vanilla ice cream. On one of the flowers, you can see a honey bee. Now take the same scenario, but take away that honey bee. You are not in the middle of meadow, with no flowers and an empty picnic basket, all because you took away the honey bee. Now the loss of only one honey bee wouldn’t cause this, but the loss of all of them would. This is a very real problem, with thousands of honey bees disappearing throughout the world. The disappearance of honey bees has a large affect on our environment and economy, and is something …show more content…

While too many people bees are something to be feared or kept away from, in reality the honey bees that are slowly disappearing effect our lives in a variety of good ways. As reported by BBC, bees “pollinate 70 of the around 100 crop species that feed 90% of the world. Honey bees are responsible for $30 billion a year in crops.” Bees are pollinators, and fly around during their daily live collecting nectar and pollen from flowers. The bees then use these to produce honey, however the effects of their actions are much larger than just honey. The bees flying to many different flowers everyday causes a transfer of pollen, moving the pollen from one flower to another. This causes the formation of seeds, allowing the flowers to grow. It’s not just the beautiful flowers we see, but these plants they are pollinating produce a large amount of foods we eat throughout the world. Foods such as apples, strawberries, kiwi, plums, peaches, avocado, onions, cashews, kidney beans and many more are all affecting by bees. Even cocoa beans, the main ingredient in chocolate, are helped on by honey bees. If the honey bees continue to disappear, all of these things, and many more, will cease to exist. Not only the foods, but the animals that eat these plants would also disappearing, causing an even larger loss in the foods we have to eat. Just the loss of food alone could cause a global food shortage. The disappearance of honey bees will not only have a huge affect on our environment, but also on our economy. Think of all the people that have jobs in the agriculture business. Whether or not they are farmers growing the plants the bees pollinate, taking care of the animals that eat those plants, or making and selling food in a supermarket, there are a lot of people involved. If the bees continue to disappear, all those people will those their jobs. The effect of that amount of job loss on the economy will be

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