The Importance Of Bees In Our Food Supply

If you didn’t know, honeybees are dying rapidly, and it is more serious than you might think. The decline of the honeybee is fairly complicated, as we cannot simply target one cause for the honeybee’s decreasing numbers. The combination of factors includes parasitic mites, Colony Collapse Disorder, harmful pesticides, poor nutrition, and habitat loss, all of which have contributed to the loss of droves of honeybees. This issue much more important than what the attention it is getting implies, as honeybees are an essential part to the agricultural society, and the human race in general. Not only are bees responsible for making honey, but also for pollinating a large portion of crops grown around the world. If we did allow honeybees to disappear,

When we think of bees, we think of pesky, harmful insects. What we don’t know is everything they do for not just us, but the world. Bees influence our food supply greatly. Without bees, the would be absolutely no honey whatsoever and the amount of pollen could increase greatly without their presence. You might be thinking, “What does pollen have to do with anything?” but actually the amount of pollen not only influences our allergies, but also the plants. It is definitely possible plants we eat could become over pollinated and there would go another one of our food sources

The impact of bees disappearing on the environment is not having enough food. Bees and other pollinators have a role in pollinating one out of every three bites of food you eat. Without bees to spread seeds, many plants, including food crops, would die off.

The economic worth of global food production supported by animal pollination is at a whopping $265 billion dollars. Bee’s themselves are responsible for the harvest of crops such as nuts, melons and berries, and plays varying roles in the production of citrus fruits, apples, onions, broccoli, cabbage, sprouts, courgettes, peppers, aubergines, avocados, cucumbers, coconuts, tomatoes and broad beans, as well as coffee and cocoa. ( Yes, that’s right without bee’s you wouldn’t be able to relax to/enjoy the sweet taste of, of a hot cup of chocolate after a long winter day). but with bee’s in consistent decline what does this mean for a growing population. Fewer bee’s would mean most likely result in higher prices for fruits, and vegetables. Less food available for mass consumption. So what can we do? In order to reverse the damage done to our bee populations, it is important that we now as a community make steps to encourage ecologically safe farming practices. That means start grocery shopping regionally, and locally and when the holiday/winter season is over and spring rolls around reduce the everyday use of pesticides, and other stuff while

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

Bee loss can eventually kill off all homo sapiens, plants, and animals because most plants depend on pollinators and homo sapiens depend on plants to live. Homo sapiens and animals need trees to live and plants need people and animals to live. when all the plants die off the whole animal population will start to die off and eventually the human population will die off because we will no longer have oxygen or food.

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

Have you ever thought about a world with little to no food? In a world without bees, this could be a possibility. Today, I’ll be talking about the decline in the bee population and how it will affect every single one of us if it continues. I’ve always been interested in bees. After joining my school’s Future Farmers of America group, I started working on entomology, which is the study of bugs. When my group went to the state competition for entomology, I became even more interested in bees and the cause of the decline in their populations. This speech should inform you of the decline in the bee population and how it will affect all of our lives.

Honeybees are a massive part of most of the world's agricultural. Many plants rely on the honeybee to pollinate and allow the continued growth of their species. Many crops also rely on these insects. Honeybees pollinate three quarters of our major food crops. What would happen if most of the bee population disappeared? Would the human race die out? Would have to find alternative methods of pollination? How would this affect the rest of the environment? Many of these questions would be erased if there was a major change in the way people treat bees. The decline of the honeybee population will become a major threat to the US, unless the population initiates a major change in the beekeeping industry.

Visualize going to the store with a list full of enjoyable, ripe fruits and veggies. Only to get to the store and you see nothing on your list, only corn, beans, and rice! Why scientists are cautioning us that this could be a possible situation in our future. Why should we care, how do bees help us? What we can do to help save the population?

As noted by the White House Press Secretary, in recent decades, bees “have declined from over 6 million, to nearly 2 million managed hives,” and as hives are lost, so is the money invested in them. Parallel to the situation with the crops bees pollinate and the loss of profit there, there is loss of profit for the bees themselves, which is worrisome because soon there will be few people willing to dedicate themselves to the cause. (White House). Before greater funding can make a difference, there must be change to the causes of bee decline. The largest and most beneficial change would be the adjusting agricultural practices to one with less pesticides and and less destructive cultivation methods. Current agriculture techniques were developed during the first stages of the Green Revolution, around 1960-1985, when countries like America were trying to provide for the exponential population growth that was occurring during these decades. Originally, the changes greatly impacted the output levels, “208% for wheat, 109% for rice, [and] 157% for maize” in developing countries like China and India (Pingali). Crops like these are pollinated almost entirely by wind, giving the bees less and less opportunities for the nectar they need to survive, leading to starvation in many colonies due to worker bees travelling greater distances to retrieve the food they

1. One of the endangered services in the United States is the pollination by bees, and by a decline of pollination the service of food production is endangered as well. This is due to the decline of bees, know as the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). It is believed to have various factors that causes this, such as pathogens, parasites, poor nutrition, habitat loss, pesticide, etc. Another factor that may contribute to CCD is the electromagnetic radiation. The economic cost of CCD is that farmers that need this bees for the productions of food would perhaps have to buy colonies of bees continually from other places since they disappear. This could raise the cost of food. If the collapse of bees is excessive to the point where farmers cannot obtain

Albert Einstein once said, “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man” (“Einstein Once Said…”). After careful thought on this matter, this can be a scary concept to process. Millions of years have passed with the honey bee gracing the earth, and in fact, the honeybee is the only insect that aids in the production of food that is consumed by the human race (“20 Amazing Honey Bee Facts!”). Imagine going to a grocery store and there being no almonds to buy, a scarce supply of apples to choose from, and a very limited

Since the late 1900’s, honeybees have been mysteriously disappearing in unusually high rates across the nation. The total number of these honey bee colonies has decreased from 5 million in the 1940s to only 2.5 million colonies today. Even though the bee colonies have decreased, the need for pollinators, such as bees, has increased dramatically. Declines in honey bee colony health were provoked further in the 1980s with the arrival of new pathogens and pests. The arrival of Varroa and tracheal mites into the United States during the 1990s created additional stress on the honey bee population. These various mites attack both adult bees and the developing honey bee larvae and can transmit viruses.

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