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Honey bees effect on agriculture
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Honey bee foragers perform waggle dances to inform other foragers in the hive about the location, presence, and the odor of beneficial food sources and new hive sites. The aim of the study in review was to investigate how the characteristics of waggle dances for natural food sources and environmental factors affect dance follower behavior. Due to the assumption that food source profitability tends to decrease with increasing foraging distance, a hypothesis that the attractiveness of a dance, measured as the number of dance followers and their attendance, decreases with increasing distance to the projected food location was formed. In addition to the hypothesis, it was assumed that time of year and dance signal noise or the variation in waggle run direction and duration, affect dance follower behavior (Al Toufailia et al., 2013).
Apis mellifera, commonly known as the European or western honey bee is a eusocial insect. Eusociality is a term used to describe living in cooperative groups in which one female and several males are reproductively active (Winston, 1981). All the non-breeding individuals of the group care for the young or protect and provide for the whole group. With these insects practicing eusociality, their hives contain one queen, a fertile female, who has all the offspring in the colony. The hive contains a few drones, males, to mate with the queen. Also, the hive contains thousands of workers, infertile females, whose duties include keeping the hive clean, building the wax combs of the hive, tending the young, and foraging for food (Engel, 2001). Honey bees need to communicate within their colonies to perform all these tasks.
Though communication within the hive is a very important aspect of the western honey bee,...
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...is insignificant in comparison with the potential loss of over 15 billion dollars worth of agricultural crops that bees are responsible for pollinating every year (Paxton, 2010). Without the western honey bee, Apis mellifera, there would mostly likely be a devastating ecological imbalance. The experiment conducted at the University of Sussex showed dance followers respond to the characteristics of the waggle dance. While dancing behavior and the factors that cause a bee to perform these signals are better understood, there is still a limited understanding of how followers of natural dances use the different informational components in their foraging decisions. More research into follower behavior, signal receiver and information use strategies under natural circumstances is needed to understand the waggle dance of the western honey bee (Al Toufailia et al., 2013).
von Frish, K. 1967. The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Throughout The Secret Life of Bees , there is no shortage of symbolism, coming directly from its namesake, bees. Each connection draws upon the deep and rich meaning behind this wonderful composed text. The bees, however, never are a scapegoat. Similar to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird character Atticus, they never allow for shortcuts or disillusion with reality. They force you to see the world as it is, and to accept it, and send love to it, for it is all you can, when you are as insignificant as a
A beehive without a queen is a community headed for extinction. Bees cannot function without a queen. They become disoriented and depressed, and they stop making honey. This can lead to the destruction of the hive and death of the bees unless a new queen is brought in to guide them. Then, the bees will cooperate and once again be a prosperous community. Lily Melissa Owens, the protagonist of Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, faces a similar predicament. While she does not live in a physical hive, the world acts as a hive. She must learn to work with its inhabitants, sharing a common direction, in order to reach her full potential. The motif of the beehive is symbolic of how crucial it is to be a part of a community in order to achieve
What do you think when you think of bees? I think of honey, pollination, and soon, new life. According to Walt D. Osborne, “Bees are vital for the pollination of more than 90 fruit and vegetable crops worldwide, including almonds, peaches, soybeans, apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers, and strawberries,” (Osborne 9-11) but each year a large percent of hives have vanished due to many different factors such as stress. Most people would declare that the average honey bee is insufficiently important to the world because bees are pests to home owners everywhere, but bees are extremely important to earths’ survival than any other pollinator in the world; they help pollinate most of the world’s agriculture; yet in the recent years bee populations have plummeted rapidly. I am writing this paper to create awareness that the agricultural society ought to stop or lessen the spraying of pesticides/ insecticides on crops, unnatural diets and overcrowding in the hives.
By listing down enough accurate examples to prove his thesis, Thomas presents a clear structured and logically organized essay. For instance, the essay focuses on the steps of building “the Hill”, a collective process that consists in using the efficient group thinking to develop knowledge (233-34). Starting with a unique ant and adding others one by one, Lewis Thomas clearly illustrates the progressive creation of the organism (233). It also emphasizes the importance of understanding the different animals’ way of living and working as an entity, since humans are part of an organism as well. Additionally, Thomas’ description of the beehive’s construction and organization to expand the family is relevant to provide basic knowledge on the subject while reinforcing Thomas’ authority on the topic. Bees form a communal intelligence that builds “symmetrical polygons” and spreads out their “family genome” when half of the members are led by the new queen (234-35). According to Thomas, this collaboration and transmission of information is also observed in the men’s activities. Thus, this other detailed explanation provides a logical reason to the author’s thesis. In short, the processes are effectively used, along with scientific terminology, to present the similar procedures mankind and other life forms daily
Plague is an infectious disease that can lead to fatality. There was once a plague called pesticides. This plague would kill off dwarves rapidly and painfully thus causing extinction. However, the dwarves were responsible for a third of the food we consume daily. This plague surfaced in the areas where dwarves live and infected many of them. Weeks later, the dwarves begin to die, leading them towards extinction. Because of the extinction, a third of our food is diminished. Nonetheless, individuals would only care about the remaining two thirds of the food leaving people . As a result, many scientists are realizing that pesticides are the reason for the extinction of the dwarves and steadily declining food supplies.
In CCD, honey bee colonies lose their workers under unclear circumstances (Cox-Foster et al., 2007, p. 283). It is not unusual for bees to die or colonies to be lost, but the nature and extent reported in the year 2006 was alarming. Statistics gathered in the United States alone show that 50-90% of the bees have been lost so far, due to this scientific phenomenon (Cox-Foster et al., 2007, p. 284).
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 Apis Mellifera, or honey bee, have survived on this planet for fifty million years. This species of bee is responsible for pollinating flowers, grass, trees and crops around the world. Much of the food we eat is dependent on honey bees for pollination. Our ecosystem depends on the survival of the honey bee. Colonies of honeybees have been disappearing at an alarming rate around the world due to parasites, viral and bacterial diseases, and the introduction of pesticides and herbicides. Over the past six years, on average, 30 percent of all the honey bee colonies in the U.S. died off over the winter of 2012(NPR/TED). If this trend continues to spiral downward, honey bees will disappear from the world. We must understand the importance of the Honey bee and change our environmental practices in order to sustain this vital insect.
Apis mellifera, commonly known as the honey bee, are solely responsible for pollinating one-third of the world’s crops, and they are in danger of dying off, according to the article “Natures Dying Migrant Worker,” written by Josephine Marcotty for the Star Tribune. This honey bee population decline poses a huge threat to our environment, farmers, and economy. It is assumed by BBC News writer Zoe Gough in her article,"Wild Honey Bees: Does Their Disappearance Matter?" that all of the wild honey bees in England and Wales are gone. The worldwide eradication of honey bees may not be too far away. The reasons the honey bees are dying are linked to a
A queen, drones, and workers share a common place in life. They all live in a bee and ant colony striving together to accomplish their specific jobs. Living in a world where females are your workers and protectors of the queen, and drones are used to multiply the colony, and then die. When you look passed the buzzing of ants, you see a very sociable creature working like a well oiled machine. When you hear the dirt on the bees, they may look sociable, but deep down, it’s another world. A world where queens kill sibling sisters, and the drones are ejected out into the cold to starve just for the sake of their colony. Where females defend the nest and die 100% of the time after the sting. Bees and ants, both considered sociable insects, have a very different view on sociability.
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.
The honey bees started to vanish rapidly without any reason in the year 2006. Honey bees are vital to the life of humans, plants, and animals. In the article “The Importance of Honey Bees”, Maria Boland writes, “Honey bees pollinate 80% of the earth’s plants, which converts to 1/3 of what humans eat.” The world should look into saving the honey bees because, without them, plants would not be pollinated, animals would die, humans would have a hard time finding things to eat, and the world would lose staggering sums of money. In the book The Backyard Beekeeper, Kim Flottum writes that 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. Because the honey bee is important to all life on earth, our government should work to help educate children and adults on the honey bees, regulate pesticides sold, and help fund research towards protecting the honey bees.
All ants are social. In fact they are the only insects in which all species are social. Large groups of ants live in colonies or communities together. In the majority of ants, colonies are families or groups of related families. These groups consist of one or more queens, who rule the colony, and males, whose only job is to fertilize the queen and then die soon after. The workers in the colony are only females. These workers are divided into several working classes including: enlargement and repair of the nest, taking care of the larvae, tending to the queen, defending the colony, and foraging for food.
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.