Bees are a really interesting type of insect. You are probably familiar with honeybees (the smaller and slim kind) and you have probably seen bumblebees (fat and furry), but there are actually about 20,000 species of bees all around the world. Bees are found in almost all habitats and they play a really vital role. They might look different and they might have different names, but they almost all do the same basic thing for us and for the environment. They pollinate plants and help make sure the plants can reproduce. Bees are vital for most of the foods that we eat. One in every three bites of food we take on any given day was probably helped along by a bee somewhere. Among the top one hundred crops that make up 90% of people’s diets around …show more content…
It is easy to take bees for granted, so one way to appreciate them is to imagine: what would happen if they were to disappear? What would it be like to have a world without bees? The first thing that would happen if bees were to disappear is that the production of different fruits and different crops would suddenly fall off dramatically. For instance, the Agave plant, which is used to make tequila, reproduction would go down, the one three thousandths of what it would be with bees. We see that happening with crop after crop: cherries, apples, almonds, blueberries, pumpkin, squash, and cucumbers. The reproduction would fall off and the first people to feel that would probably be farmers who would lose income and they would see them dwindling. A study conducted in Costa Rica with coffee farmers, found that the bees increased their income by $60,000 …show more content…
Bees are certainly important for pollinating food crops, but they are also important for other crops that touch our lives every day like cotton. If it weren’t for bees pollinating cotton, we might all have to be wearing polyester. I would not want to live in a world without bees, but we are observing some declines in bee populations around the world and it looks like it's a number of factors coming together all at once. One of them is pesticides. While there is legitimate use of pesticides for controlling unwanted damaging crop pests. We need to make sure that those chemicals do not have unwanted effects on our bees. A world without bees in the worst case is it wouldnt just mean that our diets were bland, it might be that we dont have enough food to go around anymore. But i think that the direct tangible importance of bees is for all the food that we count on. It certainly makes that a possibility I wouldn't want to try
Anthony Johnson was a black man who arrived in Virginia around 1621 and was purchased to work as a slave in the tobacco fields of the Bennett Plantation. At that time he was merely known as “Antonio a Negro”, as it wasn’t common for black slaves to have last names. On March 22nd, 1622, an Indian attack on the Bennett plantation left only 12 surviving slaves, one of them being Anthony. In that same year a woman named Mary arrived at the plantation. Being that she was the only woman living at the Bennett plantation in 1625, Anthony could be considered fortunate to have received her as his wife. Together they had at least four children. It isn’t known how Anthony received his full name of Anthony Johnson, but the time that it is believed that this happened leaves some clues for speculation. It is presumed that someone named Johnson helped Anthony and his wife escape to freedom, apparently sometime between 1625 and 1650. In the 1640’s it is believed that Anthony and his family owned a small farm in Northamton where they raised livestock, which was mostly des...
“Lets imagine for a moment that we are tiny enough to follow a bee into a hive. Usually the first thing we would have to ge used to is the darkness”(Kidd 82). The bee is an insect that spends all day working: working to create a home, working to spread pollen and working to create honey. A bee's life and the society of bees can be closely related to the life of humans. In the novel The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, the author conveys her lessons about human life through the imagery of bees.
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.
Vanishing of the Bees is a documentary film that tells the story of agriculture and what it means when the bees disappear. Bees are necessary for pollination for a third of the food we eat, without them we wouldn’t even be able to have honey. “Pollination is the act of transferring pollen grains from the male anther of a flower to the female stigma. The goal of every living organism, including plants, is to create offspring for the next generation. One of the ways that plants can produce offspring is by making seeds” (What is Pollination?, n.d.). The bees are hardworking and work together to get their job done in the hive. The main job for the bees is to collect the pollen from the flowers for pollination. The bees even have their own jobs such as the worker bees, the guard bees, and the nurse bees. The main bee of the hive is the queen bee who has the baby bees and makes sure everything is getting done.
Crazy as this might sound, how about if apples no longer existed? This seems far-fetched because apples are always available in ways such as shopping at a grocery store or hand picking from a tree in a yard. But with honey bees missing so are apples. The analogy of the unavailable apple simply means… “an un-pollinated flower won’t develop into an apple at all.” (Mader 1) The pollinators are the reason you are able to enjoy many fruits, nuts, vegetables, beans to name a few. “This apple is at the heart of why you should care about pollinator conservation.” (1). Insecticides kill pollinators directly along with the flowering plants that supply bees with pollen and nectar.
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.
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.
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.
All around the world honeybees are vanishing at an alarming rate, according to the documentary Vanishing of the Honeybees. This film features two commercial bee keepers and their fight to preserve their bee numbers. David Hackenburg was the first commercial bee keeper to go public the bee population was decreasing. Approximately two billions bees have vanished and nobody knows the reason why. Honeybees are used all across America to help pollinate monoculture crops like broccoli, watermelon, cherries, and other produce. Without the honeybees the price for fresh and local produce would be too much money. According, to this film commercial bee keeper’s help fifteen billion dollars of food get pollinated by commercial
Our livestock depend on bee-pollinated plants like grain. Poorly pollinated plants produce fewer fruits and seeds, leading to higher prices (New Agriculturist, n.d.). Some crops are entirely dependent on pollinators such as almonds and others are 90 percent dependent on blueberries and cherries (ABF, 2015). Bees give us honey and we use this honey in food, shampoo, and moisturizers (Mercola, 2015). Bees pollinate 70 out of our 100 major crops; that includes apples, cucumbers, pumpkins, and many more.
There are hundreds of thousands bee keepers in the United States alone. Without honeybees, the beekeepers will eventually lose their jobs because there will no longer be honey for them to sell. Also, no more pollination of different crops mean hundreds of businesses will have to be shut down due to no produce to sell. Over twenty-four million dollars comes from bee pollinators and straight into the United States economy but “…honey bees account for more than fifteen billion dollars through their vital role in keeping fruits, nuts, and vegetables in our diets” (Fact Sheet: The Economic Challenge Posed by Declining Pollinator Populations par 3). Food and money are the two things in this world that truly help us survive. Without both, humans will no longer be able to sustain
We need to save the bees! Community leaders have debated the effects of bees going extinct for many years. The bees keep many things alive not just flowers and fruit. My first reason we need to save the bees is we wont have a bunch of deilius and delectable fruits that many know and love. Another reason why its important to save the bees is the ecosystem will collapse and that wont be good because the ecosystem will go out of balance and that will not be good.
Source 2 states, "The crop almonds produce 4 billion pounds a year and protects the heart, lowers blood pressure, and provides important vitamins. The crop pears produce 1.60 billion pounds a year and it protects against cancer, improves heart health, and, supports weight loss." Therefore, this is important because many people would be disappointed and bees are responsible for more than 1,200 crops and 87 of the 115 food crops in the world today. Some critics may argue that these crops don't need bees, but bees help the crops grow using pollen. Clearly, bees are important to help because many crops with benefits will go away without
Without bees to spread seeds, many plants including food crops would die off. A study from cnn shows Honeybees and wild bees are the most important pollinators of many of the fruits and vegetables we eat. Of 100 crop species that provide 90% of our global food supply, 71 are
Bees are small flying insects, buzzing around with its painful stings which always make people afraid and annoyed. What generally relate with bees are their roles in pollination and producing honey and beeswax. So it seems that bees might be nothing to human as it’s easy to find substitutes for honey as flavoring. However, this perception is mistaken. Without bees, aftermath.