BThe ees

Introduction

Albert Einstein once said: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years left to live.”, because in addition to making honey, bees pollinate a third of everything we eat and play a vital role in sustaining the planet’s ecosystems.

We’ll see how they pollinate plants, and why it is important to protect them and help them thriving.

How they pollinate

Pollination is needed for plants to reproduce, and entomophilous plants are plants pollinated only by insects; they are usually big, brightly colored, and they smell good in order to attract insects.

Bees go into the flower, and because they are very hairy animals, they brush against the stigma of the flowers, and they take with them a lot of pollen. When they visit the next flower, some of this pollen is rubbed off into the stamen. When this happens, fertilization is possible, and a fruit, carrying seeds, can develop.

In the process of foraging for food, bees are designed to pollinate. If you watch a female honeybee or bumblebee on a flower, you will see she has balls of pollen on her back legs. These are collected in her pollen baskets which she takes back to the nest to feed the young after fertilizing the flowers. For solitary bees, the pollen collects on the hairs on their abdomen.

Why protecting them

Flowers that are visited more often by bees will produce larger and more uniform fruit than those visited less often. This beneficial effect of pollination is most obvious in tree fruit.

Some 84% of the crops grown for human consumption – around 400 different types of plants – need bees and other insects to pollinate them to increase their yields and quality.

But beyond their monetary value for maintaining our fragile food supply, bees also make an invaluable contribution to ecosystems around the world. Seeds, fruits and berries eaten by birds and small mammals are all from plants that are pollinated by bees, making them guardians of the food chain and the biodiversity of our species.

Conclusion

To conclude, we can say that our lives and the lives of many creatures on earth directly depend on the good health of bee colonies, because they are a source of most of the things we eat and they are a key element for biodiversity.

Open

Nowadays bees are in great danger, because of various threats, such as the introduction of Asian hornet, and new viruses. However, many NGO (like Greenpeace for instance) take a stand to protect those animals, by defending the ban of dangerous pesticides, and promoting ecological agriculture.

...