ROLE OF BEES IN OUR LIFE

Role of Bees in our Life

Role of Bees in our Life

Honey bees, or western honey bee in particular, is known scientifically as Apis mellifera. Honey bees play the vital role in our lives. Seed plants make fruit after pollinators such as bees and butterflies pollinate them by inadvertently transporting pollen from male to feminine bloom parts. It is estimated that three-quarters of flowering plants need pollinators in order to make fruit.

Many agricultural crops, on order of $14 billion dollars worth, depend upon domesticated bee hives to help with pollination, and some, such as almonds, are 100% dependent upon honey bee for pollination. In the role more familiar to most, honey bees also collect and concentrate nectar in production of honey.

The honey bee is the very social insect. Honey bees live in hives within the very structured social order. Each hive contains one queen, the few hundred drones, or male bees, and worker bees, all female. Wild (feral) hives will comprise up to 20,000 bees, while organised bees can reside in colonies of up to 80,000 bees. The sole purpose of drone bees are to mate with queen and her sole purpose is to produce eggs. The queen lives 2 to 5 years, whereas drones live only about 8 weeks.

All housekeeping tasks in hive are performed by female worker bees, who constitute majority of hive. Most worker bees live about 6 weeks, except for those born in late fall, who will live until following spring. Worker bees have the barbed stinger that rips out of their abdomen upon use, which kills them and thus can be used only once. The queen's stinger is not barbed; therefore she does not die when she stings the rival.

The differences in function are manifest in varying body types among three castes of bees.

Honeybees and our diets

When most persons think about honeybees and what they contribute to our society, they expected believe only of honey. Honeybees however have the much larger impact in our lives through agriculture. Not only do they supply pollination to crop and vegetable plantings, but they furthermore pollinate crops we augment and feed to animals which we then eat or use for dairy merchandises. Without the healthy honeybee population and beekeepers who keep them, our lives would change dramatically in the very short period of time. For this reason alone, the great debt is owed to those who keep honeybees, make the living from them, and provide pollination services required for us to sustain quality of life we have today.

Why honeybees are primary pollination source for our crops.

There are other bees in nature that can provide pollination for plants we grow, but they cannot supply sheer volume of pollination required to maintain our current amount of consumption. This is because there are foremost dissimilarities between how honeybees and other bee species can be organised or kept by humans. Bumble bees, carpenter bees, and others can and do provide some of pollination we require, ...