Why are bees important?
Bees are critical for pollinating plants that produce a significant range of food, including blueberries, almonds, and beans. The global value of insect pollination is estimated at €153 billion every year. Various creatures rely on bees for their own existence, including badgers, be eaters, and a whole host of other creatures that prey on or paralyze bees, as well as numerous wildflowers that depend on bees for pollination.
Bees have an excellent sense of smell, making them useful for detecting dangerous smells, such as explosives. Numerous bee species have extremely precise habitat requirements, and if that habitat undergoes a change, their populations will respond quickly, making them potentially good indicators of environmental disturbance, including climate change. Bees contribute to a whole load of ecosystem services, including providing us with food, maintaining biodiversity, fighting crime, acting as indicators of environmental change, and contributing to carbon sequestration and soil erosion prevention.
The decline in bees' population is due to various reasons, including changes in agriculture, the destruction of wildflower meadows, pesticide use, and humans trading bees around the world in tiny boxes causing the spread of disease. Therefore, it is crucial to take necessary measures to protect bees and their habitat to maintain the ecosystem's balance.
Video summary
• Bees are important for pollinating plants that produce a wide range of food worth €153 billion every year.
• Wildflower meadows have been plowed up, hedges have been ripped out, and pesticide use has increased causing a decline in wild pollinators across North America and Europe.
• Colony collapse disorder is causing honeybee hives to be abandoned.
• Bees are important for maintaining biodiversity.
• Bees are indicators of environmental disturbance, including climate change.
• Bees provide ecosystem services that go beyond pollination, including carbon sequestration and preventing erosion.
• Numerous creatures rely on bees for their own existence.
• Bees are important for tomato pollination, and if they die out, tomato growing could become unproductive.