#theirimpact

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https://visual.ly/tag/honeybee 

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Birds vs. bees: Study helps explain how flowers evolved to get pollinators to specialize

Ecologists who study flowering plants have long believed that flowers evolved with particular sets of characteristics—unique combinations of colors, shapes, and orientations, for example—as a means of attracting specific pollinators. But a recent paper in the journal Ecology suggests that flowers that are visited almost exclusively by hummingbirds are actually designed not to lure birds, but to deter bumblebees and their wasteful visits.

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Bees and Their Impact on Your Daily Coffee

By Caroline Markham Chances are you rolled out of bed this morning, and the first thing that you did was start up a pot of coffee. Americans

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The under-appreciated workers who really produce our crops

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, bees pollinate about 80 percent of our flowering crops, which constitute about one-third of everything we eat. Losing these tiny workers would not only impact our agricultural industry and result in us losing many of our dietary staples, but would also impact the beef and diary industries if their feed becomes unavailable. A study done by Cornell found that honeybees pollinate $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the U.S every year. So essentially, if bees disappear, they would take almost all of our insect-pollinated plants with them.

Bees are the single most impactful agents of cross-pollination, and many plants are entirely dependent on different species of bees for pollination. On many American farms, insecticides for agricultural pest control have been quickly killing the bees that are necessary for maintaining crops. These environmental stresses devastated bee populations in the US, making farmers have to rent bees from bee keepers in order to get their crops pollinated, which greatly affects the pollination of plants in the wild.

The Department of Agriculture also did a study where they found that in 2015, bees in managed colonies, which are colonies used by farmers, had decreased by 42%. The magic number in beekeeping is 18.7%. Any population losses below that level are fairly sustainable; lose any more, though, and the colony is headed toward zero. A startling two-thirds of beekeepers in a USDA survey in 2015 reported losses way above the threshold, meaning the pollination industry was in big trouble. 

Albert Einstein is sometimes quoted as saying, “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.” Though there is no concrete evidence that it was Einstein who said this, there is a kernel of truth in the famous misquote. If we do not take care of our busy bees, we will, for sure, loose Earth as we know it.

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Some useful things bees do for us

Bee venom has medicinal properties, can be used for treating arthritis, multiple sclerosis and even fibromyalgia, sexual dysfunction, cancer, epilepsy and depression.

Make sure our crops are thriving

Help flowers spread

Bee products like honey and royal jelly can reduce the growth and spread of cancerous tumors

Make life a lot sweeter with their honey

Can help to predict storms by using the Earth’s magnetic field to detect storms’ electromagnetic waves