Bees And The Perilous Future They Face
While they may be annoying and potentially dangerous, bees are also undeniably useful for our survival.
“More than 90% of the leading global crop types are visited by bees.”
— Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)
90% of our potential crops mean almost all the things humans eat and love. Not to mention, bees being excellent pollinators, help in the growth and development of various wild plants. Some hungry bumblebees even crunch on pollen-rich leaves thus helping the plant grow quicker. This means a massive amount of plant life and our food is partially grown by bees. This all is nice and dandy until you find a little in the whole issue:
Bees are dying at a quick pace. And the effects are not out of sight. While the short term effects of the predicament would be invisible, in the long term, it can even lead to global famines and millions of death. Many bees (not all) use the pollens they collect from these flowers and produce honey with them. Honey is one of the most nutritious food products and natural honey never goes bad. Some honey samples are older than several thousand years!
Imagine a world where food, perhaps the only thing on which the world isn’t divided, becomes so scarce that even easy to grow crops take 10 times the efforts and food is super expensive. 80% of European flowers require intervention from bees to prosper.
So what is it that we as humans can do to save the little fat winged creatures?
- We should start by giving our best shot at climate change.
- Making bees a part of our whole agricultural ecology would help in ushering in new ways of using bees.
- Flowers should be viewed in a new way. A way in which they themselves are not a product but a catalyst for other products.
- More public talk about bees!
I am sure we would like to taste more honey in the future and farm some more crops. Let’s get there together, together with the bees.
Anything that has ever helped humans in any way has been taken advantage of. Bees need nothing from us and would probably not even bat an eye if humans were to disappear suddenly. It is high time for us humans to take the issues of climate seriously and the issues that come with it. Taking baby steps will definitely get us there! The bee movie was bad but it made us talk about bees nonetheless. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as they say then! Only time will tell.
