The importance of honeybees

Hello – glad you’re here! The purpose of this blog is to educate! I’ll be talking about honey bees, how and why they are important to us, what some of the problems are that they face, and what we can do to help. This has been a pet project of mine for nearly a year now – but you can read more about me in my profile…I will include photos where I can, and educational links as they come up and are appropriate, so if you work with children through Scouting, or after school programs, or if you’re an educator, or perhaps you just want a better understanding of the articles you’ve been seeing in all the newspapers, then I hope you’ll find this blog helpful.

First of all, honeybees are incredible pollinators. What does that mean? Lets look at where our food really comes from. Approximately 72% of agricultural plants are pollinated in some way, and honeybees are responsible for about 80% of that. So, if you like chocolate, or almonds, tomatoes, plums, peaches, etc., then you have a honeybee most likely to thank for making that food available to you. In short, when a honeybee pollinates a plant, she is actually foraging for nectar and pollen for herself. But it’s a messy process, and she ends up with pollen all over her, stuck in the hairs of her body. (Remember this fact when we begin to talk about pesticide use) Some of this pollen drops off at the next flower when he lands, providing the other half of the genetic material necessary for the plant to produce a seed, or fruit, or vegetable. Without pollination, the plant doesn’t yield, and you don’t get a new plant.

Honeybees are not native to the US – they were imported from Europe by early American settlers. The Indians called them “white man’s flies”. They themselves had depended on wind pollination and native bees – some referred to as mason bees. Native bees do not produce honey.

Wheat is one of the plants pollinated by wind. Scientist now are trying to work with wheat to form other products that will taste and feel like fruits and vegetables. What does this tell you? That they are aware of the problems the honeybees face, and while many scientists are working to correct the problems, some are looking ahead in case of a worse case scenario. You see, bees are dying in large numbers, and scientists are baffled. We will talk more of this a bit later when we discuss Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). But for now, try imagining something like a food replicator – perhaps like one on Star Wars, where you walk up and say, “Strawberry”, and it hums and spits out a replicated strawberry. In my mind, it could never taste the same – and do they plan on injecting it with all the vitamins and minerals you would get from a real strawberry? For you Firefly fans, remember when Shepherd brought real strawberrys onto the ship? They were a delicacy to die for. Probably hand pollinated, but nonetheless real.

So this is why honeybees are important to us.

What you can do to help

So, given all of this – the question remains as to what can be done by the individual that will make the slightest impact on this huge, global problem.

In a nutshell, the answer is education. Educate yourself, educate others. If more people understood what is happening today, then hopefully better choices could be made, and when everyone is making better choices, great things can happen!

Follow the news, follow legislation, take care how you handle pesticides, and how your neighbor handles them as well.

Take a class, if you’re so inclined. I did. Many classes on beekeeping can be found in most cities. I took mine through Leisure Learning, and it was taught by Mr. Donald Burger, Vice President of the Houston Beekeeping Association. I found it to be very informative. In fact, the website for HAB is www.houstonbeekeepers.org, and he has a page on Africanized bee facts, if you’re interested.

You could start a backyard hive of your own, but take care to check your city ordinances. Some areas will not allow beekeeping, others will.

Create a pollinator garden of your own, or at your church, or with your local elementary school, junior high, or high school. This is what I did, and I combined educating the students, and area Girl Scouts, with planting and maintaining pollination gardens. The gardens serve to provide increased areas of foraging habitats to keep local honeybees healthy. Dadant is one company that provides beekeeping supplies, but they also have some great teaching tools (which is where I got mine for the classes I taught), such as coloring books, life cycle posters, incredible picture cards big enough to be seen from the back of a classroom with great info on the back – their website is www.dadant.com they also have an online catalogue. If you need patches, I found one that says “insects” but it shows a honeybee and a sunflower which was perfect for my needs. The website for the patch is www.advantageemblem.com. I looked for educational info that I might be able to use through Texas A & M, but didn’t find anything – perhaps they could assign a graduate student to develop one like Berkeley has which covers pollinator gardens and includes a study sheet your students can use to track bees once the garden has bloomed - nature.berkeley.edu/urbanbeegardens/ (don’t use www. on this address). While you’re surfing Berkeley urban bee gardens, be sure you go to their urban bee legend page – it has some great info. There is also a great website to use with your own children at www.fws.gov/pollinators/ which has posters, podcasts, activity guides, etc., and they include all pollinators, such as bats and hummingbirds, not just honeybees.

The next section of this blog will highlight my project “Bee Friendly”.