Why bees are important for the ecosystem — Anne’s student essay

Why Bees Are Important For The Ecosystem?

In life we depend on fruits and vegetables for a stable diet and on flora and fauna to bring beauty into the world. All other living organisms depend on these plants as well to provide habitats, food, and other necessities to live a healthy life. Bees are fundamental to sustaining plants and therefore to sustaining life. They, along with other pollinators, ensure that our world stays healthy and thus allow all life on Earth to continue and ultimately thrive.

Around the world, bees are responsible for a third of the pollination that takes place and visit, “more than ninety percent of the leading global crop types,” according to Friends of the Earth. Pollination is when a pollinator, insect that is responsible for this environmental function, transfers pollen from the anther, male part of the flower, to the stigma, female part of the flower. 

This process helps plants diversify and grow. Although we could survive without bees, we would have far duller diets and far less species of plants worldwide. This would also lead to less species of animals as some depend on certain plants to sustain their life. Diversification, the intermixing of DNA among a species, is needed in the environment or species will go extinct.

Bee pollinating on a flower blossom

This starts with plants, thanks to the work of bees, and their flourishing allows for the primary consumers to fulfill their needs and diversify, and from there the pattern continues. Overall, the diversity pollination by bees allows for diversity all the way up the food chain and a fuller life for all those who rely on their work-everyone and everything.

Bees are also necessary because their work provides habitats for many animals in their ecosystem. All animals in the wild rely on plants as not only their food source, but also their home. Those that reside in the woods live in trees that are and were pollinated by bees, in meadows, the flowers are the result of bees’ work, in the prairies and savannahs bees do their job. 

In all of these locations and so many others the result of the twenty-thousand species of bees, according to Earthday.org, are responsible for the health of their ecosystem. They are especially important to the protection of trees since the bees are protected from threats on the ground such as brush fires on the savannah or honey-eating animals in a forest. In this exchange, they also help the tree by offering a defense system given that they have a stinger, other than pollination of course. Thus, bees provide shelter for animals in thousands of different ecosystems.

Bees are much needed to help create a healthier and more diverse environment since they provide pollination and from that food, habitats, protection, biodiversity, and so much more. Their work has allowed ecosystems across the world to flourish and evolve. Bees are needed to make Earth a habitable place full of healthy and delicious foods, amazing flowers and trees, and millions of species of animals, none of which could survive on the same level without them.

Author: Anne Lammes

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Student Scholarships

Every year Thrive Pest Control hosts an essay contest and the reward is a 1-year scholarship at a 4-year university in the United States. This blog post is one of those scholarships.