Why Bees Are Important For The Ecosystem?
Imagine this: You wake up in the morning and pour yourself a hot cup of French vanilla coffee, you make some waffles topped with sweet strawberries and honey. You then sit down and enjoy your meal without giving much thought of how the food in front of you came to be. You decide to go for a walk in a beautiful green park full of trees and flowers; who is to thank for the beautiful nature we have around us? We do not often think about how our food came to be or how it is that flowers bloom in a thriving ecosystem. Truth be told, we owe it all to bees because they make life in an ecosystem possible.
Bees are pollinators, which means they take pollen from flowers and disperse that pollen to different flowers. When pollination happens, new flowers can bloom. This process of pollination and production of new plants will result in a thriving ecosystem which is made up of living and non-living factors.
Let us take a blueberry bush as an example to further explain the important role bees take in an ecosystem. A blueberry bush in a forest has just began to bloom with flowers that will soon become blueberries. Bees will be attracted to these flowers and collect nectar from them, the bees will then move on to the next blueberry flower to collect nectar, however while they do this they bring along traces of pollen and in the process of collecting nectar from different flowers they interchange the pollen of different flowers.
This pollen exchange results in the fertilization of the flowers which will now become blueberries. These blueberries will become food for squirrels, deer, and other small animals. Furthermore, those same squirrels, and deer will become for other predators and so forth. So, we can see that bees will cause a chain of reactions within an ecosystem.
Along side pollination, bees also cause biodiversity in an ecosystem. Biodiversity means there exists a wide variety of plants in a given area, and a higher biodiversity level in an ecosystem means an ecosystem will be rich. Biodiversity is important because this brings along different types of plants animals can eat because they pollinate different plants. Every ecosystem has bees which help its trees and plants flourish. Bees support the growth of trees which are homes to many animals.
Aside from the wildlife that bees make possible, our way of agriculture relies heavily on bees. There is a reason that farmers invest millions in maintain hives for bees, it is mostly because bees greatly increase productivity on a farm. Bees take on their usual role of pollinators on a crop farm making the crops profitable for farmers. Bees and farmers have a mutually beneficial relationship, much like the relationship that bees share with our ecosystems.
Bees are the most important organisms in an ecosystem because they are the factor that makes life for everything else in an ecosystem possible. As we can see through the couple examples explained, bees bring life to our ecosystems and ecosystems would cease to exist without the help of bees. Their huge role in our environment is why we as people must do what we can to preserve their status. If bees were to go extinct, our way of life and the life of our planet would perish along with the bees.
