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

Why Bees Are Important For The Ecosystem?

Why Bees are Important for the Ecosystem: The Humble Bee

It’s a nice warm spring morning. The birds are chirping, the wind gently brushes through the leaves, and the sun glimmers through the sky symbolizing the start of a beautiful spring. The flowers begin to bloom looking absolutely stunning! As you lean in to insufflate your lungs with the aroma of the blossoming lilies, a bee flies out from under the petals. You start to freak out and kill it with a book you were holding in your hand. What you fail to realize is the impact that bees hold in our very world. The benefits of bees that allow you to wake up every morning having food and fresh air. The impact that bees have, which trickle throughout our whole ecosystem.

Bees are the secret insects of our ecosystem. Many of the flowers in the world are pollinated by honeybees. Honeybees can take anywhere between seven to fourteen trips a day and pollinate upwards of fifty flowers on each trip! This means that a 25,000 colony of honeybees making 10 trips can easily pollinate around 250 million flowers!

This is huge and means that bees account for a large percentage of flower pollination that is essential to our daily lives. In fact, bees pollinate about one-third of the food we consume on a daily basis! Not only do they pollinate the food we consume, but they also pollinate the food that many cattle and farm animals eat. We end up eating that very same cattle and the vegetation.

Bee pollinating on a flower blossom

One thing that many people do not think about is that bees are also a major food source for animals like skunks, birds, and dragonflies – as if being a major producer was not enough. We greatly undervalue the impact that they hold in ecosystems, overlooking the benefits they have in society. Bee experts believe that we should stop using pesticides that kill bees to ensure that we keep having healthy yearly pollination.

Hold on that’s not all! Bees pollinate many of the trees we have that provide the oxygen we breathe – you know the fresh air we take in every day? The point is bees play a powerful role in our ecosystem and they should not be taken for granted. We should utilize this knowledge and do our best to protect them. Bees are used as an indicator of a healthy ecosystem.

If the bees in an environment are not healthy or they disappear, this is a warning that something severe is happening in that ecosystem. With 20,000 species of bees, the benefits that they provide are endless. Farmer’s utilize these different species of bees to perform different tasks. For instance, the red mason bee pollinates apple trees about one hundred times more efficient than regular honeybees and are often used by farmers for this very reason. The possibilities that bees provide go on and on and it is time we pay close attention to them. Without these marvelous insects, we would have much greater world hunger problems. Breathe in the fresh air and remember… the humble bee.

Author: Mathew Seelochan

University of Georgia

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.