Why Are Bees Important?

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- [Narrator] Let's hear it for bees.

Bees provide free ecosystem services by pollinating many of our food and fiber crops.

These ecosystem services are ecological processes that benefit humans and are provided by nature at no cost.

Because pollinators like bees provide this free service to agricultural systems, it is possible to estimate how much it would cost to our economy if production stop on these animal-pollinated crops.

And researchers have estimated these costs to be over $160 billion every year globally.

This is more than the gross domestic product of many small countries.

A good example of a pollinator-dependent crop is apples.

Apples are completely dependent on bees for pollination.

To produce fruit, apple flowers must receive pollen grains from a different apple variety.

For example, when you're eating a honey crisp apple, that fruit is the result of a honey crisp flower that received pollen from a different type of apple, perhaps a crab apple.

Apple flowers are visited by many kinds of bees, including honeybees, bumblebees, mason bees, and mining bees.

There are many other examples of pollinator-dependent crops that rely on bees for pollination services.

These include cherries, pumpkins, squashes, melons, watermelons, and blueberries, some of our summertime favorites.

If bees and other pollinating insects were to disappear, it would be necessary to hand-pollinate many of our crops for plants to be able to produce the fruits and vegetables we eat.

Unfortunately, this is already happening in some parts of the world.

Recent reports estimate that insect populations have declined by 45% in the past 40 years.

And that is the result of multiple interacting factors, including poor nutrition, pesticide exposure, disease pressure, and climate change.

This means that we have far fewer bees and insect available to pollinate our crops these days.

We need to keep trying to enhance bee populations and stop their decline.

One way to do so is by providing as much bee-friendly vegetation for them as we can.

Next time you eat an apple, thank a bee.

So again, let's hear it for bees and the things they do for us without asking anything in return.

Find out what you can do to help save our pollinators by talking to your local extension agent.