These benefits would seem an obvious idea and there is nothing to talk about because we all know that bees are very useful for humans - they make honey! Besides honey, there are also other beekeeping products: propolis, royal jelly, wax, bee venom, bee bread, comb capping, mud, pollen, male bee homogenate, male bee milk and even dead bees. Everything has its benefit - both for health and for beauty care. And it is just great to enjoy delicious honey or have some mead – no one will refuse, right?
However, there are more significant benefits that the honey bee provides to humanity.
First is food
Of course, a bee is not a cow, it does not give meat and milk. However, without pollination of agricultural plants, (and honey bees are the most important pollinators on the planet), there would not be such a number of fruits, vegetables, nuts and berries produced in agricultural industry and in summer vegetable gardens. There would be no high-quality seeds used for growing animal feed in the process of breeding. There would be no flower plants, which are nice to look at and which are useful in pharmaceuticals and cosmetology.
Many agricultural crops need bee pollination in order to grow and increase the volume of fruits. They are rapeseed, sunflower, mustard, sweet clover, clover, sainfoin, melon, pumpkin, watermelon, caraway seeds, coriander, anise, buckwheat, apple tree, pear tree, cherry tree, sweet cherry tree, plum tree, peach tree, apricot tree, almond tree, cucumbers, vegetable marrow, onion, cabbage, turnip, radish, viburnum, currant, raspberry, blueberry, cranberry, blackberry, lupine, phacelia, lemon balm, dandelion, rose, chamomile, tarragon, lungwort, mountain ash, cotton. And this is not the full list yet. Of more than 120 crops, about 70 are pollinated by bees. Therefore, almost every third part of the food we eat every day need to be pollinated by these small and wonderful insects.
Second is economy
Bees provide jobs and the way to earn money for many people. And it's not just about the beekeeping industry which is completely dependent on bees. And it’s not even about the accompanying industries that provide beekeepers and beekeeping with everything they need. The most important thing is the additional amount of food that people get as a result of bee pollination. Thanks to these insects, the yield of field crops increases by 30-60%, not to mention fruit trees.
Such a substantial yield increase provides the need for additional working places, machinery and mechanisms, facilities and energy resources. And this affects employment processes in related industries that produce machinery, refrigeration and storage equipment, processing facilities, vehicles, fuel, and electricity. Moreover, it is not the whole list of industries and services that are related to agriculture and so-called “food basket”. So, how often do we think about the fact that this huge economic process is supported by a humble and barely visible hardworker - the honey bee?
Third is health
Thanks to bee pollination, we have more than just food. We get a variety of high-quality fruits, nuts, berries, seeds, which enrich our diet with a sufficient number of vitamins, minerals, and structural elements. And this, of course, has the most positive effect on our health, not to mention good emotions from enjoying the taste and the smell.
The medicinal properties of honey and bee products are also well known. They have a restorative and tonic effect, help people to recover from infectious diseases, neuro-emotional overstrain and physical fatigue. A huge amount of literature is devoted to the healing properties of bee products, which can be easily found on bookshelves or on the Internet.
Fourth is ecology
The bee cannot improve the ecological situation by its existence. Only people can do that: we pollute the nature ourselves, so we should clean it ourselves as well. Bees can only show the humanity how much the nature around us is disturbed by industrialization. If a bee is alive, then the air is fresh, the water is clean, and the soil is not so polluted. However, when the bee habitat gets worse, these insects tell us about it by their death.
Overindustrialization, pesticides, environmental destruction and climate change are the main reasons for the decline in honeybee numbers, says Sabiha Rumani Malik, the founder and executive president of the World Bee Project, which aims to monitor the health of bees around the planet.
The number of bee families and, accordingly, bees in general has been decreasing for many decades. I don’t want to believe it, but there can be a moment when bees will become so few in numbers that they will no longer be able to serve those huge areas of agricultural crops that feed the ever-increasing humanity. Then there will be very serious economic and social consequences indeed. Many people who work in such industries as agriculture, the processing industry, agricultural engineering, the production of fertilizers, fuel, seeds and many other resources for agriculture, may lose their jobs due to a sharp decrease in the volume of food produced. Due to this decrease, the cost will increase and the quality will decrease. Honey and other beekeeping products will become very expensive and inaccessible, as well as medicines and cosmetics that are created with raw materials dependent on bees and pollination of plants. There will not be that variety of fruits and berries that we have now, and there will not be that number of wildflowers that bloom so beautifully and smell so good in meadows, woods and forest edges.
All these unpleasant things will continue to happen due to the ecology increasingly changing to the worse. Bees dies because of this, after all. And when there are fewer things of vital importance, prices are rising, and the standard of living is falling down, it is time to have social uneasiness.
This situation can happen if everything is left as it is now, when no action is taken. There is a question: what can we do to save the bees? Now it is easy to understand what a huge role a bee plays, and what will happen if the bees disappear for good? We will tell you about the way of helping bees and ourselves in the next article.