Operation Bee

While searching the internet, I came across this interesting website dedicated to the protection of bees. As crucial aspect of our ecosystem, and seeing as SAS is current working on a Community Garden, it is particularly important for the us to understand why bees are so important.

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Why save bees?

The website outlines 3 main reasons why we should save the bees: food security, biodiversity, and the economy.

Food Security:

Say goodbye to meat and dairy products too

• One-third of the global food supply is provided by bees.
• Without bees, say goodbye to these essential foods. Can you imagine a diet of only wheat and rice?

• Say goodbye to meat and dairy products too.
• Bees also provide forage legumes, such as alfalfa. These crops are widely grown throughout the world for cattle, especially for high producing dairy cows. In fact, alfalfa actually accounts for 80% of the total economic value of bees. Without bees, there will be a significant shortage of meat and dairy products because of the inadequate production of cattle feed.
• Global malnutrition is coming
• Of the 100 crop species which provide 90% of food worldwide, 71 are provided by bees. This means that without bees, a lack of dietary diversity will make it extremely difficult to acquire the essential vitamins and nutrients we need to survive.
• Bees provide us with foods that contain the majority of the available dietary lipid, vitamin A, C and E, and a large portion of the minerals calcium, fluoride, and iron worldwide. Bees also provide the whole quantity of Lycopene and almost the full quantity of the antioxidants b-cryptoxanthin and b-tocopherol, and related carotenoids, and a large portion of folic acid.
• As a result, bee declines may drastically impact the provision of nutritionally adequate diets for the global human population. Regions like Europe would be more affected. However, developing nations are at the highest risk because they are already vulnerable to food and nutrient shortages.

The timeline below illustrates how a world without bees is truly a world without people.

Biodiversity:

“Daily reports document the tiniest rise and fall of the stock market or the price of currency. Yet the services of nature such as filtration of water, absorption of carbon dioxide and release of oxygen, protection against erosion and many others that keep the planet habitable for predators like us are virtually ignored. Pollination keeps the terrestrial ecosystems going, and without pollination those systems would collapse. A world without bees would be a world without people” – David Suzuki

Bees are actually a keystone and indicator species for biodiversity. This means that the rapid losses of bees indicate severe environmental degradation. As a result, these declines are a vital factor in the present collapse of biodiversity. It is so threatening that seven in ten biologists believe that this collapse is a greater threat to us than global warming. Every decade, we are losing between 1-10% of biodiversity. In fact, more than 20,000 flowering plant species that bees depend on for food could be lost in the coming decades.

Economy:

“The total economic value of pollination worldwide amounted to €153 billion, which represented 9.5% of the value of the world agricultural production used for human food in 2005”.

Honey bees are the most economically valuable pollinators. In 2005, they pollinated €153 billion-worth of human food, representing 9.5% of the total agricultural production value. Without bees, many fruit, seed and nut yields would decrease by 90%. In fact, the value of beef and dairy products that come from forage legumes accounts for 7.6% of the total agricultural production value, about 80% of the pollinated production value.

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For more information about their cause, visit www.operationbee.com. On their "Get Involved" page, they suggest that people Grow Organic, Eat Organic, and Think Organic. In the future, I will be referencing articles from their blog [http://www.operationbee.com/blog/]