Chain of Dependency: Bees

Bees

Ideally, bees are responsible for pollinating a significant percentage of commercially grown food globally. This means that bees are vital for sustaining the green natural environment that provides sustainability to humans.

Natural environment

Essentially, bees can thrive in the domesticated or natural environment. However, bees tend to thrive properly in natural spaces such as orchards, woodland, gardens, and meadows, among other areas characterised by an abundance of flowering plants. Coherently, bees have a high need for energy, which is critical for their survival. Much of what bees consume is sourced from nectar and pollen from various flowers. This means that bees exist in geographical environments with various forms of flowers that act as their food source. Nevertheless, numerous types of bees, such as the bumblebee, thrive in extremely cold environments.

Despite flowers, bees depend on their species, like humans and other insects/animals, for survival. The recent data indicate that there are more than twenty thousand different types of bees in the world. In addition to consuming nectar and pollen in flowers, most bees depend on their animal/ insect for their food. For instance, Mud daubers (Sceliphron caementarium) are known for hunting spiders for their young ones. Nonetheless, humans’ impact significantly on the dependency chain of being. Human activities, especially in farming, play a central role in the survivability of bees globally. As mentioned above, bees require pollution as the main source of food. Much of the pollution occurs in spaces in farmlands. This implies that the level of agricultural activities alone can significantly impact the population growth and decline of bee colonies. A recent study deduced that the population of being in the world is reducing because of the dwindling farmland resulting from artificial farming (Kline & Joshi, 2020). Thus humans play a key role in influencing the dependency chain of bees.

Reference

Kline, O., & Joshi, N. K. (2020). Mitigating the effects of habitat loss on solitary bees in agricultural ecosystems. Agriculture, 10(4), 115.