by Nikole Shahbazian
Originally published February 12, 2016
In case you haven’t heard, bees are incredible, resilient creatures. Without bees, the world really wouldn’t look the same as it does today. The existence of diverse ecological systems worldwide wouldn’t exist, and neither would our current food system.
Honeybees help aid in the growth of plants and flowers by pollination. Pollination is the transfer of pollen from the anther of the plant to the stigma. When this happens, a plant’s fruit/seed/nut is formed… so bees essentially help a plant have sex by itself.
Bees are also loving creatures, although the love might seem a bit odd to humans.
Bees like the humans who take good care of them. Bees can detect human faces, which means they can recognize, and build trust with their human caretakers.
When the bee colony decides that the queen bee is slowing down too much, they may begin to breed new queens. The first new born queen that hatches must kill the old queen bee and all the other hatching queen bees.
Bees perform special dances to indicate the location and amount of food to other bees in the colony.
Bees just really love honey, and they’ll go to any length to get it. Sometimes, when the honey production is running low in their own hive, they’ll decide to steal honey from a nearby competing colony.
Male bees, or drones, are kinda disposable: after the drones mate with the queen, they are kept out of the hive so as not to disturb the important work that the female worker bees and the queen performs.
Without bees, at least 400 agricultural plant species/foods wouldn’t exist.
Did you know that 1 out of 6 of the world’s flowering plant species wouldn’t exist without bees?
A single honey bee can pollinate tens of thousands of flowers in a day, and an entire colony of bees can effectively pollinate millions of flowers a day.
Bees are basically the reason why we live in a colorful, beautiful world.
Thank you, bees.
On that note…
ONEArmenia’s current campaign aims at bringing beehives to the village of Baghanis, in Armenia.
…Did you know you could make a donation on bee-half of your significant other as a Valentine’s day gift? Read all about it!
