Bees have multiple benefits in addition to the production of honey.
Pollination is no less important than the production of honey
Pollination is the process by which pollen is transferred in plants, thereby enabling fertilization and sexual reproduction.Pollen grains, which contain the male gametes (sperm) to where the female gamete(s) are contained within the carpel;[1] in gymnosperms the pollen is directly applied to the ovule itself. The receptive part of the carpel is called a stigma in the flowers of angiosperms. The receptive part of the gymnosperm ovule is called the micropyle. Pollination is a necessary step in the reproduction of flowering plants, resulting in the production of offspring that are genetically diverse.
The process of pollination requires pollinators: organisms that carry or move the pollen grains from the anther to the receptive part of the carpel or pistil. This is biotic pollination. There are roughly 200,000 varieties of animal pollinators in the wild, most of which are insects. Pollination management is a branch of agriculture that seeks to protect and enhance present pollinators and often involves the culture and addition of pollinators in monoculture situations, such as commercial fruit orchards. The largest managed pollination event in the world is in Californian almond orchards, where nearly half (about one million hives) of the US honey bees are trucked to the almond orchards each spring. New York's apple crop requires about 30,000 hives; Maine's blueberry crop uses about 50,000 hives each year.
Bees are also brought to commercial plantings of cucumbers, squash, melons, strawberries, and many other crops. Honey bees are not the only managed pollinators: a few other species of bees are also raised as pollinators. The alfalfa leafcutter bee is an important pollinator for alfalfa seed in western United States and Canada. Bumblebees are increasingly raised and used extensively for greenhouse tomatoes and other crops.
We have only a vague idea about the life of bees, the origin and meaning of their intelligence. However, the simple life of bees is highly intelligent and organized. People can learn a lot about the way Nature works. For example, the building of a honey comb - it is structured exactly along the lines of information-energy streams in the Universe and the Earth discovered by modern science. The "social organization" of bees is also eye opening. Watch the video below to see how clever and practical bees are in applying perfect geometrical forms to minimize the use of energy and maximize the result of their hard work. Who taught them these secrets?
Police and military personnel have been using dogs to sniff out explosives for decades. According to scientists from the Defense Advanced Research Laboratory (DARPA), who have been working with honeybees since 1999, bees can actually challenge dogs when it comes to sense of smell. Those same, buzzing insects that seek out molecular hints of the pollen they use to make honey can just as easily detect other minute particles in the air, including traces of materials used to make bombs. So how do you train them to respond to TNT the way they respond to pollen?
With the bees strapped into small tubes, scientists involved in the Stealthy Insect Sensor Project release the smell of chemical components used to make explosives like dynamite, C-4 and liquid bombs. Expecting the sugar water to follow, each trained bee extends its proboscis, which starts waving in the air, searching for nectar. It's this obvious response that makes this particular training method so useful. By containing the bees in an enclosed structure, researchers can use monitoring equipment to alert to the waving of the proboscises. In this case, a digital camera combined with pattern-recognition software can pick up the waving and indicate the presence of explosives in the vicinity. The portable structure makes it ideal for testing in airports, subway stations and at roadside checkpoints in war zones like Iraq. The bees can detect the target chemicals in the air in concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion.
The same way you train any animal to do almost anything: by associating a particular stimulus with a reward. With Pavlov's dog, associating the sound of a bell with the smell of food caused the dog to drool when the bell rang. With honeybees at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where researchers are conducting the most recent military studies with bees, associating the smell of bomb ingredients with sugar water causes the bees to extend their proboscis, as if they were about to extract sweet nectar from a flower, when they smell explosives. And it doesn't take very long. Bees who are going to get the association get it quickly, after only a few exposures to vaporized explosives ingredients followed by the sugar water.
Years earlier, a DARPA-funded project trained honeybees to be attracted to explosives instead of pollen using the same sugar-water-reward process. This study trained them to swarm around the location of the scent of 2,4-dinitrotoluene, a chemical residue left by several different types of bombs. The uncontained bees worked very well in small, outdoor areas, where security guards could easily see where they were swarming, but were harder to track when they were used to detect explosives in large, uncontained spaces. So researchers fitted the bees with tiny radio transmitters to find them -- and the bomb -- when they swarmed. Uncontained, trained bees wouldn't be very welcome at airport security checkpoints, but they could potentially work wonders in a war zone.
Researchers at Los Alamos are also training bees to sniff out drugs like methamphetamine and cocaine.
For more information on bomb-sniffing bees and related topics, check out the following links:
Scientists have discovered that the structure of the information-energy streams (called sometimes "fields") is identical to that of the honeycomb. However, instead of observing the laws of Nature and learning from it, including the life of bees, people have invented countless means and ways to exploit bees and slowly destroy them.
An alarming trend in recent years is the quick reduction of bees in all parts of the world - the so called Colony Collapse.
In the spring of 2007, news agencies all around the world began to report on a disturbing phenomenon in the bee population. According to reports, beekeepers were visiting their hives to discover that their bees had disappeared. Sometimes, the queen and a few newly-hatched bees were all that remained. The beekeepers found no evidence of predators that feed on bees, like wasps and mammals that like honey. They also didn't see a lot of dead bees or evidence of bee diseases like chalkbrood or foulbrood, which attack the developing bee larvae, or of any of the species of mites that attack developing or fully grown bees. Based on this evidence, it seemed unlikely that the bees had gotten sick and died. On the other hand, many beekeepers reported that moths, animals and other bees steered clear of the newly-empty nests, at least for a few days. This usually happens when bees die because of disease or chemical contamination.
Many of the news reports were alarming. They described beekeepers losing more than half of their bees and explained the importance of honeybees in the pollination of food crops. Some articles implied that the disappearance of the bees would lead to widespread starvation. Others quoted Albert Einstein as saying that humans would follow within four years if bees became extinct.
It's highly unlikely that Einstein ever made his now-notorious statement on bees, but Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is a real phenomenon. It has the potential to dramatically impact food and honey production, but it's more complex than some of the reports make it out to be. First, CCD has primarily affected domestic, commercial honeybees - those that are raised exclusively for producing honey and pollinating crops. It seems to affect bees from hives that are moved from place to place in order to pollinate crops. Commercial honeybees make up a tiny portion of the overall bee population. Other types of bees, including Africanized honeybees, do not seem to be affected.
The way we heal naturally (honey being one of the best remedies) is also going to be affected, if bees disappear.
Read more here
Do you have something to say?
Do you find the information on this page useful? Do you have a personal or family holistic recipe?
Share it!
Write your own story - you have a full page to load with text or images.
I have to warn you: the knowledge contained here is not intended to replace your doctor's advice and is only for educational purposes.
Disappearing Bees: Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)
BACK
