How Do Bees Help Flowers

Bees are vital to a healthy surroundings and healthy economic system. They're too merely cute and fascinating little insects. But what makes them so special?

The need for bees

We demand bees. We may have them and other pollinators similar butterflies and hoverflies for granted, but they're vital to stable, healthy food supplies and cardinal to the varied, colourful and nutritious diets we demand (and have come up to expect).

Bees are perfectly adjusted to pollinate, helping plants abound, breed and produce food. They exercise and so by transferring pollen between flowering plants and therefore keeping the bicycle of life turning.

The vast majority of plants we need for food rely on pollination, especially past bees: from almonds and vanilla to apples and squash. Bees also pollinate around 80% of wildflowers in Europe, so our countryside would be far less interesting and beautiful without them.

But bees are in trouble. There's growing public and political concern at bee decline across the globe. This reject is caused by a combination of stresses – from loss of habitat and food sources to exposure to pesticides and the effects of climate breakdown.

More than e'er earlier, we need to recognise the importance of bees to nature and to our lives. And we need to plough that into action to ensure they don't just survive but thrive.

Types of bee

Not all bees are the same. There are over twenty,000 known species of bee globally. Around 270 species of bee accept been recorded in the U.k.. Only 1 of these is the famous Honeybee.

Near Honeybees are kept past beekeepers in colonies of managed hives. The residue of our bees are wild, including 25 bumblebee species and more than 220 types of solitary bee.

Like Honeybees, the familiar Bumblebees live in social colonies - unremarkably in holes in the ground or tree cavities.

Solitary bees tend to nest on their ain, as the name suggests. Each female builds and provisions her own nest with nutrient. Solitary bees include Mining bees which nest in the ground, too every bit Mason bees and Leafcutter bees that nest in holes in dead wood, banks and walls.

Learn more than with our bee identification guide.

Bees = perfect pollinators

Thanks to bees we can bask a range of foods from apples and pears to coffee and vanilla. And if y'all are wearing cotton, that's because the cotton plant your threads came from was pollinated.

"More than 90% of the leading global ingather types are visited by bees."

Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)

Bees gather pollen to stock their nests as nutrient for their young. They have special features to collect information technology - like branched hairs chosen 'scopae' or combs of bristles called pollen baskets on their legs. As bees visit plants seeking nutrient, pollen catches on their bodies and passes between plants, fertilising them – that's pollination.

Bees are non the world's but pollinators. Flies, wasps, moths, beetles and even some birds, bats and lizards all pollinate, but they just visit flowers plenty to feed themselves. Because they gather pollen to stock their nests, bees are more often than not the nearly effective pollinators since they visit many more flowers and behave more pollen between them.

Some bee species are also specially adult to pollinate particular plants and without them those plants would be less well-pollinated.

Garden bumblebee sipping teasel © Rory Dimond

Bees and farmers

Many bees have different characteristics that make them suited to pollinate certain plants. For example, the Early bumblebee's small size and agility permit it to enter plants with drooping flowers such as comfrey. Garden bumblebees are better at pollinating the deep flowers of honeysuckle and foxgloves than nearly other species because their longer tongue tin reach deep inside them.

Many farmers rely on a diversity of bees to pollinate their produce. For instance, commercial apple tree growers benefit from the gratuitous pollination services of the Red mason bee. This species tin can be 120 times more efficient at pollinating apple blossoms than honeybees.

There is evidence that natural pollination by the right type of bee improves the quality of the crop - from its nutritional value to its shelf life. For case, bumblebees and lonely bees feed from unlike parts of strawberry flowers. In combination they produce bigger, juicier and more evenly-shaped strawberries.

Some bee species take an affinity to particular plants, so need particular natural habitats. For example, in the UK the scabious bee, our largest mining bee, needs the pollen of field scabious or minor scabious to provision its immature. These plants grow on sandy or chalky open grassland, an of import habitat for a variety of bees and wildflowers that is under threat from changing land apply. The loss of particular habitats like this is the chief commuter of bee decline.

Red mason bee on apple blossom © Sweetaholic/390 Images

Bees are important for more than honey

In a globe without bees we would probably survive. Simply our existence would be more precarious and our diets would be irksome, poorer and less nutritious. And not just for want of honey.

Even some plants grown to feed to livestock for meat production, such as clover and alfalfa, depend at to the lowest degree partly on bee pollination.

"Loss of pollinators could lead to lower availability of crops and wild plants that provide essential micro-nutrients for human diets, impacting wellness and nutritional security and risking increased numbers of people suffering from vitamin A, iron and folate deficiency."

Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)

Governments and food producers talk a lot almost food security, yet without bees our food supply would be insecure. The United nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) identified encouraging pollinators - particularly bees - as one of the best sustainable means to boost food security and support sustainable farming.

All this natural crop pollination fills pockets likewise every bit our bellies. The global market place value linked to pollinators is betwixt US$235bn and US$557bn each year. In the UK lone, the services of bees and other pollinators are worth £691m a yr, in terms of the value of the crops they pollinate. It would cost the UK at to the lowest degree £1.8bn a year to employ people to do the work of these pollinators, notwithstanding bees practise it for gratis.

Bees are important to a healthy environment

Bees are a fantastic symbol of nature. That they are in trouble is a sign that our natural environment is not in the expert shape it should exist.

By keeping the cycle of life turning, bees heave the colour and dazzler of our countryside. Some lxxx% of European wildflowers require insect pollination. Many of them such equally foxglove, clovers and vetches rely on bees.

Pollinators allow plants to fruit, set seed and brood. This in plough provides food and habitat for a range of other creatures. So the health of our natural ecosystems is fundamentally linked to the health of our bees and other pollinators.

Maintaining our native flora besides depends on good for you pollinator populations. This includes wild flowers such as poppies, cornflowers and bluebells, likewise as trees and shrubs. The close human relationship between pollinators and the plants they pollinate is axiomatic in the parallel declines seen across the UK and Europe: 76% of plants preferred by bumblebees have declined in recent decades, with 71% seeing contractions in their geographical range.

Donate today and go everything you need to create a haven for bees and pollinating insects.