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On What Species Should Our Bee Conservation Efforts be Focused?
Pollinators, and specifically bees, contribute greatly to the world's agricultural industries and help maintain biodiversity. With the current threats to native bees and honey bees, it is important to focus on ways to conserve their habitats and health.
The Issue:
Typical commercial honeybee hive
In the past few years, bee conservation has been one of the leading environmental issues, for good reason. While the focus on bees has been recent and primarily focused on European honey bees, the problem is much more widespread than that. Bees are an integral part of the agricultural industries, provide jobs, and increase biodiversity. In the agricultural industry, honey bees are used to pollinate and increase yield primarily for plants that flower, like melons, squashes, and tree-bearing fruit, but can be used for any plant. Overall, pollinators can be attributed to pollinating about 75 percent of crop types globally (Nicholls et. al., 2020). This widespread use creates beekeeping jobs where the beekeepers can provide their bees and knowledge, but also can sell the honey and wax that honey bees produce. Additionally, honey bees are transportable and can be moved to cities and urban areas that need an increase in biodiversity.
However, honey bees aren't the only bees. A vast majority of the bee species in the world are native, solitary bees. Solitary bees prefer to live and forage on their own and are very docile. Most of the bees that are native to North America are solitary, except for bumblebees. Native bees are much more effective in pollinating their native plants and are often essential for the health of the local ecosystem. Since native bees are not as well known, they tend to be overlooked in favor of honey bees, when in fact native bees can be in more danger than honey bees.
Sweat Bee, a common native pollinator to Maryland
Currently, the major factors of overall bee decline are climate change, habitat loss, pesticides and herbicides, and pathogens (Nicholls et. al., 2020). However, our major inhibiting factor above all this is our knowledge of the patterns and lifestyles of bees, especially solitary and native bees. Of the nearly 20,000 bee species found so far, only a tiny fraction has been studied in depth. Even from the 50 “managed bee” species or ones that can be bred and kept by humans, there is still much to know (Potts et. al., 2016). Most bee scientists and conservationists agree that a top priority is increasing our knowledge of bees so that we can protect them from pathogens and know how to maintain native habitats.
With all this in mind, a question arises: If we are to save the bees, what is the best first step? There are many opinions on how to solve this problem, only three popular ones focus on what specific type of bees conservation efforts should be centered around. These three stakeholders will be highlighted here. The chart below explains them:
We should focus first on conserving honey bees to help preserve the agricultural industry
We should focus first on conserving native bees to help combat climate change and increase biodiversity
It is detrimental to focus one type of bee or another because conservation efforts used by both categories are beneficial to all bee species.
In order to protect honey bees, we should advocate for reduced pesticide and herbicide use.
We can increase bee habitats by creating more green spaces especially in urban enviroments
This can also increase the frequency of native plants and biodiverse green spaces
The last page, suggested reading, is a list of four academic sources and one TedTalk regarding bees and their importance. Feel free to read them for a more in depth understanding of bee conservation and its impacts. Additionally, all images are from the public domain section of Flickr.
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