bees

Bees are a lifeline for farms producing the world’s fruits, vegetables, nuts and other nutrient-rich foods. Bees pollinate billions of dollars’ worth of crops and play an essential role in our food supply. Pollinators are responsible for one in every three bites of food we eat and contribute more than $15 billion to our nation's crop values each year.

At Halloween, people revel in ghosts, goblins, and things that go bump in the night. Not all are in books or movies, though. There are plenty of creepy critters doing downright scary things every day in your own backyard.

Everyone wants healthy, thriving honey bee colonies. One-third of the food we eat requires pollinators, and commercial beekeepers transport honey bees hundreds of miles each year to pollinate almond trees and other crops.

Researchers have been working for well over a decade to enhance the health of pollinators and now beekeepers, citizen scientists, and anyone interested in pollinator health can join in using a new online tool, Beescape.

She leans over her dead subject and deftly pushes a pin through its body, securing it to the foam below. To be clear, this is not about a morgue or a serial killer. This is about taxonomy, or the science of identifying, classifying, and naming organisms. The woman in question is a scientist, and her pinned subject is a bee.

About one mouthful in three in our diets directly or indirectly benefits from honey bee pollination. That makes bees critically valuable to humans’ existence. For this reason the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) documents issues affecting honey bee health through the annual National Honey Bee Survey (NHBS). The survey collects data on bee health to understand long term trends, factors that drive bee health, ways to safeguard bee populations in the United States. Bee pollination is responsible for $15+ billion in added crop value -- particularly for specialty crops such as almonds and other nuts, berries, fruits, and vegetables. We need the economic benefits, as well as the nourishment, that bees provide to us through their role in pollination.

Bee populations in North America have been in decline since the 1940s. This is of great concern to the agriculture industry because about 75 percent of specialty crops depend on the services of pollinators – of which bees are the most economically important.

Across the globe, native bee species are having trouble. Populations of bees have experienced severe declines that are largely attributed to the loss of habitat. If you have a lawn, you may be able to reverse this trend: All you have to do is be a little lazy and, depending on your neighborhood, immune to social pressure.

Pollinators are a vital part of agricultural production. In the United States, more than one-third of all crop production – 90 crops ranging from nuts to berries to flowering vegetables - requires insect pollination. Managed honey bee colonies are our primary pollinators, adding at least $15 billion a year by increasing yields and helping to ensure superior-quality harvests.