let’s talk about BEES, baby

If this laborious insect becomes extinct, we are expected to quickly follow down that ominous path of no return. Bees are crucial for the planet and our survival, their role in our everyday lives stretching far and beyond the sweet taste of honey in our cereal or tea. Bees are responsible for pollination of more than 90 different farm-grown foods, and are the most important pollinators in the world. Besides the crops, bees are responsible for pollinating and propagating numerous species of trees, plants, and flowers, playing an important role in the lives and prosperity of the various animals, that depend on them for survival.

But bees are vanishing, and in alarmingly high numbers. The number of bee colonies is on a steep decline, a disquieting trend that has been perturbing scientists worldwide. Bees are leaving their hives by the thousands, abandoning the Queen and their young to starve and die, an unimaginable behavior for an insect whose life is dedicated to providing for the survival of its kind. Various reasons are attributed to this alarming trend: a change in climate, loss of habitat, malnutrition, proliferation of diseases, as well as the abusive use of pesticides and insecticides on agricultural crops.

Such a rapid decline in number of bees worldwide, researchers fear, threatens the loss of life as we know it.

Bees are extraordinary creatures. They are highly social, well organized, hard-working, and fearless. The largest specimens being barely an inch in size, they have been fascinating humans and drawing our admiration for millennia. Since ancient times, their intelligence has been revered, and the organization of their lives praised as flawless, and even as a model for a perfect human society.

Bees were royal symbols in Ancient Egypt, where it was believed that the sun god, ra, created the honeybee from his tears. Modern archeologists, unearthing the Egyptian tombs, have found the pots of honey that, even nearly 3,000 years old, was still perfectly edible. Honey was included in a deceased’s crypt, as a gift or rites of passage, and to “sweeten the transition to the afterlife.” Ancient Romans and Greeks believed that bees were servants and messengers of gods and honey was believed to be their food. In Homer’s Hymn to Hermes, three bee maidens were assigned great powers of divination, while in Delphi oracle, the prophet is often described as a bee. In English folklore, bees would be told of important events in the household, in a custom known as Telling the bees. If a bee enters a home, a friend will arrive soon after. But if the owner kills the bee, that friend will bring bad news.

the organized way of bees’ lives has been equally praised by the royalists, as well as egalitarian French revolutionaries: for both, a bee colony functions in a perfect harmony.

Royalists of the 16th and 17th centuries pointed out that the submission of bees to their divinely ordained ruler is the evidence that monarchy is found in nature, while the French revolutionaries adopted the beehive as a symbol of their Republic, denoting the community of workers and the civic ideal. Continuing the tradition of his compatriots (albeit not for the same reasons) Napoleon Bonaparte adopted a bee as a symbol of his empire. Bee, considered as the oldest emblem of the sovereigns of France, is seen as a symbol of immortality and resurrection, linking Napoleon’s empire to the very origins of France. His coat of arms, coronation robe as well as the throne feature symbols of a bee.

With a brain the size of a sesame seed, a bee is capable of easily solving a complex mathematical problem of calculating shortest distances between places, called Traveling Salesman Problem, in which a salesman needs to determined which route will lead to the most customers within the shortest timeframe, i.e. least time wasted. This puzzle, so effortlessly solved by a tiny bee “can keep computers busy for days”.

another of many fascinating facts about bees is the way the bee-scouts describe the location of the flower-plentiful field they have discovered. Once it locates the place, the bee flies back to its colony, and through a so called “waggle dance” describes to the others where that spot is! the scientists belive that the bee manages this complicated task by actually describing the position of the flowerfield in relation to the hive and the sun.

Thriving for more than 50 million years, today this beneficial insect is in danger. Bee-keepers worldwide have been stunned to discover the seemingly healthy hives empty, the bees disappearing overnight. Europe has seen an alarming decline in the number of bee colonies as well as specie disappearance.

With the growth of the world’s population comes the need for more industry, farmsteads, cattle ranching, and infrastructure. current unsustainable economic development has wreaked havoc on the world’s flora, forests and meadows, a critical habitat and source of nourishment for bees.

both insecticides, and pesticides are deadly to the pollinators, including bees. Poisoned bees either become disoriented, forgetting their way back home, show behavioral patterns that are detrimental to a hive, or (in the majority of cases) die.

Rising temperatures, causing the early snowmelt, can cause bees to leave their hive after the trees and plants have blossomed. Keeping the Queen and larvae warm, they will only abandon them to search for food in response to air temperature, while trees and plants, on the other hand, will flower “in response to snow melt.”

Buying local produce, planting trees, and native, bee-friendly flowers, lowering the consumption of products whose elevation causes eradication of woods and meadows, are small but important steps that help the nature and the world. Buying certified organic cotton makes significant impact, since the cotton industry is among the highest in pesticide usage on crops, including a mix of pesticides and fungicides known to be dangerous to bees. A colorful, flower-abundant garden, even on a balcony sill, is a source of food for bees and can help them, if they are far away from a hive, to recover and continue on their journey back home.

It seems that this intelligent creature, whose life is unavoidably linked to human existence, is holding a mirror to our faces, showing us in its own tragedy the path of destruction we have taken, and how our disregard to the environment threatens our own existence.

This time, we should listen.