“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… this is the interrelated structure of reality.”
Martin Luther King Jr.“Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… this is the interrelated structure of reality.” Martin Luther King Jr.
[endif]--Are honeybees the hardest working insect? I think honeybees are the hardest working insect because they work not only to feed themselves, but also to feed others. Over the years, the honeybee population has been declining at an alarming rate. Most people think the decline is because of the varroa mite that is causing the decline. In my opinion, the decline of the honeybee population isn’t because of the varroa mite, it’s because of how limited their food access is. We should help the honeybees with their food shortage so that the food that people eat isn’t limited. People other than beekeepers should be concerned about the honeybee population. Honeybees are important not only to people, but to all the other living things out in the world!
“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything,”
Albert Einstein
[endif]-- Now for arguments sake, let’s say that the honeybee population decline is nothing to worry about. People could hand pollinate the crops that make our food, create artificial honey, and import nonnative honeybees from other countries. But doing all that has its problems, conflicts, and dangers. Hand pollination would take up a lot of a farmer’s time and energy. One person hand pollinating a farm that is 441 acres of crops wouldn’t be able to pollinate every crop in time for the harvest, so farmers would have less profit and the public would have less food available to eat. Creating artificial honey also has its problems and the production of fake honey would limit the resources people can use. Also, fake honey could be dangerous because some fake honey might have been made with things that are harmful for people to eat. Importing invasive honeybees from other countries would be harmful to the immigrant honeybee. The immigrant honeybees might thrive and become hard to control, or the nonnative honeybees might not be able to cope with the new environment and die.
First of all, people love honey. Imagine that the honey that many living things love, vanishes. Life without honey! Most people can’t think of life without honey. It’s as simple as that. Honey, it is thick, sweet, and looks like liquid gold. Ponder that for a moment. Horrifying to think of life without honey, is it not? That is a reason to help the honeybees. What if there was no real honey, but instead there was fake honey with very slimy feeling, a disturbing odor, and a white color. I wouldn’t want to eat that as honey, and I think you wouldn’t want to either. It is important to have real honey and not fake honey that’s shipped in barrels from half way around the world.
More importantly, honeybees are gentle insects and are important for the survival of humans and other insects and animals that eat honeybees. Honeybees are known throughout the world as busy pollinators that produce honey. But honeybees do so much more than that. Honeybees pollinate three fourths of all the food crops people eat. Now imagine that three fourths of our food gone! That babies, mothers, children, elders, and other people die in agony from hunger pains caused by starvation! That’s what the world would be like without the honeybees to pollinate the plants that become our food. Without all the food that the honeybee makes for us, the food that we humans eat would be very limited. Yes, there are many other bees out in the world that pollinate crops, but the honeybee pollinates the most plants that produce the food that humans eat.
“We think we can make honey without sharing in the fate of bees, but we are in turn nothing but poor bees, destined to accomplish our task and then die.”
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog[endif]--
“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”
Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee
[endif]--Most importantly, if the honeybee population declines too much, food costs would skyrocket! If food prices increased, people would not be able to buy food because of high prices! The honeybee population greatly affects food costs almost all the time, so if the bee population plummeted, food prices would rise, especially honey. Of course some high class people would still be able to afford buying food at high prices, but lower class people wouldn’t be able to afford the high food prices. Lower class people would be forced to eat bark from trees, grass, insects, and even more disturbing and disgusting things if they couldn’t afford to buy food. People might be forced to even eat other people! Terrifying to think of. Also people would fight for food, and that could end up in bloodshed. So if food prices began to rise, the human population would decline because of the high food prices. Not only the human population would decline because of the honeybee population, but thousands of other animal and plant populations would be affected by the honeybee population as well. So if the honeybee population declined too much, the entire ecosystem would fail, and the earth that we stand on would become a silent, quiet, death planet. The honeybees are very important for the survival of everyone and everything, so we must do what we humans can do to prevent all this from happening!
From adding up all the ways that the honeybee helps people, it is clear that people greatly depend on honeybee. To help these important insect, plant a bee friendly garden. Some bee friendly trees include the black locust, catalpa, linden, manzanita, maple, sourwood, sumac, and willow. Some bee friendly flowers are Rosemary, Mint, Bluebells, and Lavender. To be helpful to the environment, make sure that the bee friendly plants are native to the area you are in. Buy organic food and natural honey from local farmers markets. By going to local farmers markets you will support farmers and you will get fresh organic food. Help the honeybees in ways that will benefit you and them. You might be surprised how little it takes to help the honeybee population thrive.
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