Why do we need bees?

In one of our previous blogposts, you’ve learned about pollination and that bees the most important insects to help with this step to ensure that plants grow well. In fact, out of all the pollinating animals, bees are the most efficient at pollinating plants. Compared to other insects and small animals like birds and lizards, bees not only feed themselves when visiting the flowers, but they also try and pick up as much pollen on their hairy bodies as possible to bring back to their nests to feed the young bees and therefore need to visit many more flowers than other pollinators.

We now know that bees are one of the most efficient pollinators on our planet, but bees not only ensure that we can harvest healthy and nutritious food. Inedible plants like hedges and trees need to be pollinated too to grow bigger and stronger which also creates the perfect habitat for other animals in our ecosystem. Livestock grown on farms is dependent on pollinated clover and alfalfa for their feed. And even the clothes we wear could not be made without the pollination of cotton plants.

There are more than 250 species of bees in the UK that are responsible for the pollination of flowers, trees, edible crops and many more plants. Some of these species only pollinate certain plants, for example the Scabious Bee only feeds on a plant called field scabious (hence the name) typically found in wildflower meadows, which have been in decline in the UK in the last 60 years. Unfortunately, this means that the Scabious Bee is one of the endangered bee species here in the UK because most of its food source has disappeared.

The close relationship between bees and plants ensures that our ecosystem is stable and healthy, but it can also have the opposite effect in that a decline in a certain bee species can mean the decline in specific plants and vice versa.

You can see now that we are much more dependent on bees than we think, because our ecosystem works so closely together that the decline of only one species within the system, everything gets fragile and is in danger of collapse.