Environmental Impacts Of Honey Bees

It is necessary to produce about one-third of the food that humans eat. No, it is not high fructose corn syrup, but pollination by honeybees. Brad Plumer of the Washington Post quotes, “The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that ‘out of some 100 crop species, which 90% of food worldwide, 71 of these are bee pollinated.’ Around the World, these crops are worth at least $207 billion.” One fact even more bizarre is that honeybees are disappearing and no one seems to know for sure why. Despite their highly evolved and complex anatomy and colony life, honeybees are susceptible to environmental and manmade threats. The economic and agricultural impacts of their disappearance are far-reaching. Honeybees have an incredibly unique …show more content…
The bee described in the previous paragraph would be a worker bee. Worker bees are the most common and are he only type of bees anyone regularly sees (“Honeybee” par. 3). But a colony of honeybees is made up of about a hundred drones, or male bees, one queen, and about 50,000 worker bees (Benjamin 14). The drones are all males. The male honeybee has a single purpose in its life: to mate with the queen and reproduce. When a drone mates, the process takes a short five seconds in which their reproductive organ explodes and the bee falls to the ground, paralyzed, to die (Kalman 17). The drone bee rarely leaves the hive, unless in search for the queen on her mating flight. The queen bee does not do much more physical labor. The queen is a fully developed female with huge ovaries that produce eggs at an unbelievable rate (Gary 21). When a queen bee is ready to mate, she leaves the hive and flies to a mating area chosen by the drones. She may mate with 15 to 20 drones before she returns to the hive. She only mates once in her lifetime (Kalman 20). If the queen dies, one worker bee, which are all female, will be chosen to be the new queen. To develop the infertile worker bee into a fertile queen bee, the other workers feed it a special diet of a food called “royal jelly”. Most of the colony is comprised of female worker bees. Despite being female, they do not reproduce because of their undersized and nonfunctioning ovaries. Worker bees do most of the work around the hive. “All matters relating to the well-being of the colony, except for egg-laying, are handled by worker bees” (Benjamin 14). These bees are the key to the survival of a colony. Drones, a queen, and worker bees all make up the complex colony of a