The Underappreciated Benefits of Wild Bees

Subject: Environment

Section: Species in news

Context:

A species of plasterer bee in the New Jersey Pine Barrens, not seen in 50 years and suspected to have gone extinct, was found again.

Native bees are crucial as:

They are an important pollinators
Their presence is crucial for various agricultural crops.
Native bees are essential to flourishing ecosystems and farms.
Domestic honey bee colonies are vulnerable to collapse due to a combination of poor nutrition, pesticides and pathogens.
Loss of pollinators could lead to lower availability of crops and wild plants that provide essential micronutrients for human diets, impacting health and nutritional security and risking increased numbers of people suffering from vitamin A, iron and folate deficiency.

Benefits of Wild Bees:

There are about 20,000 wild bee species globally.
Wild species are solitary (bumblebees, which form colonies, are one well-known exception), nesting in cavities in rocks and wood or on the ground in leaves and woody debris.
More than 80% of flowering plants depend on insect pollinators to reproduce.
In a 2013 study covering 27 types of crops it was found that the wild insects increased the rate at which flowers turn to fruit.
In a study in 2020 it is found that, for seven crops, including apples and pumpkins, wild bees were responsible for over $1.5 billion in annual production.
The wild insects land on flowers and isolate their flight muscles from their wings, allowing the muscles to vibrate their thorax as their wings stay still, making them by far the most effective pollinators for these plants.
They provide high-quality food—honey, royal jelly and pollen — and other products such as beeswax, propolis and honey bee venom.

Declining Bee species:

The number of bee species documented in a yearly survey from 2006 to 2015 had dropped by a fourth compared to similar tallies before 1990.
Some causes for their decline are:
- Habitat loss
- Disease and pesticides
- Climate change
- Forest fires
- Invasive Alien Species
- Competition for food: Dense herds of cattle can graze away food for native bees.
- Monocuture: In large fields concentrated with one fruit or vegetable, natural habitat tends to be minimal, and pesticide use maximal, leaving less food for insects while degrading their health.
- Public land management

Waggle Dance:

Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee.
By performing this dance, successful foragers can share information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new nest-site locations with other members of the colony.
The waggle dance and the round dance are two forms of dance behaviour that are part of a continuous transition.
- As the distance between the resource and the hive increases, the round dance transforms into variations of a transitional dance, which, when communicating resources at even greater distances, becomes the waggle dance.

The image presents the waggle dance – the direction the bee moves in relation to the hive indicates direction; if it moves vertically the direction to the source is directly towards the Sun. The duration of the waggle part of the dance signifies the distance.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD):

Colony collapse disorder (CCD) is an abnormal phenomenon that occurs when the majority of worker bees in a honey bee colony disappear, leaving behind a queen, plenty of food, and a few nurse bees to care for the remaining immature bees.
Several possible causes for CCD have been proposed, but no single proposal has gained widespread acceptance among the scientific community.
Suggested causes include:
- Pesticides;
- Infections with various pathogens especially those transmitted by Varroa and Acarapis mites;
- Malnutrition;
- Genetic factors;
- Immunodeficiencies;
- Loss of habitat;
- Changing beekeeping practices; or a combination of factors.
A large amount of speculation has surrounded the contributions of the neonicotinoid family of pesticides to CCD, but many collapsing apiaries show no trace of neonicotinoids.