The practice of beekeeping is over 9,000 years old and some of the world’s first beekeepers were prehistoric farmers. There are more than 20,000 species of bee globally, and the average honey bee colony has upwards of 50,000 bees all operating in a system of social organisation of incredible complexity.
Honeybees communicate with each other via physical movements like head butts, which researchers say could mean "stop", as well as waggle dances that signal where flowering plants are to be found in abundance.
What's the shortest distance you can travel between six different locations? Mathematicians call this the "travelling salesman problem", and it can even stump some computers. But for bumblebees, it's no problem. Researchers at Royal Holloway University in London found that bumblebees always fly the shortest route possible between flowers.
So far, they're the only animals known who have the ability to solve problems of this nature. And did you know that serial killers behave like bees? They commit their crimes close to home, but far enough away that the neighbours don't get suspicious.
Similarly, bees collect pollen near their hive, but far enough away so that predators can't find the hive. To understand how this "buffer zone" works, scientists studied bee behaviour and wrote up a few algorithms. Their findings improved the computer models that police now use to find criminals.
We all know that bees make honey, which they store in honeycomb as a food reserve for those times of the year when there are no flowering plants. It takes a lot of energy to make the wax that forms the honeycomb, energy that the bee colony would much rather spend making honey.
Using advanced mathematics, it took the American mathematician Thomas Hales to show that, of all the possible structures the bees could have chosen, hexagonal honeycombs do indeed require the least amount of wax and energy to manufacture.
Bees are extraordinarily valuable. In addition to honey, it is estimated that around 30 percent of the food humans consume is produced from bee-pollinated plant life. The value of pollination by bees is estimated around $16 billion in the US alone. We would be unable to enjoy most of our favourite fruits, vegetables, or nuts without these pollinators.
Insects in all their forms, even the ones that do us damage, create the biological foundation for all terrestrial ecosystems. They cycle nutrients, pollinate plants, disperse seeds, maintain soil structure and fertility, control populations of other organisms, and provide a major food source for other animals.
If we lose insects, entire food chains would collapse, faecal matter would build across the planet, as would piles of animal corpses normally consumed by flesh-eating beetles known as dermestids. In an insect-less world, we would starve to death in a sea of dung and dead animals.
Research shows that 40 percent of all insect species are in decline and could die out in the coming decades. In October 2017 a group of European researchers found that insect abundance had declined by more than 75 percent within 63 protected areas in Germany—over the course of just 27 years.
A year later, two researchers published a paper suggesting that within a pristine rainforest in Puerto Rico, the biomass of insects and other arthropods like spiders had fallen between 10 and 60-fold since the 1970s.
There are a number of reasons and no single smoking gun. Factors behind the decline include habitat changes wrought by humans, such as deforestation, and conversion of natural habitats for agriculture. Along with agriculture comes the use of chemicals like herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides. Insecticides, unsurprisingly, hurt non-target species, and neonicotinoids have been implicated in the worldwide decline of bees.
We simply can't continue like this. Finding ways to live alongside nature will be fundamental to our future on this planet. Ways to do that will start to emerge when we learn to value nature and to place a price on the services the natural world provides to the human race.
There is an Arabic proverb that says, “When you shoot an arrow of truth, dip its point in honey”. However our planet now stands on the point of ecological collapse and there is no longer time to sweeten the pill. We must act now, failing which the consequences will be disastrous.
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