Save the Bees!

Whilst attempting to identify my bees and get my hands on some seeds I was exposed to many facts about bees and bee numbers, so I thought I would briefly talk about some of the information about bees and why the seeds I received were so important.

According to both pamphlets over the past 60 years the UK has lost 97% of it's wildflower meadows from intensive farming and the use of pesticides, meaning that the bees have lost 97% of their original food sources. Because of this 20 bee species have become extinct, and one quarter of the remaining species are on the red list of threatened species, species such as the great yellow bumble bee, which is currently only found in Scotland. 

So why should we care?

Well bees are incredible pollinators, both bumble bees and honey bees (which too have numbers in a rapid decline). 

In north America it is estimated that 30% of food for human consumption is a product of bee pollination. In Europe it is estimated that 84% of crops require insect pollination and in the UK 1/3 of  crops that require animal pollination are pollinated by honey bees, the other 2/3 rely on bumble bees, solitary bees and hover flies. 

An experiment performed by Whole Foods and University Heights Rhode Island attempted to depict what our supermarket produce section could look like without bees. They removed all the foods that relied upon bees for pollination and the results were surprising and shocking.

The impact was so greta that Whole Foods lost 237 of their 453 products, equivalent to 52% of what they sell.

What would the world be like without bees?

Without bees acting as pollinators we could loose many foods and produce that we rely on. 

A short list of the some of the foods we'd likely loose include:

Kiwi fruit	Oil seed rape	Runner beans
Cranberry	Turnip rape	Lima beans
Blueberry	Sunflowers	Broad beans
Gooseberry	Cotton	Soya bean
Currants	Vetches	Aubergine
Cherry	Lucerne (alfalfa)	Tomato
Pear	Clovers	Peppers
Plum	Lupin	Cucumber
Apple	Buckwheat	Squash
Blackberry		Pumpkin
Orange		Gourds
Lemon		Celery
Melon		coriander
Watermelon		Fennel
Raspberry		Gherkin
Peach		Marrow
Strawberry		Mustard