By Elizabeth Flatley
As spring comes and flowers bloom, bees provide us with lush greenery and food. Both wild and domestic bees supply us with around 80% of all word pollination. One single bee colony is able to pollinate up to 300 million flowers a day. Bees produce much of our world’s needed fruits, vegetables, and nuts through pollination and without them, every ecosystem would experience change. Excluding plants, many predators that prey on bees would also lose a part of their food supply, which would affect the food web and the natural flow of nature.
The worldwide bee disappearance is not that big of a mystery to begin with. Global warming, air pollution, pesticides, drought, habitat destruction, and nutrient deficiency are all viable and recurring causes to bees’ endangerment. Although many of these causes are related to one another, humans are to blame consequently. The wild bee habitat shrinks exponentially every year due to industrial agribusiness as it transforms forests and grasslands into monoculture farms, which are full of pesticides By fixing the destructive and dysfunctional agricultural system, we can make bigger strides to reverse global bee decline. For example, reinstating ecological cultivation, banning the deadliest pesticides, and protecting pollinator lives. Organic and ecological farming has been practiced throughout history as it is nothing new. Safely, by circumventing large monocrops and protecting diversity in ecosystems, ecological farming proves as a safer alternative as it has a lesser impact on our insects. Not only does ecological farming protect our bees, but it allows the restoration of soil nutrients with it’s natural composting systems, eliminating soil loss due to water and wind erosion and parts from harsh pesticides and chemical fertilizers. By getting back our healthy bee population, ecological agriculture will enhance the quality of crop yields.