Busy
Bees
Busy bees
The plight of the Honey Bee
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Do you eat Honey?
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The honey bee
Wikimedia commons/Shyamal
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Britain's honeybees are
disappearing at an
"alarming" rate.
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'Colonies lost'
The government says bee numbers
have fallen by up to 15% in the last
two years, in part because agricultural
changes have reduced the availability
of the wildflowers they depend on for
food.
Disease, climate change and pesticide
use have also been blamed for the
decline.
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Wow!
A single hive of
fifty thousand
honeybees
pollinate half a
million plants in
one day.
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One person’s view
"If the bee disappeared off the
surface of the globe then man
would only a few years of life
left. No more bees, no more
pollination, no more plants, no
more animals, no more man."
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Bee gathering
pollen
It is an indication
of how important
honeybees are
to the world's
economy.
It is estimated a
third of the food
we eat is
pollinated by
bees.
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 It is no wonder the dramatic decline in
the population of these insects is
worrying for everyone.
 Fewer bees means less pollination,
which results in less honey and fewer
plants.
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Honey Bee Family
A honey bee family has females,
males, and a queen bee.
Most of the 50,000 honey bees in
a beehive are female worker bees
(with a sting).
There are a few hundred male
drone bees (with no sting).
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Waggle dance
Honey bees communicate with
each other about direction and
distance from the hive to nectar
sources through a special ‘dance
language’, making it one of the
most complex languages any
insect or animal uses to
communicate on earth.
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Interesting And Amazing
Information On Honey Bees
Did you know? Bees can’t see red.
To search for food, honey bees can
fly up to 14 kilometres away from
their nest. To look for flowers, they
usually fly one or two miles.
A hard-working bee makes round
trips to forage for pollen or honey
and can visit anything from 15002000 flowers a day.
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Multi-tasking females
A female honey bee lives for about 6
weeks, but it’s a full life – she’s always
changing jobs.
A worker bee is a cleaner, babysitter,
builder, chef, queen-groomer, airconditioner, guard, undertaker, farmer,
and scout.
Her most exhausting job is visiting flowers
to get food.
A bee flies about 1000 km in her life, but it
wears out her wings. Then she dies.
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Humans are like bees
Both live in communities
both have organised work habits
the young of both stay home then
go into the world at about 21 (days
or years)
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Humans are not like bees
We have the chance to change our
role in life
We have a choice about how we live
our lives
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BUT……..
Both humans and bees are
at our best when we
cooperate.
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Do you eat
Tomatoes? (ketchup, pizzas, baked
beans, pasta sauce etc)
Fruit? (strawberries, Jam, apple pie)
Nuts?
Chocolate?
Coffee?
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No Bees?
It is estimated that costs of foods
would double
There seems to be only one other way
of pollinating mass numbers of plants.
It involves employing people to go round
with feather dusters, brushing the
insides of plants with pollen.
They are already doing it in parts of
China to pollinate pear trees in areas
where the insects are extinct.
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So…..
What can you do to help our
little stripey helpers?
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