This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

The Benefits of Bees

By Meara Hayden, Penn State Extension Intern

For the most part, people tend to find insects frightening or nasty. Because of their different appearance and habits, they tend to be stuck with a bad reputation. But honey bees appear to occupy a special place in our hearts. Perhaps it is because of their incessant work, and we admire their industriousness. Or it may be the large quantities of delicious, sugary honey that are consumed every year. While these are both excellent reasons to love the honey bee, we often forget how important they are to the entirety of our food industry.

Cantaloupe, apple, cucumber, almond, blueberry, watermelon, and many, many more crops benefit from bee pollination. Over 100 agricultural products in the United States are pollinated entirely by bees. About a third of the food eaten in the US would be impossible without bees. And if something isn’t done soon, CCD, or Colony Collapse Disorder, will continue to kill our bees with alarming speed and efficiency.

Find out what's happening in Emmauswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

CCD is characterized by apparently healthy worker bees abandoning their hives in droves, leaving the queen and her young behind to die. They tend to leave behind ample honey reserves. The cause of CCD is not currently known, but a new pesticide is suspected. This past year was particularly hard on our native honey bees.

Would you like to learn more about the importance of bees and other pollinators, and how to help them? Join the Penn State Master Gardeners for National Pollinator Week on Wednesday, June 18 at 6:30 p.m. in the pollinator friendly garden at Burnside Plantation for an educational workshop, “What if there were NO BEES?”, and learn how native bees help create the ripe foods we enjoy every day.  

Find out what's happening in Emmauswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?

More from Emmaus