The Bee Crisis

Read the following article and answer the questions. If needed, use headphones and listen to the text using Text to Speech. 

Remember to RAUR:

Read (or listen to) the question

Understand the question

Answer the question

Review the answer to the question

1. The Bee Crisis Bees are often pesky insects that buzz around trying to sting us, or at least that’s what we humans think. At times, it may seem that bees aren’t a necessary part of our ecosystems, but that is not the case. Bees help humans to have fruits, vegetables, cheese, milk, and almonds, and more. Bees are the secret farm workers of an ecosystem and they pollinate a wide range of plants that produce food for humans.

2. Humans have a reason to be concerned about bees, because each year more of them disappear. According to a Time Magazine article published on April 25, 2015, “You Asked: Are the Honeybees Still Disappearing?”, three factors are contributing to the honeybees’ population reduction. One is varroa mites, which attach to the bees, suck their blood, and transfer disease to other bees. The second is pesticides, which keep other varmints from ruining a crop.

3. The third reason has more to do with poor nutrition, which is due to a lack of pollen types from a variety of plants. Bees are crucial to plant reproduction and plants are essential to bees’ nutrition and strength. Bees need a variety of pollens to grow into strong and healthy workers. Before the human population took over plant and animal environments, meadows were filled with pollen-packed wildflowers. Today, many of those meadows are filled with mowed lawns, which limits the number of pollen-filled flowers. Humans are creating environments that are essentially green deserts for bees.

4. Flowers need pollen to reproduce, and bees carry that pollen. Bees need the pollen for nectar to make honey. When bees land on a flower’s stamen — or the flower’s sperm — they gather pollen from the flower’s anther. Bees can sense the electric field around flowers and the pollen often sticks to them via static electricity.

5. When bees fly from flower to flower, they transport the pollen they collect. It might land on the pistil part of the flower, which contains the ovary. The stigma, which is the sticky, top portion of the pistil, collects the pollen. As pollen grains stick to the stigma, they begin to grow pollen tubes down the style and toward the flower’s ovary. These pollen tubes enable sperm to get to the ovule, where fertilization occurs. Once the sperm fertilizes the egg, a seed grows, which is protected by the flower or fruit.

6. As bees are dying off, people are worrying about the ecosystems that rely on them to help pollinate crops that supply food to plants, animals, and humans. Beekeepers are now giving their colonies pollen supplements and also splitting their colonies so they can fill new ones with the queen’s eggs. Beekeepers used to typically replace the queen bees in a colony every two years. Today, a queen bee dies about halfway through the summer and no one knows exactly why.

7. In order to help the bees, we humans should plant flowers and avoid any type of pesticides or chemical treatments if possible. If we want to continue to reap the benefits of flowers’ reproductive systems, we must do something to help these insects that are crucial to our food supply.