We need to save the bees!

May 6 2024

Hello! Today I will be talking about bees, what the do to the enviornment and why we need to save them. Let's first talk about some key facts relating to bees.

• There are about 212,000 bees in the United States of America.
• Out of those 212,000 bees there are 3600 species in the US alone.
• Finally, bees make 157mil pounds of honey each year.

One example of a native bee to Oregon is the Yellow Faced Bumblebee also know in latin as Bombus Vosnesenskii. The Bumblebees are the only known pollinater to pollinate potatoes! They also pollinate many other fruits and vegetables.

Now that you know some facts about bees and what they are responsible for, let's talk about the main topic, do we need to save bees? The short answer is yes, but let's dive deep into why. As you already know, bees make 157 million pounds of honey each year. This is important because many products (like Lip Balm, and Skin Conditioner) use honey, and many animals eat honey too! Another important point of why we need to save the bees is that they are directly responsible for somewhere between 80-90% of crops, and would die off without them pollinating them. The USDA estimates that bees are responsible for 10-15B of profits each year. (yes I said billion, not million) This would mean that each year, Americans would lose 10-15B worth of crops if bees went extinct, this would crash the US economy, and a cascading chain of effects would happen. Now, let's talk about a more important metric. In the US alone, there are around 100,000 beekeepers. This would mean that in just the US, we would lose 100k jobs, if you take into account the rest of the world we would lose approximately 25-30mil jobs! The final fact I would like to share today is livestock. You might be thinking, "What could livestock have to do with bees?" Well, most of the crops that livestock eat are pollinated by bees! Crops like alfalfa are pollinated by bees, so losing bees would cause more livestock deaths, so less food, which results in meat costing more. The result of this is that the US and Global Economy would crash and would cause items to cost more and the poverty rate to rise. This is a drastic result but could very well happen. I hope this article could help you to learn why exactly bees matter, and what would happen when/if they die off.