I choose you...

Interesting title for a small hobby farmer, huh? It caught your attention though so let's make today's blog interesting.


I choose you -
Because you are a bee. You are a major pollinator of many of our food crops, almonds, apples, avocados, blueberries, cantaloupes, cherries, cranberries, cucumbers, sunflowers, watermelon and many other crops all rely on honey bees for pollination.

Bees feed on pollen and nectar produced by plants. Female bees collect pollen to feed their larvae, storing it in pollen baskets in their legs or on branched hairs on their body. As they go from flower to flower they inevitably lose some of the pollen they have collected. Some of this pollen may land on the female parts of other flowers of the same species, resulting in cross-pollination.

(Bees, and Survival of the Human Race)

Bees are some of the hardest working creatures on the planet.  They have a definitive work ethic that deserves many thanks to this amazing yet often under appreciated insect.

What is pollination? Simply put, it is the transfer of pollen from the male part of the flower, the anther, to the stigma, which is the female part of the flower. Upon the two’s meeting, a plant’s seed, nut, or fruit is then formed. (Why Bees Are Important to Our Planet?)

Some plants rely on animals to assist with their pollination process, while others can pollinate themselves or rely on the wind to do it for them.

Bees also tend to focus their energies on one species of plant at a time. By visiting the same flowers of a particular species in one outing, much higher quality pollination occurs – rather than spreading many different pollens to different plants which are not being pollinated, all plants of one species are getting an even distribution of vital pollen from others of its same species.

Pollination is essentially plant reproduction. Without help from animal pollinators, our everyday food supply would look much different – at least one third of our staples we’ve come to rely on would no longer be available.

A short list of foods that depend on bee pollination:

Alfalfa
Almonds
Apples
Asparagus
Beans
Beets
Blackberries
Blueberries
Brussels sprouts
Buckwheat
Cabbage
Cantaloupe
Cauliflower
Celery
Cherries
Chestnuts
Chives
Clover
Cranberries
Cucumber
Currants
Eggplant
Flax
Garlic
Gooseberries
Grapes
Horseradish
Kale
Lettuce
Mustard
Onions
Parsley
Peaches
Pears
Plums
Pumpkins
Radishes
Raspberries
Rhubarb
Squash
Strawberries
Sunflowers
Sweet potatoes
Turnip
Watermelon

What would our world look like without bees?
"The bottom line is, if something is not done to improve honeybee health, then most of the interesting food we eat is going to be unavailable," warns Carlen Jupe, secretary and treasurer for the California State Beekeepers Association.

Honeybees as a species are not in danger of extinction, but their ability to support the industry of commercial pollination, and by extension, a large portion of our food supply, is in serious danger.

Whole Foods recently imagined what our grocery store would like in a world without bees by removing more than half of the market's produce. This is the worst case scenario — it's possible that human ingenuity and alternate pollinators can mitigate some of these outcomes, but not necessarily all of them.

North America is home to over 4,000 known species of native bees whose services are worth an estimated $3 billion dollars per year to the US economy in the agricultural sector alone. It’s time to celebrate their extraordinary beauty, their value to our world and the challenges that they face each day. We need bees!
I choose you little bee, because I need you and so does Planet Earth. I appreciate you and all that you do.