How Do Bees Contribute to the Ecosystem? Crops, Wild Plants, and Wildlife

Written by Bees Published on Clear, practical insect guides

Bees hold the ecosystem together by moving pollen, and they do it for far more than the honey in a jar. Every time a bee visits a flower for nectar it picks up pollen and carries it to the next bloom, which is how most flowering plants set fruit and seed. That one habit feeds people and wildlife at the same time, and it keeps wild plant communities reproducing year after year. It is also not the work of honey bees alone.

How Much of Our Food Depends on Bees?

A large share of it. Pollinators add more than $18 billion a year to US crop production, and over 100 American crops lean on them, from almonds and apples to blueberries, squash, and melons.

Some of those crops need a trick honey bees cannot do. It is called buzz pollination: a bee clamps onto the flower and vibrates its flight muscles until the pollen shakes loose. Tomatoes, blueberries, cranberries, and peppers all give up their pollen this way. Honey bees never learned the move, so on a blueberry flower a honey bee leaves about 11 pollen grains per visit while a wild mining bee or bumblebee leaves closer to 49 and 43. That gap is the whole reason growers care about wild bees and not just rented hives.

Honey Bee Anatomy and Identification Guide

Do Bees Pollinate Wild Plants, Not Just Crops?

Yes, and this is the bigger story. Animals handle about 80 percent of all plant pollination, most of them insects, and bees carry the heaviest load. The wildflowers in a meadow, the shrubs along a fence line, the berry canes at the woodland edge: most of them set seed because a bee moved their pollen first. Take the bees out and those plants quietly stop reproducing.

Native plants lean on native bees in particular. The two grew up together over a long time, and a lot of the pairings are close, one bee built to work the shape of one kind of bloom.

How Do Bees Support Other Wildlife?

Follow the fruit. The berries, seeds, and nuts that bees make possible are food for a long list of animals: songbirds fattening up before migration, mice and chipmunks caching seeds for winter, deer browsing on what flowered in spring. A pollinator sits near the bottom of that chain, so losing one does not just cost you flowers. It thins out the food supply for everything that eats what those flowers turn into.

The US Forest Service puts bees inside the larger machinery that keeps wild country healthy, the same systems that keep air and water clean and hold the soil in place. Bees are a base layer, not a decoration on top of it.

Is It All Honey Bees?

No, and this is the part most people have backwards. The honey bee is not even native to North America; European settlers shipped it over in the 17th century. The bees that were here first, and still do an enormous amount of the work, are wild: somewhere around 4,000 native species in the US, more than 3,600 by careful conservation counts, and most of them solitary. No hive, no honey, just one female digging her own nest and stocking it.

Those wild bees often out-pollinate the honey bee, as the blueberry numbers show. If I could keep only one kind of bee working my garden, I would take the scruffy crowd of natives over a single managed hive without much hesitation.

How to Help Bees Where You Live

The needs are cheap and simple. Plant a spread of flowers that bloom from early spring into fall, so something is always open when a bee is flying. Put down the broad-spectrum insecticides, which kill the wild bees along with whatever you were aiming at. Leave a patch of bare, undisturbed ground or a few dead plant stems standing, because that is where most solitary bees nest. In a dry summer a shallow water dish with a stone to land on helps too.

None of it asks much, and it pays back in fruit set and steadier flowers. If you want to match the planting to what the bees are actually after, start with what bumblebees eat and work outward from there.

Sources

Keep reading

Related posts