Why are bees so damn important and how does their existence help us with food?
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The bees collect food and building materials from flowers. They collect it by dipping themselves into the flower. They will after this have flower pollen on themselves. When they dip into another flower some of the old pollen will fall off in the new flower.
Some plants have evolved to reproduce this way. A lot of things we eat, coincidentally.
Bees pollinate plants. There are others like some flies, hummingbirds, wasps, beetles, mosquitos and so on but bees pollinate about 80% of flowering plants.
For plants to both reproduce, and also in doing so create fruits and vegetables, they need to be pollinated.
So while honey is nice and all, their biggest impact food wise is making sure the ecosystem does not collapse. No plants(food for humans)->no herbivores like cows and deer(also food for humans)->no herbivores->no predators. That is a vastly over simplified example but the idea shows that bees, and pollinators as a whole are absolutely critical for both ecosystems and humans.
It’s not just honey bees but wild native bees as well.
As bees go from plant to plant, they collect pollen on them. Many plants rely on this for pollination, which is how they reproduce and how they grow fruits.
Humans grow a LOT of our food on trees. All the trees in all the orchards won’t grow us any food if they’re not pollinated, and a huge majority of this pollination is done by bees.
Some orchards are already having to switch to manually pollinating their trees by hand. This is very labor intensive, gives worse yields, and makes the resulting food more scarce AND more expensive due to labour costs. And that if you can find labor at all. If bees die out and then ALL the orchards need to hand-pollinate every flower on every tree, they’re just going to close and we’re going to lose some major food sources.
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