Buzz About Bees

The simplicity that is pollination is one that we as a race would have a hard time living without. Not only because of the food yield, but also the economic impact the industry has had in the last century. The act of pollination has been industrialized for a while now. Some people have even linked the act back to ancient Egypt around 2400 years ago (History of Beekeeping, 2010). Since then the practices have gradually moved into the United States and we have begun to see just how important these insects are to us. The act of commercial bee keeping became the mass market it is now due in large part to a man named James Harbison. He was a bee keeper that had learned the craft from his father. He moved from a farm in Pennsylvania to a plot of
The genus name Apis refers to honey bees (Michael Wilson 2009). The difference between an Apis and a Non-Apis bee is the fact that honey bees (Apis) store more excess honey and pollen, hence the name honey bee. This concept is very easy to grasp, but there are 10 different types of honey bees and one hybrid that are in this family so they can be easily confused as many of them look similar (Buzz about Bees, 2010). Honey bees are also different than other types of bees in that their colonies are much larger. A colony normally consists of 1 queen, nearly 50,000 workers, 300 drones, around 9000 larvae, and on top of that there are about 600 eggs that haven’t even hatched yet. The workers are what do the pollination so that is what the study hones in
In this study almonds are the main product and what the researchers wanted to find out was if the presence of non-Apis bees would have an effect on the outcome of pollination success. There has been plenty of research on how bees pollinate however there had been no research done on what effect another species of bee would have on the effectiveness of the pollination, and the amount of fruit yielded by other biologists. Sarah Kremen who is one of the researchers in this study has done past research on the effects of wild bees on pollination of sunflowers in 2006, and that was a precursor to this study (Greenleaf et.al., 2006). This study is revolutionary because it can perhaps show that with the introduction of non-Apis bees the production of many different types of plants could increase. While the study takes advantage of the surrounding almond crops in California if proved to be true, the impact this finding could have on the economy and also the environment would be quite