Honeybees are mostly kept in managed hives, and are likely responsible for pollinating between 5-15% of the UK’s insect-pollinated crops.
Pollinators need you. You need pollinators.
Source: https://www.pollinator.org/pollinators
Without the actions of pollinators, agricultural economies, our food supply, and surrounding landscapes would collapse.
Birds, bats, bees, butterflies, beetles, and other small mammals that pollinate plants are responsible for bringing us one out of every three bites of food. They also sustain our ecosystems and produce our natural resources by helping plants reproduce.
Pollinating animals travel from plant to plant carrying pollen on their bodies in a vital interaction that allows the transfer of genetic material critical to the reproductive system of most flowering plants – the very plants that
- bring us countless fruits, vegetables, and nuts,
- ½ of the world’s oils, fibers and raw materials;
- prevent soil erosion,
- and increase carbon sequestration
- This nearly invisible ecosystem service is a precious resource that requires attention and support – – and in disturbing evidence found around the globe, is increasingly in jeopardy. Pollinator Partnership (P2) urges you know how this system supports you, and how your actions can help support healthy and sustainable pollination.
What is pollination?
When a pollen grain moves from the anther (male part) of a flower to the stigma (female part), pollination happens. This is the first step in a process that produces seeds, fruits, and the next generation of plants. This can happen through self-pollination, wind and water pollination, or through the work of vectors that move pollen within the flower and from bloom to bloom.
Who are the pollinators?
Birds, bats, butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, wasps, small mammals, and most importantly, bees are pollinators. They visit flowers to drink nectar or feed off of pollen and transport pollen grains as they move from spot to spot.
Why are pollinators important?
Somewhere between 75% and 95% of all flowering plants on the earth need help with pollination – they need pollinators. Pollinators provide pollination services to over 180,000 different plant species and more than 1200 crops. That means that 1 out of every three bites of food you eat is there because of pollinators. If we want to talk dollars and cents, pollinators add 217 billion dollars to the global economy, and honey bees alone are responsible for between 1.2 and 5.4 billion dollars in agricultural productivity in the United States. In addition to the food that we eat, pollinators support healthy ecosystems that clean the air, stabilize soils, protect from severe weather, and support other wildlife.
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THEIR STATUS?
Pollinator populations are changing. Many pollinator populations are in decline and this decline is attributed most severely to a loss in feeding and nesting habitats. Pollution, the misuse of chemicals, disease, and changes in climatic patterns are all contributing to shrinking and shifting pollinator populations. In some cases there isn’t enough data to gauge a response, and this is even more worrisome.
Read more
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Why do we need bees?
Source: https://friendsoftheearth.uk/nature/why-do-we-need-bees
The need for bees
We need bees. We may take them and other pollinators like butterflies and hoverflies for granted, but they’re vital to stable, healthy food supplies and key to the varied, colourful and nutritious diets we need (and have come to expect).
Bees are perfectly adapted to pollinate, helping plants grow, breed and produce food. They do so by transferring pollen between flowering plants and therefore keeping the cycle of life turning.
The vast majority of plants we need for food rely on pollination, especially by bees: from almonds and vanilla to apples and squash. Bees also pollinate around 80% of wildflowers in Europe, so our countryside would be far less interesting and beautiful without them.
But bees are in trouble. There’s growing public and political concern at bee decline across the world. This decline is caused by a combination of stresses – from loss of habitat and food sources to exposure to pesticides and the effects of climate breakdown.
More than ever before, we need to recognise the importance of bees to nature and to our lives. And we need to turn that into action to ensure they don’t just survive but thrive.
Types of bee
Not all bees are the same. There are over 20,000 known species of bee globally. Around 270 species of bee have been recorded in the UK. Only 1 of these is the famous Honeybee.
Most Honeybees are kept by beekeepers in colonies of managed hives. The rest of our bees are wild, including 25 bumblebee species and more than 220 types of solitary bee.
Like Honeybees, the familiar Bumblebees live in social colonies – usually in holes in the ground or tree cavities.
Solitary bees tend to nest on their own, as the name suggests. Each female builds and provisions her own nest with food. Solitary bees include Mining bees which nest in the ground, as well as Mason bees and Leafcutter bees that nest in holes in dead wood, banks and walls.
Learn more with our bee identification guide.
Bees = perfect pollinators
Thanks to bees we can enjoy a range of foods from apples and pears to coffee and vanilla. And if you are wearing cotton, that’s because the cotton plant your threads came from was pollinated.
More than 90% of the leading global crop types are visited by bees
Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)
Bees gather pollen to stock their nests as food for their young. They have special features to collect it – like branched hairs called ‘scopae’ or combs of bristles called pollen baskets on their legs. As bees visit plants seeking food, pollen catches on their bodies and passes between plants, fertilising them – that’s pollination.
Bees are not the world’s only pollinators. Flies, wasps, moths, beetles and even some birds, bats and lizards all pollinate, but they only visit flowers enough to feed themselves. Because they gather pollen to stock their nests, bees are generally the most effective pollinators since they visit many more flowers and carry more pollen between them.
Some bee species are also specially developed to pollinate particular plants and without them those plants would be less well-pollinated.
Garden bumblebee sipping teasel © Rory Dimond
Bees and farmers
Many bees have different characteristics that make them suited to pollinate certain plants. For example, the Early bumblebee’s small size and agility allow it to enter plants with drooping flowers such as comfrey. Garden bumblebees are better at pollinating the deep flowers of honeysuckle and foxgloves than most other species because their longer tongue can reach deep inside them.
Many farmers rely on a diversity of bees to pollinate their produce. For example, commercial apple growers benefit from the free pollination services of the Red mason bee. This species can be 120 times more efficient at pollinating apple blossoms than honeybees.
There is evidence that natural pollination by the right type of bee improves the quality of the crop – from its nutritional value to its shelf life. For example, bumblebees and solitary bees feed from different parts of strawberry flowers. In combination they produce bigger, juicier and more evenly-shaped strawberries.
Some bee species have an affinity to particular plants, so need particular natural habitats. For example, in the UK the scabious bee, our largest mining bee, needs the pollen of field scabious or small scabious to provision its young. These plants grow on sandy or chalky open grassland, an important habitat for a variety of bees and wildflowers that is under threat from changing land use. The loss of particular habitats like this is the main driver of bee decline.
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Who Are the Pollinators?
Source: https://www.xerces.org/pollinator-conservation/about-pollinators
Although birds, bats, and other creatures are also pollinators, insects are the animals that do the bulk of the pollination that affects our daily lives. Some of these insect pollinators will be familiar (bees and butterflies), but you might be surprised by some of the others (flies, wasps, and beetles). Here we provide an overview of these five main groups of insect pollinators—including their life cycles, habitat requirements, and conservation needs. For further reading, check out our page about endangered pollinators.
Solitary Bees
Honey bees (Apis spp.) may be the most well-known, but they represent a tiny fraction of all bee species! Worldwide, there are an estimated 20,000 species of bees, and approximately 3,600 bee species are native to the United States and Canada alone. Of these myriad bee species, more than 90% lead solitary—rather than social—lives, in which each female constructs and provisions her own nest, without the assistance of others.
The majority of solitary bee species are not aggressive and many are stingless—undeserving of the fear many people feel towards bees. Bees are also important pollinators of a variety of plants, possessing hairs and other specialized anatomical structures that readily collect and transfer pollen.
Bumble Bees
Bumble bees are important pollinators of wild flowering plants and agricultural crops. They are able to fly in cooler temperatures and lower light levels than many other bees, making them excellent pollinators—especially at higher elevations and latitudes. They are characterized by their rounded, fuzzy bodies and their ability to perform “buzz pollination,” which involves grasping a flower in their jaws and vibrating their wing muscles to dislodge the pollen. Many plants—including a number of wildflowers and crops like tomatoes, peppers, and cranberries—benefit from buzz pollination.
Because they are essential pollinators, the loss of bumble bees can have far-ranging ecological consequences. Alarmingly, recent work by the Xerces Society in concert with the IUCN Bumble Bee Specialist Group indicates that some species have experienced rapid and dramatic declines. In fact, more than one quarter (28%) of all North American bumble bees are facing some degree of extinction risk.
Butterflies & Moths
Butterflies and moths—both members of the order Lepidoptera—are valuable pollinators, supporting the health of ecosystems and agriculture. As with many other insect species, butterflies and moths in the U.S. are experiencing significant declines: 19% are at risk of extinction—including species with special habitat needs and generalist species that were once widespread. Sadly, this includes the iconic monarch butterfly, which has experienced dramatic declines in populations both east and west of the Rocky Mountains—see our monarch conservation page for more information. From the grassland-dependent species of the Pacific Northwest to the swallowtails of Central and South America, the Xerces Society works to conserve butterflies and moths throughout the world.
Wasps
Wasps are wrongly maligned due to a reputation for being aggressive. In reality, they are adept hunters that we wouldn’t want to live without. They are doing us all a great service in keeping insect populations in balance and managing pests—they are counted among the many beneficial insects that can be utilized for conservation and biological control. From an evolutionary standpoint, bees are simply wasps that have adopted a vegetarian diet!
Many wasps are smooth-bodied and do not actively collect pollen. Those with hairs lack the branched, pollen-trapping hairs found on most bees, making them relatively minor pollinators of most plants. Nonetheless, they do provide some incidental pollination, carrying and dropping some pollen grains as they move among flowers.
Flies
With over eighty-five thousand species worldwide, flies form one of the most diverse orders of insects, Diptera. Although a number of these species are reviled as crop pests and carriers of disease, many are beneficial—from the aquatic midges that serve as an abundant food source for migratory birds to the fly pollinators of apples, peppers, mangoes and cashews.
Because flies are generalist foragers, with no nests to provision and sometimes sparsely-haired bodies, they don’t get much credit as significant pollinators. However, they can be important pollinators for specific plants.
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Why bees are essential to people and planet
The greatest pollinators
Bees are part of the biodiversity on which we all depend for our survival. They provide high-quality food—honey, royal jelly and pollen — and other products such as beeswax, propolis and honey bee venom.
As the landmark 2019 report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) notes, “Sacred passages about bees in all the worlds’ major religions highlight their significance to human societies over millennia.”
Beekeeping also provides an important source of income for many rural livelihoods. According to IPBES, the western honey bee is the most widespread managed pollinator globally, and more than 80 million hives produce an estimated 1.6 million tonnes of honey annually.
And pollinators contribute directly to food security. According to bee experts at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, a third of the world’s food production depends on bees.
When animals and insects pick up the pollen of flowers and spread it, they allow plants, including many food crops, to reproduce. Birds, rodents, monkeys and even people pollinate, but the most common pollinators are insects, and among them, bees.
Bees at risk from pesticides, air pollution
But sadly, bees and other pollinators, such as butterflies, bats and hummingbirds, are increasingly under threat from human activities.
Bee populations have been declining globally over recent decades due to habitat loss, intensive farming practices, changes in weather patterns and the excessive use of agrochemicals such as pesticides. This in turn poses a threat to a variety of plants critical to human well-being and livelihoods.
Air pollution is also thought to be affecting bees. Preliminary research shows that air pollutants interact with scent molecules released by plants which bees need to locate food. The mixed signals interfere with the bees’ ability to forage efficiently, making them slower and less effective at pollination.
While the vast majority of pollinator species are wild, including more than 20,000 species of bees, the mass breeding and large-scale transport of pollinators can pose risks for the transmission of pathogens and parasites. According to the IPBES report, better regulation of their trade can decrease the risk of unintended harm.
Bees are a key part of our global food system and pollinate 75% of our food crops
Taking urgent action
But there are positive signs.
In May 2018, the European Union upheld a partial ban on three insecticides known as neonicotinoids to mitigate the lethal threat they pose to bees and their trickle-down effect on pollination as a whole.
This August, when world leaders gather in Kunming, China, at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP 15), they are expected to finalize the post-2020 biodiversity framework, which calls for, amongst other things, the reduction of pesticides by at least two thirds by 2030.
“Increasing crop and regional farm diversity as well as targeted habitat conservation, management or restoration, is one way of combating climate change and promoting biodiversity,” says UN Environment Programme (UNEP) biodiversity specialist Marieta Sakalian. “Governments need to take the lead.”
It is precisely to encourage governments, organizations, civil society and concerned citizens to protect pollinators and their habitats that the UN has declared 20 May World Bee Day.
Read more
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Scientific studies
The worldwide importance of honey bees as pollinators in natural habitats
Published: 10 January 2018https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.2140
Abstract
The western honey bee (Apis mellifera) is the most frequent floral visitor of crops worldwide, but quantitative knowledge of its role as a pollinator outside of managed habitats is largely lacking. Here we use a global dataset of 80 published plant–pollinator interaction networks as well as pollinator effectiveness measures from 34 plant species to assess the importance of A. mellifera in natural habitats. Apis mellifera is the most frequent floral visitor in natural habitats worldwide, averaging 13% of floral visits across all networks (range 0–85%), with 5% of plant species recorded as being exclusively visited by A. mellifera. For 33% of the networks and 49% of plant species, however, A. mellifera visitation was never observed, illustrating that many flowering plant taxa and assemblages remain dependent on non-A. mellifera visitors for pollination. Apis mellifera visitation was higher in warmer, less variable climates and on mainland rather than island sites, but did not differ between its native and introduced ranges. With respect to single-visit pollination effectiveness, A. mellifera did not differ from the average non-A. mellifera floral visitor, though it was generally less effective than the most effective non-A. mellifera visitor. Our results argue for a deeper understanding of how A. mellifera, and potential future changes in its range and abundance, shape the ecology, evolution, and conservation of plants, pollinators, and their interactions in natural habitats.
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Declines in honeybee populations
Scientists warn of severe honeybee losses in 2025
Researchers at Washington State University projected that honeybee colonies in the U.S. could decline by up to 70% this year.
Honeybee colonies in the United States are projected to decline by up to 70% in 2025, entomologists at Washington State University said Tuesday.
The university said in a news release that in the past decade, honeybee colony losses have averaged 40% to 50% annually. But this year, a combination of nutrition deficiencies, mite infestations, viral diseases and possible pesticide exposure during the previous pollinating season led to higher losses, the release said.
Read more
No, the Bees Are Not Okay
Source: https://www.nrdc.org/bio/daniel-raichel/no-bees-are-not-okay
In the mid-2000s, honeybee colony losses skyrocketed almost overnight—jumping from 10-15% per year, mostly due to winter cold, to around 30-50% per year and happening year-round. Since then, these extreme losses have continued unabated and, if anything, have gotten worse. But now we have more honeybee colonies than we did 20 years ago, so what gives? Put simply, beekeepers are breeding a lot more bee colonies to offset the massive year-over-year colony die-offs.
This raises two key points that the headlines miss. First, beekeepers continue to struggle to maintain honeybee populations, and with colonies weaker than ever, our food system could be one new disease or parasite away from a sudden-onset catastrophe. Even now, increased pollination costs contribute to increased food costs, and research shows production of many key crops is already limited by a lack of bees and other pollinators.
And that limitation isn’t just because of weak and dying honeybees. Our wild bees—over 4,000 species of which are native to the U.S.—and other pollinators continue to disappear at disturbing rates. These losses form part of a larger recent trend of across-the-board insect losses (sometimes dubbed an “insect apocalypse”), but pollinators are especially hard hit—e.g., monarch butterfly populations shrunk up to 72% over the last decade and several native bumblebee species declined up to 96% over the last two. Many of these species are even better crop pollinators than honeybees, and with 80% of plants dependent on pollinators to reproduce, all are critical keystone species for our ecosystems.
Honeybees and wild bees share the same recent and alarming loss trend, but while we rarely count wild pollinator populations, we do count honeybees. That means that—and this is key point two—far from being a distraction from a larger biodiversity problem, honeybees are our canaries in the coal mine, ringing yearly alarms about precisely that problem.
What’s causing this crisis? The answer includes multiple factors such as climate change, habitat destruction, and disease. But while all of those stressors have been steadily building for a long time, only one stressor maps with the sudden spike in bee losses, and that’s the sudden spike in use of a relatively new pesticide class known as the neonicotinoids or “neonics.”
Neonics are now the world’s most widely used insecticides and possibly the most ecologically destructive since DDT. Among the most potent insecticides ever created, just one square foot of neonic-treated lawn can have enough active ingredient to kill a million bees, and their widespread use as coatings on crop seeds has made U.S. agriculture 48-times more harmful to insect life.
Neonics’ harmfulness also comes from the novel way in which they work. Designed to permeate plants—making every part of the plant toxic inside and out, from root to flower—neonics also permeate ecosystems: persisting in soils; migrating easily in rainwater; and building up in our soil, water, and wildlife from year-over-year nationwide use.Play Video: Neonics, the Toxic Truth
While chemical companies have long fought an information war to make neonics look “safe,” scientific studies have been piling up for over a decade linking neonics not only to honeybee colony losses, but also the disappearance of wild bees and butterflies, mass losses of birds, the collapse of fisheries, and birth defects in deer. People aren’t immune either. A recent study found neonics in the bodies of over 95% of pregnant women nationwide, with detected levels increasing every year—raising alarms from health experts given neonics’ links to birth defects and a whole host of neurological and hormonal harms.
The latest trend of throwing shade on honeybees (and those keeping them) does get one thing right: we can’t breed our way out of the biodiversity crisis or avoid that crisis by focusing only on honeybees. But if we listen to the warning our fuzzy little friends are sending, we can tackle the underlying and preventable problems that threaten all bees, our ecosystems, and ourselves.
And that’s exactly what NRDC is doing across the country—helping to pass policies in New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, Nevada, and California to eliminate the unnecessary and destructive uses that account for the vast majority of neonic use. If you really want to “save the bees” this World Bee Day, reach out to your elected officials—whether it’s they’re in the state house or Congress—and let them know you want them to rein in reckless neonic pollution too.
Pollination is critical for food production, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with the agency saying about 35% of the world’s food crops depend on animal pollinators to produce.
Crops that depend on honey bees and other pollinators to grow include fruits and vegetables — like apples, strawberries, cucumbers and avocados — but also nuts, such as almonds and macadamia nuts, the USDA said. Other affected plants include coffee, cocoa and vanilla, according to the USDA.
“I don’t want to be a fearmonger, but this level of national loss could mean increased bankruptcies amongst beekeepers,” Brandon Hopkins, a professor of pollinator ecology at WSU, said in a press release accompanying the research.
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Honey bee colonies could face 70% losses in 2025, impacting agriculture
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/US/honey-bee-colonies-face-70-losses-2025-impacting/story?id=120191720
Honey bee colonies across the United States are facing record-breaking losses in 2025, with scientists warning the impact could be felt in agricultural production.
Washington State University entomologists announced this week that commercial honey bee colony losses are projected to reach between 60% and 70% in 2025.
Over the past decade, annual losses for colonies have typically ranged between 40% and 50%, marking a significant jump this year.
Priya Chakrabarti Basu, an assistant professor of pollinator health and apiculture at WSU told ABC News that honey bee losses could stem from nutrition deficiencies, mite infestations, viral diseases and possible pesticide exposure during the previous pollinating season.
“I honestly think this is a combination of multiple stressors, which is why for years my lab has been focusing on understanding the impacts of and interactions of these stressors on bee pollinators,” Basu said, adding that America’s commercial beekeepers are under pressure to maintain colonies.
“The pollination demands haven’t gone down, so beekeepers face tremendous pressure to keep the same number of colonies to meet those needs,” Basu said.
Read more
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Beekeepers say catastrophic honeybee losses are cause for alarm
Honeybee officials are raising the alarm about severe colony losses over the past few months. The extent of the bee deaths is still being tallied, but one estimate suggests more than a million colonies have died.
“No one is aware of the massive nature of this year’s die off,” said Steve Ellis, a Minnesota beekeeper. “It is unprecedented.”
Over the past 20 years commercial beekeepers have often lost nearly 50 percent of their bees over the winter. But Ellis, who is also president of the national Pollinator Stewardship Council, said he’s hearing from beekeepers who have losses ranging from 70 to 100 percent this year. One immediate repercussion is that there aren’t enough bees to fully pollinate California’s almond crop.
“The almond crop will be impacted due to a shortage of bees in a way that has never happened before,” said Ellis who takes his bees to California to pollinate almond orchards.
In a statement earlier this month, the Almond Board of California said it was aware of “alarming reports of nationwide honeybee colony losses” as beekeepers prepared for the almond pollination season.
Honeybee organizations are collecting data to determine the extent of the losses. A voluntary online survey conducted by Project Apis m., named for the Apis mellifera honeybee, found “severe and sudden” colony losses, according to a recent news release. The nonprofit estimate nearly 1.25 million colonies have been lost since June of 2024.
“Initial survey results of colony losses suggest that commercial beekeepers may have lost in excess of 60 percent of their bees. The scale of these losses is completely unsustainable,” said Zac Browning, a fourth-generation commercial beekeeper from North Dakota and board chairman of Project Apis m.
Read more
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Bee decline threatens global food supply, says UN
Populations of bees, butterflies and other species important for agricultural pollination are declining, posing potential risks to major world crops, a UN body on biodiversity said Friday. (26.02.2016)
Source: https://www.france24.com/en/20160226-environment-decline-bees-pollinators-threat-global-food-supply
The Diversity Decline in Wild and Managed Honey Bee Populations Urges for an Integrated Conservation Approach
Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.767950/full
Many parts of the globe experience severe losses and fragmentation of habitats, affecting the self-sustainability of pollinator populations. A number of bee species coexist as wild and managed populations. Using honey bees as an example, we argue that several management practices in beekeeping threaten genetic diversity in both wild and managed populations, and drive population decline. Large-scale movement of hive stocks, introductions into new areas, breeding programs and trading of queens contribute to reducing genetic diversity, as recent research demonstrated for wild and managed honey bees within a few decades. Examples of the effects of domestication in other organisms show losses of both genetic diversity and fitness functions. Cases of natural selection and feralization resulted in maintenance of a higher genetic diversity, including in a Varroa destructor surviving population of honey bees. To protect the genetic diversity of honey bee populations, exchange between regions should be avoided. The proposed solution to selectively breed all local subspecies for a use in beekeeping would reduce the genetic diversity of each, and not address the value of the genetic diversity present in hybridized populations. The protection of Apis mellifera’s, Apis cerana’s and Apis koschevnikovi’s genetic diversities could be based on natural selection. In beekeeping, it implies to not selectively breed but to leave the choice of the next generation of queens to the colonies, as in nature. Wild populations surrounded by beekeeping activity could be preserved by allowing Darwinian beekeeping in a buffer zone between the wild and regular beekeeping area.
