Caretakers versus Exploiters: Impacting Biodiversity in the Age of Humans

Background Content

This unit will be written based on the knowledge I have gained in the 2020 Caretakers versus Exploiters: Impacting Biodiversity in the Age of Humans seminar in addition to my own research of bees and the reasons for their decline. I will provide background information on bee physiology and behaviors, background information on the factors of their decline, a description of conservation steps that are being considered, as well as steps our governments have taken to address these issues, and background information on the various ways the reduction or complete extinction will impact other species, including humans

What is Biodiversity

Biodiversity is the shortened form of two words “biological” and “diversity.”  It refers to all the variety for life that can be found on Earth) plants, animals, fungi and micro-organisms) as well as to the communities that they form and the habitats in which they live.  Biodiversity includes the diversity within species and between different species within terrestrial, freshwater and marine ecosystems.  An ecosystem is the name given to all living species that live together in a stable community, interacting with one another and their physical environment.  Ecosystems need a balanced and diverse number of species to thrive.  Biodiversity plays a critical role in sustaining human populations across the globe.  We depend on it for sustained food growth, for clean air and water and for medicine and for shelter.⁴  Biodiversity enriches our lives – it has economic, cultural, recreational, religious and aesthetic importance across the world.

Biodiversity is under serious threat as a result of human activities.  The main dangers worldwide are population growth and resource consumption, climate change and global warming, habitat conversion and urbanization, invasive alien species, over-exploitation of natural resources and environmental degradation.⁵  While there might be “survival of the fittest” within a given species, each species depends on the services provided by other species to ensure survival.  Evidence shows that a sixth mass extinction is occurring now.  Unlike previous mass extinctions, the sixth extinction is due to human actions.  This period during which human activities have impacted the environment from global warming, habitat loss, changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere, oceans and soil, and animal extinctions to constitute a distinct geological change is defined as the Anthropocene.   

Biodiversity boosts ecosystem productivity where each species has an important role to play.  For example, many plant species mean a greater variety of crops, greater species diversity ensures natural sustainability for all life forms, and healthy ecosystems can better withstand and recover from a variety of disasters.  A healthy biodiversity provides several natural services for everyone.  Ecosystem services such as protection of water resources, soils formation and protection, contribution to climate stability, and maintenance of ecosystems.  Biological resources such as food, medicinal resources and pharmaceutical drugs, and diversity in genes, species and ecosystems.  Social benefits such as research, education, recreation, tourism and cultural values.⁶

Characteristics of the Bee 

Most bees have short, thick bodies covered with hair, six legs, and three body parts: head, thorax, and abdomen.  They have two pairs of wings.  One pair is attached to each of the last two segments of the thorax, but front and back wings are joined so that they may look like only one.  The rapid movements of the wings make a humming sound in flight.  Bees wings flap about 200 plus beats per second.  These insanely rapid wing movements cause the air to vibrate.⁷  With three single eyes on top of their heads and two huge, helmetlike compound eyes, bees can see color, pattern, and movement.  The honeybees’ antennae serve as their temperature indicators.  From their thermometers, the bees receive signals telling them what needs to be done to keep the hive safe and comfortable.  If the colony gets too warm, some of the bees’ form living chains and cool the air with the fanning of their wings.  There are bees that collect water, which also will lower the temperature of the nest as the water evaporates from the surfaces of the honeycomb.  Simultaneously, a watery substance, probably from their honey filled stomachs, evaporates from their mouths.  In the opposite spectrum, if it gets too cold outside, the bees raise the temperature of the nest by clustering very closely together.  Colonies part ways in the fall and only the young queens, who have mated, remain to hibernate; all others pass away.  In the spring, after emerging from hibernating quarters in the litter or soil, the queen looks for a place to nest, which may be under rocks, on or below the ground surface, in the abandoned nest of a mouse or bird, in a clump of grass, and makes preparations for her first brood.  In the case of the first brood, egg cells are fabricated, usually of pollen, and one egg is laid in each cell.  One or more cells are manufactured of was and pollen and filled with honey before the young arrive.  There are three distinct castes among social bees:  The drone, (which is male), the worker (which is an infertile female), and the queen (which is a fertile female).  After the workers arrives, commonly the first brood, the queen isolates herself to egg laying while her infertile female workers forage and enlarge the nest, constructing brood cells, building and storing honey and pollen pots, caring for the young.  Brood cells are not used again, but cocoons are used for storage of honey and pollen after undergoing alterations.  In some colonies the second brood is all male and the third brood is female.  Workers of the later broods become progressively larger.  The queens and males usually leave the nest and fly off to mate.  Males are often seen flying about the entrance at this time, waiting for the young queens to come out.   

Colonies of honeybees (Apis mellifera) are maintained throughout the winter by their habit of storing honey and clustering.  When a bee collects nectar from the flower of a plant, the pollen sticks to the hair of the bee’s body.  Some of this pollen is rubbed off when it visits the next flower.  When this happens, fertilization is possible and a fruit carrying seeds can develop. Bees need to visit close to two million flowers and plants to produce about one pound of honey.⁸  Each of those bees in their lifespan can produce one twelfth teaspoon of honey. Often bumblebees work from dawn to dusk, visiting twenty to forty flowers per minute. The population of workers in a hive of honeybees may be 20,000 to several times this number.  By continued movement of wings, legs, and bodies and the normal process of metabolism, enough heat is generated to keep the compact cluster of individuals alive.  They draw closer together as the temperature drops and shift their position to gain access to more stores of honey.  The queen remains within the cluster and by early February begins laying eggs.  As the days grow longer and warmer, the cluster will enlarge, and drones are produced in preparation for the division of the colony.  The worker broods are kept in the lower central part of the comb, and the pollen stored around them in cells of the same size.  The larger cells of the drones are usually in the lower corners of the comb.  Honey is stored in cells of the same size toward the back of the hive.  Queen cells are large thimble shaped cells which hang down vertically from the brood comb.  Brood cells are kept open and the larvae fed daily.  All get royal jelly, a secretion of the workers, for two days.  Workers and drones are then given honey and pollen while queens remain on the royal jelly diet.  The white grublike larva is full grown and fills its cells in about six days.  The cell is capped, and the larva pupates after spinning a cocoon.  Pupation requires about seven and one-half days for queens, twelve days for workers, and fourteen and one-half day for drones.  Swarming by honeybees occurs when new queens appear in the hive, prompting the mother queen to leave and half the colony to follow her.  They cluster on a limb or other overhang and remain until the scouting bees find a new home.  In the parent colony the new queens fight one another until only one remains alive.  The survivor flies out to mate and returns as the new queen mother.  Young workers first serve as nurses, later produce wax, and after about three weeks of various chores in the hive become foragers.  Workers live about six weeks during the peak of activity.  The queen is fed royal jelly throughout her life, which lasts a year or more.  Drones are fed honey if it is plentiful but are ousted from the hive when they become a burden.  Their life span is about eight weeks.

The main types of bees in the US are honeybees and bumblebees.  Our bumblebees are native species, but honeybees are descendants of bees brought over by early settlers.  Native Americans used to call them “white man’s flies.”  There are twice as many bee species as bird species⁹ and they are generally grouped into the Apidae family.

Figure 2  “The busy bee has no time for sorrow.” -William Blake

The “B”ee in Biodiversity

It was around 2006-2007 that beekeepers raised the alarm that thousands of beehives were alarmingly empty.  It wasn’t just in the US that was losing beehives because it seems that similar issues were occurring all over the world with beekeepers.  In 2018, the United Nation with the lead from Slovenia introduced May 20^th as the official World Bee Day to draw attention to the importance of bees and biodiversity.¹⁰ This date was significantly chosen for Anton Jansa’s birthday, who was a Slovenian apiculture pioneer from the 1700s.  Apiculture is derived from the Latin word ‘apis’ which means bee and is the scientific method of caring and management of honeybees for the production of wax and honey.  One of Anton Jansa’s most notable work includes a posthumous 1775 publication of “A Full Guide to Beekeeping” where he wrote “Among all God’s beings there are none so hard working and useful to man with so little attention needed for its keep as the bee.”  Bees are pollinators that play a part in every aspect of an ecosystem.  Growth of flowers, trees, and other plants which serve as shelter and food for creatures small and large are supported by bees.  Without bees, our plates would be empty because our gardens would be bare.

Known for their elaborate hives, bees also help build homes for millions of other insects as well as larger animals.  Tropical forests, temperate deciduous forests, and savannah woodlands are vital to the bee’s role as pollinators because the tree species in these ecosystems couldn’t grow.¹¹  Bees feed their colonies during the cold winter months by producing honey.  As humans we have harvested this sweet snack for thousands of years, but humans aren’t the only ones who delight in its nutritious treat.  Besides Winnie the Pooh and Baloo from “The Jungle Book,” birds, opossums, racoons, and other insects will raid beehives for a taste.  Bees are also part of an ecosystem’s food chain.  Many species of birds and insects such as spiders, dragonflies and praying mantises’ prey on bees for nourishment.  Bees are also accountable to produce many seeds, nuts, fruit, and berries that serve as a vital good source for wild animals.¹²

The Importance of Pollination

If you love broccoli, asparagus, melons, cranberries or apples you should thank our fuzzy insect friends.  These plants require the transfer of pollen which bees move from flower to flower in their search for nectar.  And because bees are social insects, they are not going to eat this food themselves, they are going to return to their hive and use the nectar, the lipids, and the proteins found in the pollen and feed the hive.  About 1 out of 3 crops and ninety percent of all plants require cross pollination to spread and thrive.  Bees are one of the most important pollinators with no disrespect to moths, beetles, flies, ants, butterflies, and wasps.  Pollination is a fundamental process that forms the basis for much of our terrestrial biodiversity.  IPBES 2016 published that $577 billion rely on animal pollination.¹³ 

Factors of Their Decline

Over the past two decades, bee declines worldwide have drawn international attention.  Many bumble bee populations have gone locally extinct, resulting in dramatic range contractions.  Recent surveys of Pennsylvania beekeepers have recorded a statewide loss of 44.5% of colonies in the winter of 2016-2017.¹⁴  It’s complicated to pinpoint why bees are declining and how we can help them.  One factor is the availability of food and nest resources due to intensive farming practices such as mono-cropping or landscaping with condos and strip malls. Another factor is the incidence of antagonists.¹⁵  Flowers are the watering holes of the pollinator world offering a place for other pollinators and their parasites (Varroa mites and deformed wing virus) to encounter each other.  This mite is sort of like a tick that transmit diseases to humans and other mammals.  One of the diseases that it will transmit is a virus called deformed wing virus that causes the adult bees to emerge with shriveled wings.  That poor bee will never be on an apple tree, she will never go and collect nectar and pollen for her hive, and as a result, the hive will suffer.  

Climate change causes some flowers to bloom earlier or later than usual, leaving bees with fewer food sources at the start of the season.¹⁶  Bees suffer habitat loss from development, abandoned farms, and the lack of bee friendly flowers.  When flowers are abundant, pollinators select their favorite or most energetically efficient flowers and therefore are less likely to share flowers with other species.  As flower abundances decline due to habitat loss and/or climate change, pollinators forage from a greater diversity of plants, potentially meeting many more individuals and increasing parasite transfer.  Some colonies collapse due to plants treated with neonicotinoid pesticides.  Neonicotinoids are slow-release, agricultural pesticides that attack the central nervous systems of insects.  Honeybees seem to prefer neonicotinoid-laced nectar and become so inebriated they have difficulty finding their way home.

Conservation Steps

Conservation practices designed to help honeybees and other pollinators also help reduce erosion, increase soil health, control invasive species, provide quality forage for livestock, increase populations of other beneficial insects and wildlife and make agricultural operations more efficient.  Mowing less frequently can improve pollinator habitat and can be a practical and economical alternative to lawn replacement.¹⁷  Other practices include not using pesticides in your garden, buying local raw honey, plant your garden with native and bee friendly plants, don’t weed your garden, and even if you just have a small balcony you can install a little water basin for the bees to drink during the summer.

Figure 3 A bee descends into the sweetness of a white apple blossom.

One of the biggest environmental impacts of the global shutdown due to the pandemic has been the significant reduction in air pollution.  Less fumes from cars on the road makes it easier for bees to forage as air pollution substantially reduces the strength and longevity of floral scents.  Pollutants break down scent molecules emitted by plants, making it harder for bees to detect food. In a world with less air pollution, bee can make shorter and more profitable shopping trips and this may help them rear more of their  young.¹⁸  Ecologists and conservation groups have called on the wider public to help them gather scientific data during this time.  Citizen science is vital and anyone can participate in the scheme by completing what is known as a Flower-Insect Timed Count (FIT Count).  This involves monitoring a small patch of flowers in your garden for 10 minutes, counting the number of insects you see and filling in an online form.  People are beginning to realize how their mental health and well-being is supported by nature.¹⁹   

Bees Are Nature’s Mathematicians

Bees use a sophisticated communication system that is unique and allows the coordination of an entire beehive of up 20,000 to 80,000 individual bees that include a single queen, several male drones and mostly female worker and forager bees.  This efficient form of communication is referred to as the waggle dance.²⁰  Once a forager has discovered what she determines to be a good patch of flowers, a new nesting site, or a good source of water she returns back to the hive and begins her dance.  Upon landing, her body waggles forward very quickly from side to side forming a circle, she then stops at her certain position and either turns to the left or the right of that circle and performs another waggle run to form a figure eight.  There are two vital pieces of information that is communicated to the colony: direction and distance.  The way she is facing when she’s doing the waggle dance communicates direction.  If she dances at about 270 degrees from up, this communicates that the new resource is located 270 degrees from where the sun is on the horizon.  The duration of the dance communicates distance where about one second represents about 250 feet.  To make a case for her determination, this bee will waggle dance more figure eight runs to convey to the colony that her newfound resource is of high quality.  As a leaderless democracy, the hive will observe other foragers waggle dances that are casting their vote for the new site located and they themselves go out to explore these possibilities.  They will then return and mimic the waggle dance that they voted for that represent the best source of survival for the colony.  Based on majority rule, the entire assemble will depart and fly together to their new resource. 

Mathematically, bees are good at weighing the cost of a longer distance flight against the benefit of the resource.  Bees are blessed with a very reliable twenty-four-hour clock that is seldom affected by anything and does not seem to depend on events in the outside world to keep it working.  Bees also can measure very short units of time, down to mere fractions of a second.  They use their internal clock sense to arrive at the right time for the opening of a flower that offered a generous serving of nectar the day before.  The biological clock is also a very important part of a bee’s direction-finding equipment.  When a foraging bee leaves the hive to look for nectar or pollen, an almost unbelievable process begins.  Flying at a speed of perhaps thirteen miles an hour, the bee’s eyes sense its flight speed in relation to the ground and somehow measure the direction of its flight compared to the angle of the sun. On a heavily overcast day bees seem confused, presumably because there has been no glimpse of the position of the sun.  But on a partly cloudy day, a bee can use a small patch of blue sky as its direction finder.  This is possible because bee’s eyes detect polarized light.  Bees also see the entire pattern of the sky at once, for their compound eyes are made up of thousands of tiny facets.

Nature Adores the Number Six and Bees Adore Hexagons

Let’s take a little tour of the all-pervasive hexagons in nature on a massive scale down to its ethereal existence.  There’s a substantial cloud formation on Saturn’s north pole.  Far from an ordinary cloud formation, it is a unmistakable hexagon.  Each of the sides of the six-sided polygon is bigger than the Earth’s diameter.²¹  One of the many hypotheses about its mysterious cause is a weather whirlpool spinning so fast that it turns into a hexagon.  Returning to Earth, there are plenty examples of basalt columns which are found in California’s Devils Post Pile, Wyoming’s Devils Tower, the Cliff of Stone Plates in Vietnam and similarly in Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway.  Basalt columns or columnar jointing forms when lava or types of rocks undergo cooling and contraction which leads to cracks that were burdened with tension.  These cracks just happen to release the most tension at around 120 degrees which is magically the interior angle of a regular polygon.²²  Snowflakes utilize the hexagonal structure.  The molecules in frozen water crystals become hexagonal because of its molecular structure.  To break it down even further, most organic compounds have a carbon foundation.  Carbon is bountiful and bonds well with other elements.  But when six carbon atoms are bounded together, the bond angle is at an even 120 degrees and forms a perfect hexagon known as the benzene ring.²³  Then there’s the bees themselves.  The reason that bees can see the entire pattern of the sky at once is because the eyes of bees are made up of hundreds and hundreds of hexagonal lenses.  On some level the hexagon is encoded into their spirit and the most notable proof of that are the honeycombs found in every beehive around the world.

The Honeycomb Conjecture

The most important feature of a bee’s life is the hive.  Like humans, bees require food and shelter to survive.  Bees demand a secure place for the entire colony to live while at the same time a place where they can store their nectar to ripen into honey; therefore, space efficiency is of utmost importance.  A marvelous solution is to build tiny storage cells just wide enough for a bee to fit and doubles as a storage space for their nectar.  The cells are made from wax which the bees produce themselves through their glands by converting the sugar from the honey.  The dilemma is that it requires a great deal of energy to produce their own wax because the bee themselves have to consume about eight ounces of honey to produce about one ounce of wax.²⁴  Efficiency is of supreme importance to a bee’s survival.  Through evolutionary architecture, the bees designed an efficient space that allows them to store the largest possible amount of honey while using the least amount of wax, hence the hexagonal prism we call honeycombs.  In geometry, a conjecture is basically a conclusion or opinion which is suspected to hold truth without confirming evidence.  The honeycomb conjecture asserts that a regular hexagonal grid is the best way to divide a surface into regions of uniform area with the least total perimeter.  This conjecture dates as far back as 36 BC and in 1999 was proven to be true by University of Pittsburgh professor and mathematician Dr. Thomas C. Hales.²⁵

Let Γ be a locally finite graph in R², consisting of smooth curves, and such that  R² \ Γ has infinitely many bounded connected components, all of unit area.  Let C be the union of the bounded components.  Equality is attained for the regular hexagonal tile.