懂你英语 Level4-Unit 3 3/4 listening 蜜蜂、蜂农与环境

Honeybees play an interesting and important role in nature. In additional to making honey, honeybees help many plants reproduce. They do this by pollinating the plant which means to transfer pollen. Pollination occurs when pollen is moved within a plant’s flower or carried to another flower. This is how the plant reproduce. For reproduction to succeed, the pollen must be transferred from the male part of the flower to the female part. Many plants depend on the pollen for reproduction. This included many fruits and vegetables.

Beside honeybees, there are many other pollinators including birds, insects and other kind of bees. Without enough pollinators, many of our favorite fruits and vegetable will become more expensive and hard to find. This included almonds and cherries.

Honeybee are important pollinators and play an important role in agriculture.

Beekeepers are people who keep honeybees. In addition to collecting honey, some beekeepers provide pollination services for farmers. They do this by raising and managing colonis of bees. Farmers need colonies to pollinate their crops. Beekeepers can provide and manage of bee colonies to farmers.

Honeybees are social insects that live in colonies. A bee colony consists of a queen bee, male drones and thousands of male worker bees. Each colony also contains eggs and immature bees in various stage of development. The number of bees within a colony depends on the seasonal changes. A colony’s population increases during the warm season and decreases during the colder season.

In recent year, many bee colonies have collapsed or disappeared. A bee colony collapses occurs when a majority of bee in colony disappear and leave behind the queen.

Some beekeepers have reported losing 30 to 90 % of their colonies. This loss of bee colonies can cause significant problems for farmers who depend on them to pollinate their crops. In some parts of the world, a shortage of bees has increased the cost of renting bees by up to 20%.

There are several possible causes for bee colony collapse. One possible collapse is the use of new pesticides. Other possible causes include infections from viruses, genetic factors and malnutrition（营养不良）. Changing weather patterns may also play a role as summers get hotter and winters get colder. These changes in weather may weaken the bees, making it more difficult for them to fight infections. Whatever the causes of colony collapse, it’s important to understand that many parts of our world are interdependent. Changes that effect on one species may have serious effects on other species.

A change to our environment, can start a chain of event that is difficult to predict. In any complex system such as the earth environment, small changes can cause a un consequences. The danger of un consequences is something that we all need to understand better.