By AmandaREO
Bees are awesome. Some of you may beg to differ, saying that they're creepy or icky. But these pollinators are hella cool, trust me.
A bee's body is divided into three parts: The head with two antennae, The thorax with six legs, and the abdomen. Only the female bees have stingers. Bees' can be yellow and black, but can also be green, red, and blue. They can be striped or sport a metallic sheen, and can be huge like carpenter bees or small like the tiny two millimeter Perdita minima bee.
With over 20,000 bee species around the globe, there are bees on every continent except Antartica. Take North America-4,000 native bee species in a range of ecosystems including forests, deserts, and grasslands.
As we all should know, bees are pollinators. They eat sugary nectar and pollen from flowering plants, where some of the pollen sticks to them. When they fly to the next flower, some of the pollen falls off, fertilizing the flower. The flower is then able to produce the fruit and seeds that we, among many other animals, feed on. Bees pollinate 80% of all flowering plants, including 75% the fruits, nuts, and vegetables grown in the United States.
Most bees fly solo (get it?), unlike honey bees and wild bumble bees. They don't make hives, create honey, or live with other bees. They actually leave their babies to grow without any parental guidance, unlike how raising babies is a communal thing in many hives.
Queen bees and solitary bees live up to a year, while the worker bees only live about a month.
Many types of bees are endangered, and the rest are in decline. Diseases, habitat destruction, pesticides, invasive species, changes in land, climate change, and habitat fragmentation are the likely causes. This is terrible because the bees' job is so critical to plant, animal, and people's survival. We can't let them go extinct.
You can help by planting a garden that is sustainable and bee friendly, in ways like planting native plants and pollinators, hanging up bee homes, and never using pesticides. Go here, this awesome instructional guide, to find out more: https://www.nwf.org/Garden-for-Wildlife
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