Bees and Pollination

Bees — including honeybees, bumblebees, and 20,000+ species of solitary bees — are the world's most important pollinators, responsible for the reproduction of 75% of flowering plant species and the production of one-third of all human food by volume. The annual economic value of bee pollination is estimated at $200-600 billion globally. Honeybees communicate the location of food sources through the 'waggle dance' — a figure-8 dance on the vertical honeycomb that encodes direction (relative to the sun) and distance (duration of waggle run) of flowers with extraordinary precision. Karl von Frisch decoded the waggle dance and won the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1973. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD, first documented 2006) has reduced managed honeybee colonies by 30-50% annually — caused by a combination of pesticides (neonicotinoids), habitat loss, Varroa mite parasitism, and disease.