🎵 [music] 🎵
KIDS: Our World!
EVAN: Hey Globey, have you ever wondered how flowers are
pollinated? What’s pollination?
Pollination is the process of moving pollen. All flowers
and about 75% of plants need to be fertilized in order to
reproduce or create more flowers and plants. Insects and
birds carry the pollen on their legs from one flower to another
flower. As the pollen drops into the flower,
fertilization occurs, and the plant forms a new seed.
So insects such as honeybees, and other animals like bats and
birds, play important roles in our ecosystem as pollinators.
In this show we’re going to concentrate on honeybees.
Honeybees are part group of arthropods called insects.
All insects have six legs, one pair of antennae,
three body sections, and wings.
Honeybees actually have 2 pairs of wings and five eyes.
The honeybee can fly about 32 kilometers per hour which is
the same as about 20 miles per hour.
Did you know that honeybees have been on Earth for about
30 million years? A bee’s habitat is very large.
It includes the place where the bee lives and the fields and
forests where the bee searches for flowers.
Honeybees live in beehives that can hold as many as
50 to 70 thousand bees. If these bees were people,
that would fill up an entire football stadium.
RICHARD ANTCLIFF: Bees are actually very important to
our food systems. EVAN: Richard Antcliff works
for NASA and he’s also an amateur beekeeper.
RICHARD: About 30 % of what we eat is actually dependent upon
bees because they pollinate the plants. So all of the apples,
and fruits, and vegetables that we eat are dependent upon the
pollination of the bees. And when I heard a couple of years
ago bees were starting to decline in this country,
there was a real concern about that. So I decided to take up
bee keeping myself to help build up the population and
frankly they’re a lot of fun. It’s kind of like a lot of
pets. A typical beehive will have 60 thousand bees,
so I have 60 thousand pets.
EVAN: Wow, would you want to bee around that many honeybees
all at once?, Uh ok, that was just a bad joke. Sorry.
Honeybees help pollinate approximately 130 agricultural
crops in the United States each year.
This represents more than 90% of all commercial crops.
Some of these crops include berries, apples, cherries,
oranges, watermelons, nuts, and vegetables.
These crops even feed cows, which in turn produce milk
and ice cream for us.
So you can see how important honeybees are to humans.
Unfortunately though, the population of the honeybee in
North America is declining. There are fewer bees here than
there were in the past. And scientists aren’t exactly
sure why. Let me explain one of the reasons scientists think
the honeybee is dying. Honeybees feed all year off the
honey they produce in the Spring. One of the main
ingredients for honey is a sugary liquid called nectar.
Nectar is produced by plants and flowers, and honeybees
collect this nectar and then bring it back to the beehive
where they make honey.
Unfortunately, nectar is only produced by flowers at certain
times during the year. Honeybees have an internal
instinct that tells them when to go out and collect this
nectar. But here’s the problem.
Our Earth is experiencing climate change.
Things are warming up, so each year the flowers’ production of
nectar starts a little bit earlier then the year before.
In the Northeast for example, flowers produce nectar about
one full month earlier than it did back in the 1970’s.
So honeybees get confused by this changing time and they
usually end up with less time to collect the nectar.
This results in the honeybee collecting less nectar than it
needs to. The less nectar, the less honey.
The less honey, the less food the honeybee has all year long.
This lack of honey adds stress to the honeybee,
and the end result is that we are seeing the number
of honeybees get smaller.
RICHARD: Bees in the wild are disappearing very very fast.
We’re not seeing bees in trees anymore, or out in the open
anymore. So, it’s important for people the actually get
into bee keeping such that we have enough bees in order to
have the population to do the pollination.
EVAN: Fortunately, NASA is trying to help solve the
problem. NASA is using satellites measure climate
change and predict the time when the flowers’ nectar
production will begin. NASA is also partnering with beekeepers
in the United States to help with this study. The beekeepers
are weighing their beehives to determine how much honey is
being produced by the honeybees. If the honeybees
are making a lot of honey, that means the beehives will weigh
more. But it also means the honeybees are getting to the
flowers’ nectar in time in order to make the honey in the
first place. The beekeepers become citizen scientists and
submit the information about their beehives to a website at
Goddard Space Flight Center called HoneyBeeNet.
So NASA and other beekeepers can track whether or not
honeybees are collecting the nectar they need to survive.
It’s amazing how humans, animals, and insects are all
dependent on each other to survive. Without the little
honeybee, our crops would be much smaller, and we would not
have as much food to eat. Wow Globey, let’s hope that NASA
and beekeepers across our country work busy as bees to
help solve this problem of the declining honeybee population.
? [music] ?
KIDS: Our World!
.