Bees. This word in itself causes different feelings for many people. For me, bees are terrifying and have left me cowering and suffering from many panic attacks since a young age due to my phobia of them. But even with these feelings, I understand how important they are to our ecosystem.

Honey bees are an important foundation both agriculturally and economically. But a sad fact about the honey bees is that they are going extinct even though people have known that for a while now.

Some information that people are not aware of is that one country in particular has lost so many bees that they have to hand pollinate most of their crops.

This country is China, the largest populated country in the world.

One of their most important jobs is transferring pollen and seeds from one flower to another which fertilizes the plant so it can grow and produce food. This could also include cross-pollination which helps at least 30 percent of the world’s crops and 90 percent of our wild plants to thrive. Without bees to spread seeds, many plants, including food crops, would die off.

A major tragedy that involved bees was in June of 2013. A Target parking lot in Portland Oregon was found covered in in a layer of Bumble bees, some staggering around trying to move, while most others were already dead, and even more raining down from above. This tragedy lasted several more days.

It did not take long to figure out that the day before a pest-control company had sprayed a powerful insecticide on surrounding Linden trees to protect them from aphids. In the end, an estimated 50,000 bumblebees were killed, meaning more than 300 bumblebee colonies were wiped out.

This incident happened several years ago, but events like this are still continuing. The cause of so many bee deaths is pesticides. Now days scientist are trying to come up with a way to use pesticides that are not harmful to these tiny helpers, but there has been very little progress.

Bees are very important for our survival and people need to learn to comprehend that bees need to live, whether they like it or not.

No matter how terrifying people may think they are, bees are important to the world, and to our survival. I know people just want to save their plants and crops, but pesticides and many types of chemicals are killing off the bugs that are a major party in how we have survived on this earth so long.