Article curated by: Samriddha Ghosh
Every year since 2018, on the occasion of the birth anniversary of the Slovenian beekeeper Anton Jansa (1734-1773), the pioneer of modern beekeeping, May 20th is celebrated as ‘World Bee Day’ across the globe to raise awareness about the significance of bees and beekeeping. These tiny buzzing hymenopteran insects display eusociality, which is the highest level of organisation of sociality amongst living animals. They have unique haplodiploid breeding systems. For millions of years, bees have coevolved with flowering plants as their salient pollinators. Apart from being of paramount importance for the study of evolutionary ecology, bees are pivotal for maintaining healthy ecosystems, biodiversity and food security. There are about 20,000 different species of bees which contribute to pollination of the majority of the world’s wild plants and close to 87% of all leading agricultural crops.
The theme of this year’s World Bee Day is Bee engaged: Build Back Better for Bees, focusing on actions for restoring, supporting and enhancing the role of these pollinators. A variety of interrelated factors such as pesticides, drought, habitat destruction, nutrition deficiency, air pollution, global warming continue to contribute to rapid decline of nature’s miracle workers that bees are. The disappearance of bees threatens the very existence of us human beings. To prevent our own untimely extinction, the leading solutions in this context are ban on certain pesticides, preserving wild habitats and health of pollinators, restoring sustainable organic agriculture and promoting indigenous beekeeping practices. Studies have shown that beekeeping has clear benefits regarding sustainability and food security.
In India, indigenous species such as Apis dorsata (rock bees) or Apis cerana indica (Indian hive bees) have declined over the past several decades. As a part of our Livelihood Programme, we, with the generous support from our donors (NatWest Foundation, Larsen & Toubro Infotech Limited & SBI Foundation/SBI Card), have been supporting local forest-dwelling communities by providing them with bee boxes with colonies, organising training programmes and supporting them in marketing the produced honey. We have seen that being in close proximity with the forest with access to various flowering plants improves the yield. These communities live outside protected areas and have been traditionally associated with beekeeping and honey collecting. This support helps the community earn a decent livelihood, and concurrently, the proximity of the bees helps in pollination of the wild plants in the forest, maintaining the local biodiversity.
Sources:
FAO, GREENPEACE, https://www.worldbeeday.org/, ZSI
Sillman, J., Uusitalo, V., Tapanen, T., Salonen, A., Soukka, R. and Kahiluoto, H., 2021. Contribution of honeybees towards the net environmental benefits of food. Science of the Total Environment, 756, p.143880.