It’s the end of the month and you’re sitting down to pay your bills, electricity- paid, gas- paid, TV- paid but, have you ever thought about how much you owe the humble honey bee?
Yes, these iconic insects not only enhance their surrounding environment but they also have an input into around a third of all our foodstuffs through their pollination efforts, contributing over £400 million a year to the agricultural industry, all whilst producing delicious honey and bees wax.
And while the European Union values insect pollination at £134 billion (153bn Euros) it misses the point that pollination is priceless; to say that every company, city, family and person is 100% dependent on nature and the biosphere is both indisputable as well as banal.
Despite our dependence on these little creatures, bees worldwide are disappearing at an alarming rate due to habitat loss often attributed to the use of pesticides by the very farmers who rely on bees for their survival.
As Pavan Sukhdev from The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity puts it “Not a single bee has ever sent you an invoice. And that is part of the problem – because most of what comes to us from nature is free, because it is not invoiced, because it is not priced, because it is not traded in markets, we tend to ignore it.”
When we consider how intricate the eco-system is, the value of bees and other insects is obvious. Not only are they pollinating much of the food that we eat, they are also ensuring the future generations of all kinds of plants that support many other species. For this reason reducing emissions and recycling is not enough, we must positively contribute to the ecosystem and attempt to help our bees cope with modern life.
The expense of low bee hive activity has already been seen in countries like China where crops are having to be hand pollinated just to yield a harvest and the plight of the honey bee is regularly seen in our news headlines.
For now pollination is free in the West but if the bee does die out there will be much bigger costs to pay than missing your monthly phone bill.