Honey Bees Research Paper

Honey bees are the small, fuzzy winged creatures that tell me when spring and summer are about to arrive. These tiny insects that are seen flying through the air inhabiting vegetable and fruit gardens, pollinating flowers, and farmer’s crops have provided people with honey and food around the world for centuries. In the United States these angles of agriculture, have provided pollination for 130 fruits and vegetables which supports the foundation of nutritional diets for Americans. “Fruit, vegetables, nuts, seeds, honey; are all nutrition-rich foods that are produced with the help of animal pollinators, especially bees” (). It’s estimated that 35 percent of foods worldwide are dependent on animal pollinators. In addition, pollination by honey bees contributes to 15 billion dollars of agriculture production in the United States. In the last several years, honey bees have received global attention due to the losses attributed to many different factors. …show more content…
Gondwana, a single land mass that included Africa, India, South America, Australia, and Antarctica had a warm dry climate that included flowering plants that attracted the bees so they could collect the pollen. These flowering plants produced nectar and provided carbohydrates to these winged insects. Over time the honey bee developed its morphologies changed to collect pollen by its increased fuzziness, pollen baskets, longer tongues and more colonies to store supplies. Forty million years ago Gondwana broke apart and temperatures cooled dramatically during the Oligocene-Miocene period. Because of the cooler temperatures and climate change many of the European honey bees went extinct. However, the Indo-European honey bees lived and began to evolve throughout India. “During a Pleistocene warming about 2-3 million years ago, this bee spread west into Europe and thence into Africa to become Apis