For our final project, we chose to make an informative website concerning the topic of bees, the pollination cycle, and the importance of bees to the continuation of humanity. This topic relates to the material we’ve read about in class in that it covers an element of food production and the way our pollution interferes with it. The site covers many topics concerning bees including their life cycle, our history of utilizing bees for pollination, the ways in which we’ve inhibited the pollination cycle, other countries and their approach, and our solutions to fixing the problems that humanity has created for bees.
As we all know, bees are vital to ecosystems across the globe for their role as pollinators acting a medium for carrying pollen from male flowers to female flowers. This process affects far more than our food production. Unfortunately, centuries of human industrialization has led to a global climate crisis which has put the world’s bee population at risk. As bee populations gradually drop, the hole they leave in the ecosystem becomes all too noticeable. Bees serve a vital and complex role in every ecosystem from top to bottom, allowing a vast number of plant and animal species to exist while also playing a vital role in human agriculture.
The point of the site is to bring awareness to the vital role that bees play, both for the world’s ecosystems and in their direct impact on human endeavor. By the same ticket, this site aims to offer various solutions to the human-caused issues facing the world’s bee populations, as well as offer links to other informative websites and documents. Due to the unfortunately industry-driven approach to political ecological action, a primary method of getting major world leaders and corporate lobbyists to take part in this issue is detailing how exactly the loss of bees will affect their bottom line. The loss of bees can hurt or, in many cases, potentially cripple the economic output of certain types of farms which act as the backbone for much of the human food supply chain; even in the world’s richest countries, this problem is all too present, yet at the time time all too unnoticed. Here, we hope to move the needle in some small way, particularly given the two-fold benefit of a healthy bee population — both environmentally and in long-term humanitarian/economic affect that bees invariably hold in the human food chain.