Industrious bees are worth billions – Vasterbotten Courier

Bees play an important role to be pollinated crops is nothing new. But now a study has shown that the small, industrious and additionally unpaid lives are worth their weight in gold.

The services that wild bees are doing is worth about 3250 dollars, around 26,300 kronor per hectare per year , the researchers concluded. Their value for food supply is in the “billions” worldwide, noted in the study presented in Nature Communications.

The researchers have been following the activity of nearly 74 thousand bees from more than 780 species. In addition, they studied 90 projects which monitors bee pollination at almost 1400 farms all over the world.

It was also found that only two percent of the species accounted for about 80 percent of the conception of bipollinerade crops. But the researchers suggest that even if the other species might not have such great importance for agriculture as they play a crucial role in the ecosystem.