EMN
Dimapur, April 28
Local business group Fingerprint-Design & Events are continuing their “awareness campaign” about conservation of ‘wildlife, environment and climate change.’ The group is on the trail of 175 schools and colleges in Nagaland. During a stop on Thursday, they visited Maple Tree School and Lima Aier Memorial Higher Secondary School in Dimapur.
During the program in the schools, the campaigners said that an eco-system comprised a wide variety of organisms. The students were told: “We are keen on saving and preserving only the ones that are beautiful and useful to our eyes, the ones which we tend to fall in love with. But, what about the ugly, smaller and unproductive ones, the ones which we hardly give a second glance?. Are they not useful? The question is, do they offer us anything?”
The organizers encouraged the students to “look these things from a different perspective, a view from a totally different angle about our eco- system and about those little insects, plants etc. which we neglect to give due importance.”
The campaigners also told the students that ‘a species of blue butterfly” became extinct in England “because the ants that it feasted upon went extinct because of human activities.”
“Small or big, pretty or ugly, everything is co-related to each other in an eco system,” the group stated. A press release the campaigners issued on Thursday did not identify what the ‘blue butterfly’ species was.
Another life that the Fingerprints team talked about was bees, one of nature’s superheroes. “When we picture bees, the first and foremost thing that comes to our mind is honey. We only see bees as an organism which provides us honey. The perspective we want to share is, bees are not honey producing insects, bees are our food provider, the working agent that provides us with fruits, veggies, cereals etc .Bees pollinate 70 percent out of 100, of food that we use in our diet, which means bees provide 90 percent of the world’s population with food.”
While the organizers made clear that the issue was not to keep bees ‘in every home,’ they stressed the importance of how even small insects such as bees “which we only know for honey” could contribute much more. “...then definitely there are more like them who are relentlessly contributing to our survival,” the campaigners stated.
Citizens’ Factfile: Why are bees important?
It has often been said that bees are responsible for one out of every three bites of food we eat. Most crops grown for their fruits (including vegetables such as squash, cucumber, tomato and eggplant), nuts, seeds, fiber (such as cotton), and hay (alfalfa grown to feed livestock), require pollination by insects.
Pollinating insects also play a critical role in maintaining natural plant communities and ensuring production of seeds in most flowering plants. Pollination is the transfer of pollen from the male parts of a flower to the female parts of a flower of the same species, which results in fertilization of plant ovaries and the production of seeds.
The main insect pollinators, by far, are bees, and while European honey bees are the best known and widely managed pollinators, there are also hundreds of other species of bees, mostly solitary ground nesting species, that contribute some level of pollination services to crops and are very important in natural plant communities.
Why are bees good pollinators?
Bees make excellent pollinators because most of their life is spent collecting pollen, a source of protein that they feed to their developing offspring. When a bee lands on a flower, the hairs all over the bees’ body attract pollen grains through electrostatic forces. Stiff hairs on their legs enable them to groom the pollen into specialized brushes or pockets on their legs or body, and then carry it back to their nest.
Individual bees tend to focus on one kind of flower at a time, which means it is more likely that pollen from one flower will be transferred to another flower of the same species by a particular bee. Many plants require this kind of pollen distribution, known as cross-pollination, in order to produce viable seeds. The business of collecting pollen requires a lot of energy, and so many flowers attract and also reward bees with nectar, a mixture of water and sugars produced by plants.
Bees need our help!
Bee communities, both wild and managed, have been declining over the last half century as pesticide use in agricultural and urban areas increased. Changes in land use have resulted in a patchy distribution of food and nesting resources.
Concerned bee researchers recently met to discuss the current pollinator status in North America and to publish a report about it. Since January (2007), there have been a number of reports in the media about the mysterious disappearance of large numbers of honey bees called colony collapse disorder.
This has many growers concerned about how they will continue to be able to pollinate their crops. Now more than ever, it is critical to consider practices that will benefit pollinators by providing habitats free of pesticides, full of nectar and pollen resources, and with ample potential nesting resources.
