Page 67 - How to Be a Conscious Eater - Making Food Choices That Are Good for You

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POLLINATOR PROTECTION

any of us love honey in our tea and on our Cheerios, in
our salad dressing and on our Greek yogurt. But have
Myou ever wondered how it gets to us in that cute lit-
tle bear bottle? It’s from bees regurgitating nectar they collect
from flowering plants. Bee stomachs (technical term: crops)
act as storage units. The forager bee who harvests the nectar
deposits the honey into the stomach of a processor bee, who
posts up at the entrance of the hive, delivering the nectar him-
self or herself into the honeycomb.
Honey and honeybees relate to your plate for reasons far
above their enterprising spirit. All living organisms aim to
leave behind a future generation, but most plants can pro-
duce offspring (seeds) only when pollen gets transferred from
the male of one of their flowers to a female. This can happen
via the wind, but also via insects, butterflies, birds, bees, and
other pollinators. Some 90 percent of wild plants and 30 per-
cent of the world’s crops—the apples and the blueberries, the
almonds and the pumpkins—can’t live or produce food with-
out cross-pollination. When a bee pays a flower a visit, the
pollen gets stuck to/shaken off the bee’s body while it’s sta-
tioned there, sucking out nectar. Although bees aren’t the only
pollinators we’ve got, they’re one of the most important.
Bees are running out of nectar. Wild bee populations have
been collapsing in large part because of climate change. With
warmer temperatures, many flowers bloom before or after the
time bees are used to, so by the time they arrive, the flower
has come and gone or not yet arrived, so there’s no pollen or

56 how to be a Conscious Eater