Bees have always been proven a very effective catalysts to plant pollination. Pollination is the mechanism in which the pollen grains from the anther (male germ cell of a plant) come in contact with the stigma (female reproductive system) of a flower. This later leads to fertilization that progressively leads to the formation of seed with a viable embryo inside. While pollination is a crucial mechanism in seed formation, this also increases the commercial yield of a crop which would otherwise remain basically sterile.
In self-pollinating crops, like rice, wheat and tomato, pollination takes place within the plant not requiring any such external agents to assist in the process.
Some crops are cross-pollinating crops in which a flower is not fortunate enough to have both male and female reproductive parts bound to it. Thus, pollination can’t occur, until some external agent helps carry the pollen from the male part, to the stigma of the female part. The agents might include air, or birds, animals, some human activities, or insects like wasps, hornets, and well, bees.
Bees, especially honey bees (Apis mellifera), since eons have been known as commendable agents for pollination in nature. And they’re apparently the greatest pollinating machines when it comes to agriculture. They contribute up to 80% of pollination of all insects. Apiculture is the technical term for beekeeping.
Bees are social creatures which work in a magnificent fashion of labor division, also called eusociality. A colony is generally divided into;
A queen, who is single in each colony and whose only function is reproduction. She can lay hundreds of thousands of eggs living up to 3-5 years during which she only mates once.
Drones are the largest bees in a colony whose function is to fertilize the virgin queen during her mating flight. These bees with big heads are devoid of any stingers, or pollen baskets or wax glands. Sexually mature about a week past emergence, they die instantly upon mating.
Workers are the smallest of the bees and the largest in number in a colony. They are sterile females with specialized structures like food glands, scent glands, wax glands, and pollen baskets. They perform all the labor activities to keep the hive alive, from cleaning and polishing the cells to feeding the brood, caring the queen, guiding the entrance, and most importantly, the nectar collection. Nurse bees perform the hive activities while forager bees, or field bees, go foraging the nectar. Young workers work as nurse bees while they go foraging in the later part of their adulthood.
Forger bees communicate with each other about the food via a special kind of dance. Each dance pattern symbolizes the type of flower the dancer bee has come across.
Beekeeping, or apiculture in integration with agriculture can benefit a small range famer to a commercial level farmer. While a farmer can make honey along with wax from beekeeping, he can also experience a dramatic upsurge in his crop yield owing to the pollination activity by the bees.
Beekeeping helps in balancing the reproduction cycle in nature, and helps it stay as verdant and lively. Bees are one such natural fertilizers which come up safe, environment friendly, and with their own primary benefits.
While beekeeping is one such gem of a companion to agriculture (not to mention, apiculture itself is a part of agriculture) and bees are those worthy creatures that come in small size, their number is dwindling recently at an alarming rate. Remember those days when a swarm of bees would be reveling in your flower garden? Where did they go all at once?
Well, this might be caused by various factors like urbanization, pesticides or parasitic mites. Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is one such major syndrome that has led to a massive decline of bee colonies in the recent years. This includes sudden disappearance of bee colonies and dying up of adult bees. Another such problem is the adult bees not returning to their colonies which generally is very uncommon. The reason behind this is apparently not known.
What we can do to revamp the presence of bees in the atmosphere is adding bee-friendly plants in the locality and avoiding the use of such noxious pesticides and herbicides. In the end, we can encourage the local farmers to practice beekeeping to boost up their agriculture yield.
India's agriculture is composed of many crops, with the foremost food staples being rice and wheat. Indian farmers also grow pulses, potatoes, sugarcane, oilseeds, and such non-food items as cotton, tea, coffee, rubber, and jute (a glossy fiber used to make burlap and twine). India is a fisheries giant as well. A total catch of about 3 million metric tons annually ranks India among the world's top 10 fishing nations. Despite the overwhelming size of the agricultural sector, however, yields per hectare of crops in India are generally low compared to international standards. Improper water management is another problem affecting India's agriculture. At a time of increasing water shortages and environmental crises, for example, the rice crop in India is allocated disproportionately high amounts of water. One result of the inefficient use of water is that water tables in regions of rice cultivation, such as Punjab, are on the rise, while soil fertility is on the decline. Aggravating the agricultural situation is an ongoing Asian drought and inclement weather. Although during 2000-01 a monsoon with average rainfall had been expected, prospects of agricultural production during that period were not considered bright. This has partially been due to relatively unfavorable distribution of rainfall, leading to floods in certain parts of the country and droughts in some others.
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Despite the fact that agriculture accounts for as much as a quarter of the Indian economy and employs an estimated 60 percent of the labor force, it is considered highly inefficient, wasteful, and incapable of solving the hunger and malnutrition problems. Despite progress in this area, these problems have continued to frustrate India for decades. It is estimated that as much as one-fifth of the total agricultural output is lost due to inefficiencies in harvesting, transport, and storage of government-subsidized crops.
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