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CyberDodo and Bees (1-5)

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In order to ensure the survival of the colony, bees look for food in the form of nectar, pollen, resin, and also water, which takes care of the insect's need for water, but also helps lower the temperature of the hive when this is necessary.

They can travel up to almost 20 million kilometers a year just in the hive area! A bee is capable of making all these trips because it can locate the hive from any place it may have gone to find food.

Bees, vector of pollination

It is capable of calculating its trajectory in terms of the position of the sun in the sky; it can even do this when the weather is overcast.

Once the bee has found food, it returns to the hive loaded with about 20 grams of pollen and then communicates the place where it was found to other foragers. In order to do this, it uses two types of dances: the round dance and the figure eight.

The round dance is used by the bee for all sources of food found at least 50 to 100 metres away; the figure eight dance is used for greater distances. These two dances give other bees indications such as direction, distance, viability (nectar too sugary or not sugary enough), desirability (does the hive need more water, resin or nectar?).

Most studies focus on the so-called domestic bee, that is, the Apis mellifera and Apis cerena, which both guarantee 85 % pollination of species of plants. With the disappearance of bees, 65 % of plant species are under threat, that is, 35 % of our food. The fruit and vegetable crops, for example, have 90 or even 100 % dependence on bees and already the United States has had to make massive imports of bees from Australia for their apple orchards and blueberry fields. 80 % of flower plants depend on this type of insect for their reproduction and thus their very survival.

If they were to disappear, the change will have such dire consequences that it is impossible to even measure their impact on the environment and on man. The bee is considered to be a sign that the environment is in a good state and its disappearance from the scene represents the state of deterioration of the planet.

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