Warm spring days are the best times to be outside, but they may involve the dreaded, surprising buzz of a bee’s wings close by. The tiny insects can be startling, causing people to recoil in fear and instinctively cover their ears. Many people share this unease toward these six-legged creatures that are 700,000 times smaller than humans, but I’m here to tell you to fear not. These hard workers are our friends! They are so crucial to our ecosystem that their rising absence due to hotter temperatures could cause a drastic change in our lifestyle. You wouldn’t want a friend to suffer, would you? And, more importantly, I don’t think you would want to suffer either.
There are many reasons why our native (and domesticated) bees are so important. Most people believe that bees only produce honey, pollen, and wax, but they also create royal jelly, propolis, and venom which all have nutritional and medicinal properties. For example, although seemingly hazardous, bee venom has been used to treat immune-related diseases and some cancer-related tumors. Wax is also used to curate more eco-friendly candles. However, our fuzzy friends are not just important for their products, but for their impact on our agriculture. In more simplistic terms, they are key players in our diets.
Bees’ main job is to pollinate, collecting pollen from flower to flower until their legs are fully saturated. Flowers rely on these pollinators for breeding to create the food we eat, since they cannot uproot and pollinate each other. About 35% of the world’s food crops such as potatoes, vanilla, almonds, coffee, chocolate, and most fruits are produced with the help of pollinators.
With the help of bees, cross-breeding can also occur and help keep flower gene pools unique and vibrant. Not only does this make our backyards look pretty because of the diverse selection of pollinated flowers, but it also helps our plants contribute to a highly adaptable ecosystem that can suppress pests and diseases, increase crop yields, improve soil health, and re-contribute to the pollination pool more effectively. Now who wouldn’t want that?
Big corporations, that’s who. It’s no secret that big producers of fossil fuels like ExxonMobil, BP, and Shell are contributing to the rise in our planet’s heat. Just in 2023, Exxon, one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gasses in the world, had produced over 98 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, as well as 540 million metric tons of crude and natural gas equivalent alone. That’s 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide since 1965, and it is exponentially increasing.
The rate of global warming since the 19th century has been about 0.11°F on average per year. However, the rising temperature due to these toxic greenhouse gas pollutants has almost tripled to 0.36°F on average per year in the 21st century. And, from an outsider’s perspective, we can see the effect this warming has had on citizens’ lives, such as the rare Los Angeles fires at the beginning of 2025 with Santa Ana winds blowing in at almost 100 mph. So, how has climate change been affecting the bees? And what does that mean for us?
The rapid warming of our planet through the deterioration of clean air is a big contributor to a phenomenon scientists are seeing in bees called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). This increasingly abnormal phenomenon occurs when all worker bees spontaneously abandon their queen, leaving only a few nurse bees with abundant food and immature bees. These nurse bees, or juvenile worker bees, care for the queen and her larvae in the beehive. Research shows that there can be several reasons for this unusual phenomenon — these include pests, habitat loss from urbanization, an increase in harmful pesticide usage, and rising temperatures, to name a few.
Rising temperatures promote CCD by causing flowers to bloom earlier, shifting bee hibernation patterns. It can also hinder bees’ ability to regulate their body temperature, leading to suboptimal development in future bees that rely on the warmth of others. This ultimately has negative effects on their brain development and flight muscles. So, if bee populations are decreasing, flowers that rely on pollinators will not produce the fruits and other foods that humans rely on to have a well-balanced diet. It’s a chain reaction!
Not only do humans rely on the food that is made as a result of pollination, but many other animals a part of the human diet also rely on their nutrition from pollinated food. These animals of prey that are a part of the human diet could suffer the same deficits, ultimately becoming an insufficient resource of energy for humans’ diets, too. A lack of food resources will ultimately lead to a significant malnutrition problem for the human population, and it is more than just our diets becoming bland from the lack of pollination in our environment.
Exposure to malnutrition for extended periods of time can lead to cognitive decline, delayed growth, weakened muscles, impaired immune function, and death in extreme cases. A large deficit in the population’s ability to function would take a huge toll on our society’s everyday lives leading to a dramatic, more lethargic cultural shift.
Economically, if food is scarce, the price of more nutritious food will surge, rendering it almost unaffordable for the average individual. This foreshadows a dark future of malnourishment, financial strain, and the mental toll of failing to meet basic human needs. As a society, we should ask ourselves: what steps can we take to protect the bees?
Even though we cannot change the opinion of big companies in small groups, we can still help out our fuzzy friends. Take Northeastern’s Husky Environmental Action Team (HEAT), for example. This club, open to all students on campus from different interdisciplinary backgrounds, comes together to brainstorm ways to protect our environment. It ultimately educates students about the importance of environmental awareness. One of these important topics is bees and their influence.
HEAT has made the student body aware of how the students can get involved on a local level to help bee populations propagate and flourish in a society that views these tiny hard-working insects as inferior through the Pollinator Pathway Program. This program consists of public and private pesticide-free sections of land filled with nutritional plants, shrubs, and trees for pollinators to feed off while simultaneously pollinating the plants around them. It is extremely important that these sites are pesticide-free since most pesticides made today contain harmful chemicals that destroy bee colonies and other pollinators. The goal is to have each space 750 meters from the other so the pollinators have a consistent nutrition resource due to the average distance they travel from a natural hive being less than a mile. These pathways can either be started by organizations or by you in your own backyard!
If you care about food, you should care about the animals that help grow it, especially the bees. Understanding how our food is made can give us greater empathy and gratitude for our little friends because our lives would be much different without them. Want to learn more about how the environment is connected to our daily lives and what you can do to protect it? Consider joining HEAT to become part of the change.
