[Music] today it's all about bees everyone loves bees right well not everyone but most and there's something comforting about seeing a bee buzz from flower to flower a feeling that the universe is ticking away nicely in the background but it's not all Sunshine and Lollipops as you may have heard in the news bees are in trouble across the United States honey bees are suffering from a mysterious condition known as colony collapse disorder in which hives are found abandoned and Beyond the honeybee evidence indicates declines and wild pollinators across both North America and Europe the reason changes in agriculture Wild Flower Meadows have been plowed up Hedges have been ripped out to form bigger Fields pesticide uses massively increased and humans have been trading bees around the world and in tiny little boxes causing the spread of disease but why care so here in no particular order are my top five reasons why bees are important one food it's not all about honey bees both the wild ones and the ones we keep in hives are critical for pollinating plants that produce a huge range of food including blueberries almonds and beans the global value of insect pollination is estimated AT3 billion e every year and while this figure includes contributions from say butterflies and beetles most of the work is done by the bees still don't care commercially reared Bumblebees are important pollinators of tomato plants if the bees die out these plants will have to be pollinated by hand using little vibrating wands Which is less fun than it sounds and more expensive tomato growing could become unproductive no tomatoes means no pizza and a world without Pizza is a sad and lonely Place indeed two biodiversity numerous creatures rely on bees for their own existence Badgers will dig out the nest to Feast on the juicy grubs bee eaters consume well you can probably guess what they consume and a whole host of other creatures preon or parasitize upon the bees including the endangered oil beetle numerous wild flowers depend on bees for pollination take away the bees and there will be drastic consequences for both the plants and the animals that depend on them the world will become a less colorful less interesting place free bees fight crime not a joke bees have an excellent sense of smell and in 2008 scientists developed a detector essentially a box of bees trained to stick out their tongue if they CAU a wh of something dodgy like explosives an infrared sensor registers the movement in the bees tongues and Alert security staff to the presence of danger four bees are watchdogs for environmental change or watch bees if you're being picky and speaking of picky numerous B species have extremely precise habitat requirements and if that habitat undergoes a change their populations will respond quickly now this makes be potentially good indicators of environmental disturbance including climate change one recent example is the arrival of the tree bumblebee in the UK in 2001 from France the species has now spread to cover over half the country but fortunately it's not likely to have any any negative impacts on Native UK bees five ecosystem Services these are services to which bees contribute that go beyond just pollinating our food plants remember the wild plants pollinated by bees well some of them will gr big and strong and soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere a process known as carbon sequestration potentially offsetting human caused emissions their Roots might bind the soil together preventing erosion and slow the seepage of water through the ground helping to minimize floods at present no one's calculated the value of all these Services currently being provided for free but as anyone who's ever stared through the window of a super expensive shop will know just because there's no price tag doesn't mean something isn't extremely valuable so Beast provid us with food help maintain biodiversity fight crime act as indicators of environmental change and contribute to a whole load of ecosystem services so the next time you order pizza or enjoy a blueberry muffin spare a for for the bees hi I'm David and I'm Phil and we're conservation biologists and the presenters of a new show called EOS saion which explores the importance of the natural world and biodiversity if you like this episode or any other why not hit the Subscribe button we need all the help and support we can get to continue producing the huge array of videos we hope to make thanks for watching