How to Be a Conscious Eater

15

POLLINATOR PROTECTION

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any of us love honey in our tea and on our Cheerios, in

our salad dressing and on our Greek yogurt. But have

you 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