Practical and High-Yield Beekeeping New Technology

Author: Kuang Haiou
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Chapter 5: Beekeeping and Pollination
The primary purpose of beekeeping and pollination is to utilize bees to pollinate crops, fruit trees, pastures, vegetables, and medicinal plants. This is an efficient measure for increasing production without expanding arable land or increasing production investment. Many crops, as well as fruit trees and economic crops, are entomophilous plants that rely on cross-pollination. They are often dioecious, with separate male and female flowers, or within the same flower, the stamens and pistils may differ in length or maturity, or the pollen grains may fail to germinate on the stigma of the same flower. Over 80% of these plants depend on insects for pollination to set fruit. Bees, on the other hand, rely on collecting nectar and pollen from flowers for their survival, forming a mutually dependent and adapted relationship between bees and plants. This is the result of long-term natural selection and serves as the scientific basis for beekeeping and pollination.
Bee as the Ideal Pollinator
In nature, there are many insects that pollinate plants, such as various wild bees, ants, butterflies, and hoverflies. However, they exist in a wild state and are highly susceptible to climatic and environmental influences, making it difficult for humans to control and utilize them. Some even harm crops and may need to be eradicated. With the development of modern agriculture, the extensive use of pesticides and fertilizers has killed many wild pollinators, leading to phenomena where crops and fruit trees only flower but do not bear fruit, or produce fewer fruits despite abundant flowering, resulting in low yields.
Bees, as social insects that live in colonies, can form strong populations under artificial rearing conditions, with a single colony numbering tens of thousands of individuals. They can be transported to any place requiring pollination at the will of humans. Additionally, bees exhibit specificity in foraging, often visiting one type of plant each time they leave the hive, which increases pollination intensity. They can also be trained to pollinate a specific crop, achieving highly ideal results.
Bees have slender and flexible mouthparts that allow them to enter flowers to collect nectar without harming them. Their bodies are covered with dense hairs, making it easy for them to adhere to pollen. As they forage, they carry a large amount of pollen of varying maturity to the stigma of the pistil, increasing the plant's selective fertilization. As a result, they produce more fruit with higher quality.
Bees themselves require a significant amount of pollen for feeding and raising larvae. Statistics show that raising one bee requires approximately 10 pollen pellets. A strong colony can produce about 200,000 bees in a year, requiring the collection of 160 million peach flowers or 700 million lucerne flowers. Due to the high demand for pollen by bee colonies, their foraging ability is particularly strong. Bees account for more than 80% of all pollination tasks performed by pollinating insects.
A single bee can carry 48,000 pollen grains of gourd crops during one flight, while a single ant can carry only 330 grains, and a single earthworm can carry only 6 grains. This demonstrates that bees are the ideal pollinators.
A single bee can collect 350 sunflower flowers or 500 buckwheat flowers, or 200 cotton flowers during one flight. To collect 1 kilogram of nectar, a bee must leave the hive more than 30,000 times. The large amount of cross-pollination not only strengthens the mutual assimilation of sexual cells in pollinated plants, completing fertilization, but also promotes the development of various nutrient tissues in the ovary.
Therefore, using bees for pollination not only significantly increases the yield of agricultural products but also greatly improves their quality, enhances the vitality of seeds, and increases the nutritional content of fruits.