Video from group n° 022
Welcome to the webpage of group 022[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
The topic we have decided to explore is the following :
In our video, we focused on the problem of the disappearance of bees and the risks linked to it. In order to show you the importance of this issue, we interviewed two beekeepers who helped us to analyse the problem.
Our video[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
Our paper[modifier | modifier le wikicode]
Is ecology only a rural question? When cities could save the Mother Nature :
Nowadays we can observe something which seems to be one of the biggest current paradox: the quantity of honey is higher in our cities than in the campaign. Indeed, a Parisian beekeeper who installed beehives on the rooftop of the Opera observes that they product 10 times honey in Paris than in campaign (every beehives products 70 to 100 kg per year). Our purpose is to find answers in order to understand why.
First of all, expert’s analysis show that there are some reasons of the disappearance of bees in our campaign: the destruction of their natural habitat, the massive use of pesticides and the lack of food for them. Intensive agriculture has for a great part destroyed the number of flowers, by replacing them by wide cornfield and wheat field, and the hedges where an ecosystem was installed. There is no more diversity and they need to flee or die. That is why bees prefer go to cities where they can find on average 350 different species of flower. However, if bees would disappear, it will be a crucial problem: 1.4 million people would dead in addition every year because of the lack of pollination and it will be exponential over time. Indeed, 35% of the world quantity of food is produced by the phenomenon of pollination and bees are the biggest vector. For instance, every leg of bee carries 500 000 pollen grain per day which constitute on average 538 flowers pollinized.
On the other hand, in our cities, we have a totally different specific case: in the urban area, the climatic context is favorable to bees: Indeed, the temperature is 2 or 3 degrees higher than in the campaign and it is not a negligible thing for thermophile insects. Moreover, we can observe that people try more and more to recreate a more natural environment which benefit to pollinating insects by replanting a diversified flora: magnolia, tulip, chestnut and cherry tree which allow the development of bees. The main advantage is that they use less pesticides to treat those garden which are less harmful. And people still continue to develop thing like in Montreal where, for the four last years, the number of beehives has skyrocketed on rooftops from 10 to 368. We have another example in France: an expert we interviewed has created a company about that topic called Beecity which install beehives in companies’ garden in order to recreate an ecosystem, to make workers more aware about the problem of the disappearance of bees and to rebuild a link between people and nature.
In a nutshell, for all these reasons, we can conclude that it could be easier for bees to product honey in city which show that pollination is easier. It could be explained by the fact that living conditions are nowadays better for bees in cities where pollination problem is taken into account. That is why the main effort today regards in particular the campaigns.
