Bees do far more than just make honey. Globally, the 25,000 or so bee species play a crucial part in crop production and in promoting biodiversity.
This month Nature Outlooks published a supplement focussed on bees. As part of the supplement I worked on the infographic, Meet our prime pollinators, giving an overview of the species.
What I learned was that there are a lot of bees! Honeybees and bumblebees steal the limelight a little in this species, considering they make up only a very small percentage of all the species that there are.
One of the challenges with this piece, and I believe with the whole supplement, was that there is such a dearth of data on bees. And what there is rarely agrees. There are very few researchers in the field, making it difficult to track these little critters.
Go to the orginal article here or listen below