Humans rely on bees probably the most out of all insects in the world, but not just for honey or pollination. No, they’re actually also working away in labs and even giving us parts of their very home to help humans out. 

So if all you know about bees is that they flit from flower to flower, think again. Here are some of the fascinating ways bees have helped humans even more than just making all the flowers and food bloom across the world.

The Humble Honeybee and Medicine

The sweet taste of honey is almost certainly the first thing you think of when you think of bees. But honey isn’t just food. Medical grade honey, taken from honeybees, has been developed to help treat burn wounds. It has antibacterial properties that prevent infection, and its use has proven to be effective against a type of bacteria that are resistant to up to 13 types of antibiotics. On top of that, even honey used in large amounts didn’t make the bacteria more likely to become resistant to its antibacterial properties. 

Though research is ongoing to fully understand medical grade honey’s capabilities for treating wounds, researchers are also exploring other ways bees can help us, including with their venom 

It might sound counterintuitive. Isn’t venom-anything bad for you? Well, apparently not.

In 2020 researchers found that honeybee and bumblebee venom killed cancer cells in triple-negative breast cancer, an invasive, fast-spreading, and hard-to-treat cancer. And it killed the cancer cells without harming healthy cells. 

Dr. Ciara Duffy, who headed the study, also tested a small component of honeybee venom called melittin that can be produced synthetically and found it had many of the same anti-cancer effects.

Synthetically-produced melittin means we can protect the honeybee population. It also means scientists can make it more effective as a cancer cell-killing agent by adding new components to better recognize and target cancer cells. Duffy’s team has also started testing melittin on ovarian cancer cells, which has also proven effective.

None of Your Beeswax! …Well Maybe Just a Little

It’s common knowledge that bees pollinate plants, which lets those plants produce food for us to eat. But, how much do they actually help us?

Oh, just about 30% of the world’s dietary supply. Which means every three meals a day a human eats, an entire meal can be attributed to the hard work of bees.

While other insects and animals do contribute to pollination as well, bees as a species are pulling the most weight. But it’s not just the domesticated bees living in stacks of bee boxes on the sides of fields doing this work. Studies have shown that having wild bees and honeybees interact increases the pollination efficiency of honey bees, specifically in a sunflower field. The best way to ensure that interaction is having natural habitat nearby farms so wild bees can live nearby, while still pollinating crops.

But beyond helping our food grow, and making honey from it, bees also create beeswax. It’s the substance the bees use to actually make their hives and the cells that they store honey and larvae in. For bees it serves as the building block of their home, but it also has several properties that make it useful for cosmetic purposes. 

Products like lipstick and cream use beeswax as a stiffener, which keeps the product adhered to the face better. But it also has antiseptic properties that protect the skin. It creates a thin film on the surface of skin and protects it from bacteria. This makes beeswax a good natural ingredient in cosmetic products. 

Bee Brainpower

Worker honeybees live for 15 to 38 days in the summer, and they have a lot of flowers to visit and paths to memorize in that barely two month lifespan. A bee’s brain is smaller than one cubic millimeter—a sesame seed is two to four millimeters—so researchers at Virginia Tech wanted to analyze how bees were able to keep so much knowledge in that tiny brain of theirs.

Professors Read Montague and Brian Smith put bees in a laboratory and tested how different scents, which would be flowers in the real world, sent specific signals in the bees brain as they tried to learn about a new environment. Some of the brain chemicals bees have are the same in humans, and can lead to new discoveries about how brain chemicals play into learning or brain disorders.

They’re continuing to study how chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, tyramine, and octopamine release in a bee’s brain to help them learn and possibly apply those findings to better understand how human brains learn as well. 

Busy, Busy Bees

Bees do a lot for us, even if we don’t always see it. The yellow-striped flyers have contributed to the ecosystem for generations, happily buzzing away while people collect their honey and beeswax, and now are studying every part of them to further medicine and research. But not everything about honeybees is always peachy.

Though they’re not endangered, honeybee populations have been on the decline. Exact numbers are hard to pin down, considering there are wild hives out there we don’t know about, but 2025 started with 2.63 million colonies in the U.S. and ended with an estimated loss of 50% of hives. Fortunately, they seem to be recovering this year, but it’s important to do all we can to support honeybee populations. 

One way to help bees is to make our system of agriculture more sustainable. Habitat loss contributes to wild bees population decline, so the less new farmland we have to make from their habitats, the more they can thrive both in human-kept hives and the wild. Learn how you can support sustainable practices like regenerative agriculture and keep habitats safe from further development.

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What do pumpkin pie, banana bread, and apple cider all have in common? Not only are they perfect fall foods and drinks, the fruits that make up these sweet treats are all products of  animal pollination. It is estimated that 35% of the world’s food crops need animal pollinators to reproduce, which is one out of every three bites of food you eat. Without pollinators, the world would lose many crops we take for granted like coffee, chocolate, and strawberries. 

Pollinators include animals such as bees, butterflies, birds, and bats. As they move from flower to flower collecting nectar, they spread pollen and help plants reproduce. In recent years, however, the United States has seen a sharp decline in pollinator populations—driven by the oss of habitat  from urban development and deforestation, as well as harmful agricultural practices that destroy wild spaces and expose pollinators to toxic chemicals.

Pesticides Kill Pollinators

Conventional, often industrialized, farming relies heavily on pesticides and fertilizers to increase crop yields, but these chemicals have significantly contributed to the decline of pollinators. 

Even when exposure doesn’t kill them immediately, sublethal doses of common insecticides like imidacloprid can impair bees’ navigation, reduce reproduction, and disrupt colony health. Imagine a bee returning to its hive, carrying contaminated pollen on its legs and body. As it interacts with other bees, the toxins spread silently, weakening or even killing its hive-mates. 

What begins as a single exposure can ripple through the entire colony, undermining the health and productivity of one of nature’s most essential pollinators. One study found that over  90% of pollen samples from agricultural hives contained traces of multiple pesticides.

In addition, pesticide drift often spreads these toxins beyond treated fields, threatening wild pollinators and nesting habitats nearby.

To reverse this trend, regenerative agriculture focuses on restoring soil and ecosystem health by minimizing synthetic chemical use, like pesticides, promoting natural pest management, and creating pollinator-friendly habitats by protecting wildflower meadows and woodland to help both farms and ecosystems thrive together.

It’s The Blooming Economy, Stupid!

From a consumer perspective, it is undeniable that pollinators are crucial to the growth of everyday food items. However, even from an economic standpoint, pollinators are irreplaceable and invaluable drivers of the global food economy.

In the United States alone, pollinators contributed over $18 billion in crop production revenue annually as of 2022. They are able to increase crop yields; for example, the weight of a cherry can increase by 2.8% when pollinated by bees, and animal pollination can help increase the weight and quantity of watermelons per plot. 

Animal pollination improves the global crop output by an extra $235 to $577 billion annually as of 2016. Without pollinators, an estimate from 2009 showed that 5 to 8% of crop production would be lost each year around the world. 

Between 2015 and 2016 in the United States, 44% of managed honey bee colonies were lost mainly due to infectious diseases. In North America, over one-fifth of native pollinators have an elevated risk of extinction. A loss in pollinator populations would be detrimental not just to the U.S. economy, but the world. 

Cover Crops and Flowering Plants

While crop rotation — growing different types of crops on the same land each season — has become an increasingly common practice in farming, monoculture still exists. Monoculture is the practice of growing the same crop on the same land year after year.  While monoculture crops like soybeans are more economically efficient, it is a system that increases the risk of disease and pest outbreaks. The lack of diverse plant and animal species weakens natural pest controls, and monoculture crops drain nutrients from the soil and use large amounts of pesticides, harming the pollinators that come into contact with them. 

One powerful way to offset the damage of monoculture farming, and give pollinator numbers a much needed boost, is through cover cropping on farmland. A cornerstone of regenerative agriculture, cover crops literally blanket the soil, preventing soil nutrients loss and providing a feast of flowering plants to attract and support pollinators. 

Different varieties of cover crops can be planted, allowing them to support diverse populations of pollinators. Some examples of cover crops are sunflowers, barley, and oilseed radish, which all support pollinator populations through their flower blooms. Cover crop choices can allow for crops that bloom during different seasons, ensuring that pollinators have a year round source of nutrients. Additionally, these plants can help support pollinator habitats, and even improve soil health. 

Farm Better

Regenerative agriculture supports pollinators through minimizing use of pesticides. In order for agriculture to be qualified as Regenerative Organic Agriculture, there must be no use of chemical fertilizers or synthetic pesticides. Instead, integrated pest and disease management (IPM) is important for preventing the spread of harmful pests while protecting beneficial insects.  

IPM uses various methods to deter pests. Crops are consistently monitored to identify the early signs of pests and disease outbreak. Additionally, crop rotation is important for deterring pests by preventing pests populations from building up over time. Planting pest-resistant rootstocks such as tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants can also serve as natural deterrents against harmful insects. The use of IPM strategies lessens the need for synthetic pesticides, protecting both pollinators and plants from harmful chemicals. 

Farming with the Forest

Agroforestry is another key component of regenerative agriculture, where trees and shrubs are integrated into crop and animal farming systems. Crops are grown and livestock reared in alleys between rows of trees, that in turn can produce timber, fruit and nuts. Agroforestry protects topsoil, increases crop and livestock productivity, and improves surrounding air and water quality. 

However, the additional benefits of agroforestry help pollinators too – by providing habitat, nesting, and egg-laying sites for birds and insects while also lessening their exposure to pesticides. This supports all biodiversity, providing more food sources for pollinators through flowering trees and shrubs such as blueberries and raspberries, increasing the quality of their habitat, pollination services, and crop yields.  

Be The Change

Animal pollinators are essential to us all, not just environmentalists because without them, over a third of the world’s crops would disappear. Yet modern farming  practices are harming both the environment and the pollinators themselves. Shifting to sustainable agricultural methods is crucial to protect these vital species and ensure our food systems thrive.

It is not just pollinators, we are at all potentially at risk from pesticides. These chemicals don’t stay on the farm either; they travel through the food supply chain straight to your kitchen table where they can poison our families. Children are especially at risk; they take in more pesticide per pound of body weight than adults, and their developing brains and organs are particularly vulnerable to these toxins. 

Despite this, Congress is considering a measure that would make it harder, if not impossible, to hold pesticide manufacturers accountable even when their products harm people. A small clause in the Interior Appropriations Bill known as Section 453 would destroy legal frameworks used by the public to sue chemical companies when they fail to disclose the health risks of their products. Section 453 would also block state and local governments from taking their own measures to protect communities from pesticides.

Glyphosate, the most widely used pesticide in the world, was classified by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015. Many countries have banned or restricted it, but U.S. regulators have been slow to act. A new study even found it caused cancer in animals at doses considered “safe” by the E.U. There is scientific consensus that glyphosate can cause serious health issues, but Congress seemingly wants to make it illegal to warn the public of these dangers on product labels.Tell Congress: We Need Protection from Poison Pesticides and ask them to oppose Section 453 and keep our communities safe from dangerous chemicals. Plus, If you are interested in learning more about how to support a more pollinator-friendly agriculture industry, check out EARTHDAY.ORG’s Renewable Agriculture campaign, and discover how agriculture can be used to help the planet not harm it.

This article is available for republishing on your website, newsletter, magazine, newspaper, or blog. The accompanying imagery is cleared for use with attribution. Please ensure that the author’s name and their affiliation with EARTHDAY.ORG are credited. Kindly inform us if you republish so we can acknowledge, tag, or repost your content. You may notify us via email at davies@earthday.org or fielder@earthday.org. Want more articles? Follow us on substack.

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