Can eating honey help save bees?

吃蜂蜜能帮助拯救蜜蜂吗?

CrowdScience

科技

2025-05-24

26 分钟
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单集简介 ...

CrowdScience listener Saoirse is vegan and doesn’t eat honey. But she’s been wondering - might honey actually have environmental benefits, by giving bee populations a boost? To find out, presenter Anand Jagatia dons a bee suit and opens up some hives with biologist Dave Goulson, who reveals that there are over 20,000 bee species on earth – and not all of them need saving. Honeybee researcher Alison Mcafee talks about the importance of beekeeping for crop pollination, and why honeybee colonies around the world are collapsing. Although, as she explains, in some places beekeeping might actually be bad for endangered wild bees. We travel to Kenya to meet Loise Njeru and Lucy King, who show how the humble honeybee can be a powerful tool for conservation – helping to protect the mighty elephant. And, on a rooftop in London, former beekeeper Alison Benjamin explains how we can support the wild bee species that need our help. Producer and presenter: Anand Jagatia Location recording: Sophie Ormiston Series Producer: Ben Motley Production Co-ordinator: Ishmael Soriano
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单集文稿 ...

  • Right, get the smoker going.

  • This is Crowd Science from the BBC World Service.

  • I'm Anand Jagatia, and that's the sound of a bee smoker pumping out smoke to calm down honeybees.

  • And we're going to need it because we're about to open up a hive.

  • So this is a frame.

  • which you can see, all that glistening honey.

  • Yeah.

  • That's all just been collected in the last week or two.

  • Helping me in the hunt for sugary liquid gold is bee scientist Dave Goulson.

  • We're at the bottom of his garden in Sussex in the south of England.

  • I harvested just a few of these frames the weekend.

  • I've got about seven kilos of my own lovely honey, and I do love honey, I have to say.

  • That's amazing, seven kilos.

  • Yeah, yeah, by the end of the summer there'll be lots more.

  • You can get as much as 40 kilos per hive,

  • so with three hives I've probably got enough to keep the entire neighbourhood stocked up with honey.

  • You'll be popular.

  • And we're here because it's honey that has got the brains of one of our listeners buzzing.

  • Hi CrowdScience, I'm Saoirse from the UK, and my question is...

  • Can honey help save bees?