Food for free?
If you look at fields full of flowering crops or wild flowers in
the countryside, or at garden and park flowers in the cities, you are not only
looking at beauty but also at gold thousands of tons of valuable honey. Liquid
gold sitting there, all for you! If you don’t go and get it, the flowers will
die at the end of the season and all those tons of honey will go to waste. All
that money will simply have dried up in front of your eyes. If, on the other
hand, you have bees, they will go and get it for you for free, and you can then
either eat it or sell it or both.
Bees are probably the only livestock that use other people’s land
without permission and those landowners welcome them. It is a win-win situation
for the bee and for everyone else. Your bees are happy carrying out their work;
you can enjoy your hobby or business, and if you want to you can make a profit;
the farmers get their crops pollinated and so they make a profit; the shops
obtain food to sell and they make a profit; the general public have food to
eat; and the government is happy that its agricultural and environmental
sectors are running smoothly and that somewhere along the line they will be
able to raise some tax.
Bees and the economy
Don’t forget that governments regard the whole set-up as so
important that they are willing to spend millions on ensuring that the status
quo does not change and that nothing happens to harm it. Recent research in the
USA has valued crops that require pollination by honey-bees at an estimated $24
billion annually, and the value of commercial bee pollination on contracts at
around $10 billion annually. These are huge figures by any standard and they
show that bees are big business.
Using honey in medicine
Honey sale value, on the other hand, is much less, at $285 million
annually in the USA. However, now that hard clinical trials are showing that
certain types of honey can provide antibiotic wound treatments more effectively
and with fewer side-effects than conventional treatments, this non-pollination
side of beekeeping has become a rapidly growing industry. Active manuka honey
has been shown to beat the MRSA super-bug with no side-effects to the patient
and is used in burn dressings. Buckwheat honey has been found in clinical
trials to be more effective as a cough treatment than many over-the-counter
cough medicines. Honey is no longer old Gran’s remedy for colds or an
‘alternative’ therapy. It is now a mainstream medicine available on national
health systems and used in hospitals in the UK, the USA and other countries.
Malik (Author)
About Admin:
Malik Currently working as Marketing Executive at Oasis Agro Industries Pakistan, and hobbies to read about agriculture, share latest information with others
Malik Currently working as Marketing Executive at Oasis Agro Industries Pakistan, and hobbies to read about agriculture, share latest information with others
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