OPINION: Honey Bees Are Hogging The Spotlight

By Samuel Rivers

In the past several years, few environmental causes have quite achieved the popularity and staying power as that of the honey bee's endangerment. From art that anthropomorphize bees to make them more relatable to various organizations developing programs to spread awareness about them, the endangerment to the honey bee populations is an incredibly bipartisan that receives nearly constant attention.

This is far from a bad thing, of course. Politicians are much less scared to enact laws for causes that they know everyone supports, and organizations can far more easily find funding for popular issues.

So what is my issue with the honey bee's popularity, then? Well, my main problem lies in the fact that, while honey bees are being seen as this adorable busy-body that the world depends on for pollination (and, to be fair, they are), other species that face similar endangerment see much less popularity and thus less awareness raised for them.

Species such as the gopher tortoise (which I will use as my primary example less popular endangered species for the rest of this article) have a much more difficult time gaining the awareness and popularity that the honey bee does, despite being just as or even more so endangered, and this could be for various reasons, not the least of which being the significance they hold to the environment.

For example, there is a significant difference in the importance that the gopher tortoise and the honey bee have in their ecosystems. Gopher tortoises are considered important largely because they dig burrows that various other animals often end up living in. This is important for those animals, but not so much to humans. Honey bees, however, are extremely important pollinators throughout the world. Losing them would have a significant impact on agriculture everywhere, and thus effect nearly everything.

Please don't mistake me as having some sort of hatred toward the honey bees. I hope they continue to receive the attention and help that they need to save them from endangerment. However, I think the spotlight that the honey bee has can be shared a little with lesser known endangered species. While they may not hold the fate of the entire world in their hands, creatures such as the gopher tortoise would still be quite missed within their ecosystems were they to die out.