The Need for Bees (and not just for honey)

● 1 Background
Bees are closely related to human activities, especially in food and agriculture. They can spread pollen between flowers which is beneficial to reproduction. According to the data, one bee can pollinate a flower in an approximately circular area with a 2.5 km radius and collect nearly 10 flowers per day. Nearly 90% of flowers need bees to help them reproduce. A hive contains 20000 to 80000 workers, which means the impact of bees made on nearby areas can be significant. In addition, humans get honey from bees for cooking. Producing honey for human use is a tough mission for bees; one bee has to collect 1100-1400 flowers to fill the honey sac, and it can only collect 0.6g of honey in its whole life. Therefore, the diminishing bee population will cause remarkable impacts on human activities, so the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) level becomes highly relative to humans and becomes an essential problem researchers examine when they analyze honeybee. According to beekeepers, who have lost 90% of hives, there could be a variable of causes that lead to the loss of honeybee hives, including chemical contamination, pesticides, predation, and lack of food. After that, they create the term Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which is characterized by the rapid disappearance of adult honeybees from colonies. And while CCD has affected farms in the US, Western Europe, and parts of Asia, globally beekeeping has increased by 45% in the last five decades. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, reports of CCD cases in the US have declined substantially over the past five years, which has led many experts to question whether there is a sustained trend. However, honeybee colonies lost 86,070 colonies from January through March 2022, and over the entire year (April 2020-April 2021), beekeepers in the U.S. lost an estimated 45.5% of their colonies, which is the second-highest annual loss on record. As shown in the data above, this problem has deteriorated recently. Therefore, we have to consider the factors that influence the bee population again, including weather changes in a short time, temperature, season, and food sources. Then figure out the importance of each factor by the model (mentioned later) so that the solution to the issue can be figured out to the greatest extent.
● 2 Problem Analysis
To support research relating to honeybee population, researchers must have access to a model that can help them to predict the population of a honeybee colony. A commonly used method to determine the population size is the mark-recapture method, which refers to first capturing a random sample of individuals in the population, then marking each individual and releasing them, then capturing the second set of individuals and getting the ratio of the number of marked individuals and the total number of the individuals captured in the second sample, and these data are used to estimate the total population size. However, this method is too complicated to be used by every time scientists who want to establish research, and a greater dataset is hard to be collected. Thus, we need to develop a model that can predict and determine the real-time population size of a honeybee colony. In this model, a sensitivity analysis is included to determine the factor that impacts the honeybee colony size most significantly so that it can inform researchers or the public how to take action to protect honeybees and prevent their population size from decreasing drastically. Moreover, although researchers are acknowledged that honeybees can help pollination and how they achieve this result, researchers are not informed about the number of honeybees needed to support pollination in a certain region. To provide information about what population size of the honeybee is most beneficial, we are developing a model to predict the number of honeybee hives needed to support pollination of a 20-acre parcel of land containing crops that benefit from pollination.
● 3 Objectives
To find the best way to protect bees and indirectly increase pollination of plants to
protect the ecological environment by studying what are the main factors affecting bee
population and solving CCD problems.