Bees are a fundamental part of ecosystems. They play a major role in maintaining biodiversity, ensuring the survival of many plants, ensuring forest regeneration, sustainability, adaptation to climate change, and improving the quantity and quality of agricultural production systems. In fact, close to 75 percent of the world’s crops producing fruits and seeds for human consumption depend, at least in part, on pollinators for sustained production, yield, and quality. Beekeeping, also called apiculture, refers to all activities concerned with the practical management of social bee species. Beekeeping is different from honey-hunting, which involves “plundering wild nests of honeybees to obtain crops of honey and beeswax”. For thousands of years, we have known that honey can be obtained much more easily and conveniently if bees are encouraged to nest inside a
man-made hive (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO], 2009). Depending on the type of hive and the species and subspecies of bee, it is also possible to manage the colony to some extent. In many rural areas of the world, beekeeping is a widespread activity, with thousands of small-scale beekeepers depending on bees for their livelihoods. Social bees can provide humans with valuable hive products (honey, wax, propolis, pollen, royal jelly, queen bees, and swarms) and services (pollination, apitherapy, ap tourism, and environmental monitoring) and play other important economic, cultural, and social roles.
