the quest to save our honey bees!

 

Busy as a bee. Anyone who has seen these tiny insects can certainly agree, as they flit from one flower to another, gathering nectar and helping in the pollination process. Bess are extremely valuable to us in the food chain. If not for bees, we wouldn't have honey OR food itself! Yet in the past several years, alarming numbers of bees and the hives they produce have been dying- something researchers call colony collapse disorder. The list of crops that simply won’t grow without honey bees is a long one: Apples, cucumbers, broccoli, onions, pumpkins, carrots, avocados, almonds … and it goes on.

Honey bees are disappearing across the country, putting $15 billion worth of fruits, nuts and vegetables at risk!

Researchers at the U of MN have speculated the cause may very well be our overuse of pesticides and fertilizers. Even if you yourself do not use any chemicals, all it takes is a neighbor upwind of you to do so. The resulting chemical cloud can taint the flowers, plants or hives that you may have, killing off your source of pollen. Researchers are also looking into the seeds themselves. Genetically modified seeds carry within them pest resistant as well as drought resistant properties that, when the bee comes into contact with it, can, over time, harm it to the point of killing it. They bring the GM pollen back to the hive and literally infect the workers as well as the queen, rendering the hive dead. Bee keepers say that to restore their hives takes time and money. Time we may not have and money the farmers also are in short supply of.

I encourage you to find out all that you can about bees and how valuable they are to us. Sure, I realize that you may have been stung a time or two, but to ensure our future, as well as the future of the next generations, we must keep our bees alive, healthy and strong. They are the link in our food chain that determines survival of us all! Contact the USDA and tell them they need to act now if we are to have bees in the future. Thus far, they have allotted only 20 million dollars in their research to dying bees, yet the cost to the food industry could be as high as 15 billion dollars in lost revenue! Other ways that you can help include providing native species of plants, have water for them to drink and avoid using pesticides if at all possible!
For more information, go the this website: http://www.nrdc.org/wildlife/animals/beegardens.asp
It has valuable information that can help you in the quest to save our little friends. We are all in this world together...together, let's make a difference!