Save the Bees!

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bee on flower

Save the Bees!

Bees don’t just make honey, they are vital to life on earth, every year pollinating 90% of plants and crops and without immediate action, many of our favourite fruits, vegetables, and nuts could vanish from our shelves.

Recent years have seen a massive decline in bee populations around the world and some bee species are already extinct! A key EU agency is saying that toxic pesticides called neonicotinoids could be responsible for the bee deaths. The EU has banned three of these bee-killers, but giant chemical producers like Bayer and Syngenta continue to export their poison across the world.

Bumble Bee

Bumble Bee

Let’s get people power to counter the powerful pesticide lobby and save bees from extinction. Please sign the urgent petition to leaders around the world, and then share it as wide as you can.

Thank you 😉

15 thoughts on “Save the Bees!”

  2. Has anyone seen the new movie, “More Than Honey?” (available on Netflix streaming) I thought they would be describing the importance of the bees for use in pollination. What they showed was an example of grand exploitation of the bees. The owner of the pollinating bees let them get sprayed while they were still in the almond orchards. It was so painful to watch dying bees, we stopped the movie. We have eaten almonds for years, but with the thought of dying bees, we have vowed to stop eating almonds.

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    • OMG! That is so awful, I had no idea! The only way to stop things like this happening, it seems to me, would be to absolutely refuse to buy anything that’s not organic. I know that’s easier said than done – it’s more expensive and not always available, but the more of us that do it, the more available it will be, and we should certainly be supporting all the growers that don’t resort to these barbaric and toxic methods. You’d be ok to have organic almonds wouldn’t you? Thanks for sharing this.

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      • The problem is not just the spraying, but the pollination. One of the reasons the price of almonds is going up is because the demand has increased over the years, while the supply is the same or less. I think this past year there were not enough bees to pollinate all the trees. If you’ve ever watched “Vanishing of the Bees” or possibly “Queen of the Sun,” or now “More than Honey,” you’ll see that bee hives have to be trucked hundreds of miles. That’s a real stresser on the bees. The decision to stop eating almonds came as a quick reaction to the scene in the movie where the owner of the bees is seen driving into the orchard and upon hearing the buzz of the bees says, “That’s the sound of money.” We see thousands of bees buzzing around the trees. I’m sure he has a lot of capital tied up in getting the bees into the orchard and he’s probably happy to see a return, but why would let his bees get sprayed?

        I’ve got to research the organic almonds to see if they are grown in mono-culture orchards and how they are pollinated. In the meantime, we are ‘off’ almonds.

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        • I’m going to try my hand at beekeeping this summer and took a beginning beekeeping workshop recently. The beekeeper conducting it told us that the almond growers used to pay $10 per hive for beekeepers to come and put their hives in the orchards for the three-week pollination period. Now they pay $200. “My” beekeeper has about 300 hives, but he won’t do it. He said it was “a whorehouse” because the bees mingle with each other as they do their pollinating thing and that they spread all kinds of hive diseases to each other (varroa mites, tracheal mites, hive beetles). He also said (and I don’t remember the exact figure) that the difference in almond yield between pollinated and unpollinated orchards was something like 200 times more than an unpollinated one. (Here’s a link to a piece on prices: http://www.beesource.com/point-of-view/joe-traynor/2015-almond-pollination/)

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