05/22/2024
Meet Sarah, one of our newest partners in hosting a honeybee hive in the Bay. Sarah asked us a question that we’re constantly reflecting on - Are we helping to “Save the Bees.”
It’s an issue that keeps us me at night. Are we making a difference?
There’s a large debate in the US among environmentalists such myself as to whether hosting a honeybee colony is good for our ecology.
I do, in fact, believe that what we are doing is saving the bees, but in a different way than I imagined when I was just getting started out.
What I mean by that is that left alone, bees would do just fine on their own. This has been true since the beginning of time. Humans have been keeping bees for literally thousands of years with the first image of wild honeybee harvesting coming from cave paintings in Spain dating from 8,000-6,000 BCE. They would’ve done fine on their own then too.
But this issue of the “disappearing of bees” (all bees, honey and native) is recent and man-made. From the rampant use of toxic pesticides, habitat loss due to urban sprawl, the plowing up of grasslands and prairies for monocrop agriculture, and the changing climate, the bees need our help.
A large majority of honeybee hives that are currently in the US are mostly commercial. They are being carted to and from large monocrops, which is against their natural foraging tendencies and also exposes them to harmful pesticides.
Hosting and caring for a hive in a home garden, one that is dedicated to planting organic, native flowering plants and trees, is a perfectly lovely and sustainable way to have a symbiotic relationship with nature. One that supports the bees (and in turn your garden) in a way that’s been done throughout all of recorded time.
It offers a healthy and happy home to our winged friends to forage from and pollinate an abundance of variety of vegetation as nature intended.
It’s one of the many ways (of which I’ll share my thoughts in the future ) of how our work is valuable in our symbiotic relationship with the bee.
