World Bee Day – Bee Engaged!

World Bee Day
Published May 20, 2021

Today is World Bee Day – 20 May 2021

A world without pollinators would be a world without food diversity – and in the long run, without food security,” FAO Director-General JoséGraziano da Silva

Today, is World Bee Day. Bees play a vital role in maintaining a healthy and well-functioning ecosystem and contribute to food production (and food security) through pollination. In fact, bees and other pollinators sustain one third of all food produced globally (Huffpost, 2016).

However, bees are facing major threats including urban development, pesticide use, monoculture agriculture and climate change that can disrupt flowering seasons. Without bees, a host of nutritious foods would be removed from our diets including potatoes, cauliflowers, carrots and apples (FAO, 2016).

Here are 3 simple ways to contribute to the preservation of bees:

1. Plant nectar-bearing flowers to attract bees and other pollinators

2. Support and Buy local honey and other hive products

3. Raise awareness on the importance of bees

Tiny Miracle Workers

The following is some great information from https://www.worldbeeday.org/en/

Pollination is vital to life on our planet. Bees and other pollinators have thrived for millions of years, ensuring food security and nutrition, and maintaining biodiversity and vibrant ecosystems for plants, humans and the bees themselves. Pollinators are essential to the production of many of the micro-nutrient rich fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and oils we eat. 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. The diversity of food available is largely owed to animal pollinators. But alarmingly, in a number of regions, pollination services are showing declining trends.In the past, this service was provided by nature at no apparent cost. As farm fields have become larger, agricultural practices have also changed, focussing on a narrower list of crops and increasing the use of pesticides. Mounting evidence points to these factors as causes to the potentially serious decline in populations of pollinators. The decline is likely to impact the production and costs of vitamin-rich crops like fruits and vegetables, leading to increasingly unbalanced diets and health problems, such as malnutrition and non-communicable diseases. Maintaining and increasing yields in horticultural crops under agricultural development is important to health, nutrition, food security and better incomes for smallholder farmers.The process of securing effective pollinators to ‘service’ agricultural fields is proving difficult to engineer, and there is a renewed interest in helping nature provide pollination services through practices that support wild pollinators.

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