Bee the Change | Hahnemühle German Etching Print

Bees are busy indeed. Depending on floral resources and weather, a single bee might pollinate as many as ten thousand flowers a day, according to Stephen Buchmann, a pollination ecologist who has studied bees for more than four decades. But bee productively is contingent upon bee health, physical and psychological. Bees are not machines, but sentient creatures. They have thoughts, memories, and personalities. The stress they feel may be one reason they’re dying off at alarming rates. Most people are aware that the honey bee is threatened, but so are thousands of native bee species. A recent analysis by the Xerces Society and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) found that 28% of bumble bees in Canada, the United States, and Mexico are in an IUCN Threatened Category. Drivers of population declines include habitat loss, alteration and fragmentation, introduced diseases, climate change, and chemical use. In the US, pest control businesses spray almost three times the amount of neuroactive chemicals than in 1962, the year Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. Although bees have been around for 130 million years, they have never faced such wide ranging threats. According to the Xerces Society, there are four steps that we can take to help them survive: grow flowers, provide nest sites, avoid pesticides, and spread the word. Bee the Change!