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What's the Buzz on Honeybees?

As Americans, we can't get enough honey.  We buy hundreds of millions of dollars of honey and other "hive" products like bees wax and bee pollen each year.  Additionally, bees are important to our economy because they pollinate approximately 130 agricultural crops in the US including fruit, fiber, nut, and vegetable crops. Bee pollination adds between 15 - 20 billion dollars annually through improved crop yield and product quality.
Honeybees work hard to make all that honey for us to enjoy.  In the course of her lifetime, each worker bee will only produce 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.  Bees from the same hive fly 55,000 miles and tap two million flowers to make just one pound of honey for us to enjoy.

What Makes It Green?
Honey is a nutritious as well as delicious treat.  In its natural form honey is a mixture of the sugars glucose and fructose. Our bodies can use these sugars without any special digestive process.  Honey is also a truly fortified food with many vitamins, minerals and enzymes. Over the past several years, more than 25% of the honeybee population in the US has disappeared. Beekeepers and scientists aren't sure exactly what is causing this disappearance to happen.  Many things have been blamed for the mystery from poor nutrition, invasive mites and Colony Collapse Disorder - bees mysteriously abandon their hives and dying.  Over the last 3 years more than 1 of 3 honey bee colonies has died nationwide.  This is a serious risk to our national food chain.   If honeybees become extinct, approximately 1/3 of all the food we eat would disappear for lack of pollination. We should all try to support the honeybee colonies in our area.

What You Can Do
A delicious way to help the honeybees is to support Häagen-Dazs Brand ice cream products-a portion of the proceeds of the sale of all honey bee-affected flavors and new Vanilla Honey Bee ice cream will go toward funding sustainable pollination and CCD research at UC Davis and Penn State.

You can also follow these 5 simple tips from Bees-online.com to create a bee-friendly garden in your backyard:
  • Choose garden plants and flowers that are pollinator-friendly. This includes most plants in the rose, mint, pea and aster families.
  • Select flowers that have a single layer of flower petals, such as a classic daisy.
  • Add non-native plants to your garden to create diversity. Plus, many non-native varieties are excellent, attractive and vigorous plants that provide food for bees and pollinators.
  • Look for flowers that provide food all season. Plant some early flowering plants, along with mid-and late-season flowers. Late-season flowers like goldenrod and aster are especially important.
  • Provide a good environment. Limit, or better still, eliminate the use of pesticides, particularly on attractive plants with open flowers.
didyouknow

An average beehive can hold around 50,000 bees.

handson

My kids love looking at the cross section of a honeybee hive and watching the bees busily do their work. Buzz, buzz, buzz.

 
 
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