LOCAL HEALTHY FOOD FOR LOCAL HEALTHY KIDS SPRING 2014 • ISSUE 2
Save the bees! By Sissy Sugarman What’s your reaction when you see a bee? Do you run for cover screaming, “a bee! A bee!” I was afraid of bees until I joined our 4H beekeeping project and learned so many amazing things about honeybees. They are highly intelligent and function in a well-ordered and complex society. Bees use their honey to feed their offspring and to fuel their wing muscles – a honeybee flaps its wings about 230 times a second and would get about seven million miles out of a gallon of honey. How’s that for fuel efficiency? To collect a pound of honey, a bee would have to fly more than 50,000 miles. That’s twice around the world! Bees are fascinating, intelligent animals and are critical to our very survival. We need bees because they are our number-one plant pollinators. Without bees, we would have no fruits, vegetables, flowers and crops like alfalfa hay which feed our farm animals. Without pollination, plants can’t reproduce. More than one third of our world’s crops depend on bee pollination. So we need the bees. But they are disappearing. In 1945, we had 4.5 million bee hives. We have a lot fewer bees since then. A report in 2007 showed that we only had 2 million bee hives in the U.S. Why? After World War II, farmers changed their farming practices. They stopped planting as much clover and alfalfa (which make food for bees) and started using poisons that kill weeds that provide flowers that the bees need for food.
Scientists have found that every load of pollen that a bee collects has about six pesticides (poisons) in it. Some pesticides are so poisonous that even if a bee gets a little, they can become so confused that they cannot find their way home. We need all of our bees, so what are we going to do? Everyone can help in a few simple ways. Plant bee friendly flowers and don’t use pesticides. It’s best if you plant from seed because some plants you buy at stores have pesticides in them. Plant them in your front yard, on your apartment terrace or in your garden. Also, get involved in beekeeping. You can learn all about it at your local 4H club or from the San Diego Beekeeping Society. With just a bit of equipment and a little knowledge, you can set up your own honeybee hives right in your backyard. I have 4 at my house and the honey harvest is one of my favorite days of the year. It might seem like a really small solution to a huge problem, but when bees have access to good food, we have access to good food through their pollination. We can help make a big change by helping out in small ways. So let the small act of planting flowers and keeping them pesticide free help the bees survive. Sissy Sugarman is 12 years old and lives on a hobby farm in Encinitas California with her dairy goats, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, sheep, ducks, goats, horses, cow, donkey, pig and many sweet honey bees.
Edible San Diego for Kids is produced in partnership with Slow Food Urban San Diego. • Sponsored by Sempra Energy