Beekeepers Seek to Save the Buzz

By MARK ANDERSON

Is preserving the bee population—clearly a crucial thing for human well-being and survival — as easy as giving a special designation to an American city?

Well, Beaumont, Texas, nestled in the southeastern part of the Lone Star State near Louisiana, has been slated to become Bee City USA, which serves as a focal point to institute practices to at least start rescuing a rapidly dwindling bee population.

Local beekeeper Tammy Muldrow stressed the importance of education in the city’s conservation efforts, because some area residents are not aware that they’re killing bees and other pollinators.

“The first problem we have that’s leading to bee deaths is all of the pesticides and chemicals that people are using,” she told the Beaumont Enterprise, while adding that many people don’t understand how indiscriminate these chemicals can be, since they kill “the good and the bad bugs.”

Sevin Dust, a commonly used pesticide, is one of the culprits, she said, while noting that when bees land on any part of a plant — not just the flower — they take the pesticide back to their hive. There, the bee is cleaned and the pollen, which now includes Sevin Dust, is put into the “pantry” to feed the rest of the bees.

“You haven’t killed one bee or two bees, you’ve killed an entire hive,” she said.

Under this designation, Beaumont must create a committee, pay an annual $500 fee, celebrate National Pollinator Week, install a bee-city street sign, plant pollinator-friendly plants and document activities that support pollinators. The committee will figure out which policies will enable pollinators to thrive.

Thus, Beaumont is part of a nationwide movement to educate residents. Bee City USA committee chair Elizabeth Waddill said this designation is especially appropriate for Beaumont because of its location along two migratory flyways that bring bird species which feed on seeds, nuts and fruits from native plants—many of which are made possible by bees and other pollinators.

Another creative means of raising awareness to try and stop CCD came when General Mills recently removed the “Buzz the Bee” mascot from Honey Nut Cheerios cereal boxes. To complement that symbolic move, the company advertised a give-away of free packets of wildflower seeds that bees like to visit. The company gave away 1.5 billion seeds.

Moreover, Ypsilanti, Mich., gardener Bob Van Bemmelen, in 2017 and 2018, rolled out his “Unity Garden Initiative” in cooperation with a local church to not only gather families together to work in the garden and bring vastly improved nutrition to the table, but also to call attention to the importance of bees as part of his education program about constructing raised-bed gardens throughout the community, as he explained during a garden tour with this writer.

All of the above, and much more, is sorely needed because a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has “plagued beekeepers’ bumblebee colonies,” according to the Centre for Research on Globalization, which noted that “bee populations began dropping in 2006.” Moreover, the Center for Biological Diversity says that habitat loss from pesticide use has pushed more than 700 bee species toward extinction.

Furthermore, the increasingly intense and widespread electromagnetic field (EMF) created by today’s modern communications and surveillance grid, is another likely cause of CCD. And considering that society is being pushed by corporate power into the next generation of digital communications, known as 5-G, or fifth generation, we should all admonish local, state and national policymakers to slow down this juggernaut and demand that genuine research on the health affects of 5-G on bees, human beings and other living things is actually carried out—involving researchers unconnected with the telecommunications industry.

Mark Anderson is a veteran journalist who divides his time between Texas and Michigan. Email him at truthhound2@yahoo.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2019

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