July 13, 2016

The Bee Cause Campaign

By Amy Gaglardi

Beelineweb is a proud contributor to Friends of the Earth Canada in support of The Bee Cause Campaign.

The Bee Cause is calling for a ban on bee-harmful practices and pesticides and is proposing practical ways to help the bees and natural pollinators.

While we believe ALL harmful pesticides should be banned and organic practices should always be used, this is a great place to start. Bees are critical to the world’s food production, and bee populations worldwide are dwindling. Many factors may account for honey bee losses; however, there is strong scientific evidence that a major contributing factor in the bee die-offs is the use of neonicotinoid pesticides.

Neonicotinoids (neonics) are systemic pesticides that are absorbed into plant tissues. Once they are applied, neonics spread through the entire plant, including the stems, flowers, nectar and pollen. This is scary stuff! While we use organic gardening practices at our office garden, we recently learned that many garden centers pre-treat plants with these pesticides that are harmful to bees. We are concerned that we could have inadvertently contributed to this problem by not knowing if the plants we purchased were bee safe. The Bee Cause Campaign can help avoid this problem!

Bees are extremely important to our food security, as 2/3 of crops do require bees to successfully grow, plus they help beautify our world by pollinating flowers.

Learn more about The Bee Cause and neonicotinoids and how you can help!