What you can do to help

So, given all of this – the question remains as to what can be done by the individual that will make the slightest impact on this huge, global problem.

In a nutshell, the answer is education. Educate yourself, educate others. If more people understood what is happening today, then hopefully better choices could be made, and when everyone is making better choices, great things can happen!

Follow the news, follow legislation, take care how you handle pesticides, and how your neighbor handles them as well.

Take a class, if you’re so inclined. I did. Many classes on beekeeping can be found in most cities. I took mine through Leisure Learning, and it was taught by Mr. Donald Burger, Vice President of the Houston Beekeeping Association. I found it to be very informative. In fact, the website for HAB is www.houstonbeekeepers.org, and he has a page on Africanized bee facts, if you’re interested.

You could start a backyard hive of your own, but take care to check your city ordinances. Some areas will not allow beekeeping, others will.

Create a pollinator garden of your own, or at your church, or with your local elementary school, junior high, or high school. This is what I did, and I combined educating the students, and area Girl Scouts, with planting and maintaining pollination gardens. The gardens serve to provide increased areas of foraging habitats to keep local honeybees healthy. Dadant is one company that provides beekeeping supplies, but they also have some great teaching tools (which is where I got mine for the classes I taught), such as coloring books, life cycle posters, incredible picture cards big enough to be seen from the back of a classroom with great info on the back – their website is www.dadant.com they also have an online catalogue. If you need patches, I found one that says “insects” but it shows a honeybee and a sunflower which was perfect for my needs. The website for the patch is www.advantageemblem.com. I looked for educational info that I might be able to use through Texas A & M, but didn’t find anything – perhaps they could assign a graduate student to develop one like Berkeley has which covers pollinator gardens and includes a study sheet your students can use to track bees once the garden has bloomed - nature.berkeley.edu/urbanbeegardens/ (don’t use www. on this address). While you’re surfing Berkeley urban bee gardens, be sure you go to their urban bee legend page – it has some great info. There is also a great website to use with your own children at www.fws.gov/pollinators/ which has posters, podcasts, activity guides, etc., and they include all pollinators, such as bats and hummingbirds, not just honeybees.

The next section of this blog will highlight my project “Bee Friendly”.