Yaay, it’s World Bee Day! 🐝🌼
Today is the day to draw attention to the importance of protecting native bees and other pollinators because they play a fundamental role in the survival of our ecosystems. Today we must discuss how to halt biodiversity loss and the degradation of our fragile ecosystems on which all life depends. Today is a day to remind ourselves that native pollinators are heavily threatened, and we must do everything to restore nature’s balance.
Every year, #WorldBeeDay is disproportionally focussing on honeybees. The official UN website offers a wide range of honey-centred recipes to bee-related products. Coined and funded by the Slovenian Beekeepers’ Association, the event is the perfect marketing campaign to boost the pollination industry and Slovenian bee tourism – yes, it’s a thing.
But in case you didn’t know, behind honeybee pollination is a lucrative billion-dollar industry responsible for absolute environmental devastation. Every year, people are shocked to hear how many honeybees die off during pollination season and wonder what we can do to save them. But the honeybee isn’t the one that needs savin’. It’s the tens of thousands of native pollinating species (including 20.000 different bees that don’t make honey) that are pushed into extinction that needs to be saved from monoculture agriculture and honeybee competition. Strengthened in wild habitat, honeybees out-compete other pollinators and spread diseases. Native pollinators that already struggle to survive due to excessive exposure to pesticides, insecticides and herbicides now also need to deal with an army of invasive honeybees.
Our native pollinators need no competitors; they need a wider variety of crops, more crop margins filled with native weeds and flowers, and enough wild habitat near farmland. Today shouldn’t be about honey, it should be all about our native pollinators and how to save them 🌻🐝🐞🦋🦇🌼
Today is a great day to abstain from consuming honey and to fight obscure eco-washing claims of bee-related products. You with us? Check out our full article discussing what’s wrong with #WorldBeeDay ~!
