World Honey Bee Day
This Saturday, 21st of August, is World Honey Bee Day 2021 🐝 World Honey Bee Day is an annual awareness day in which honey bee enthusiasts and beekeepers celebrate the honey bee, recognising the contribution honey bees make to our lives. Honey bees are social and cooperative and are generally divided into three types: workers, drones and the queen.
Honey bees play a crucial role in our everyday lives. Sadly, bees face extinction, with a quarter of known bee species not seen since the 1990s. Causes of this extinction include climate change, which has destroyed bee’s native habitats or even killed bee colonies; the introduction of non-native bees to help with pollination, non-native bees may carry pathogens creating pandemics among bees; and pesticides which are killing bees and other pollinators, intentionally, or unintentionally through what is known as a “pesticide cocktail”.
Did you know….
🐝 Bees are responsible for more than a third of the food we eat, with the 20,000 species pollinating 85% of food crops globally
🐝 A single bee colony can pollinate as many as 300 million flowers each day
🐝 Honey bees fly at a speed of around 25KM per hour and beat their wings 200 times per second
It is important that we do our bit to look after bees and other pollinators. You can help care and protect bees by…
🐝 Planting bee friendly flowers and plants
🐝 Going chemical free in your garden
🐝 Creating bee baths or bee hotels
Sources: National Geographic, GreenPeace, Days of The Year, The Bee Conservancy