Love Our Bees: Easy ways to help important pollinators
We love the pure New Zealand honey that the busy bees in our hives produce, BUT there’s so much more that bees contribute to our world too.
Bees are so important to our environment and biodiversity because they are pollinators. They support the reproduction of countless plant life as they fly from plant to plant spreading pollen.
Approximately one-third of the food we eat relies on bee pollination! Most fruit, nut, vegetables, seeds, and livestock feed production relies on the existence of Bees. The article Why are bees so important to the ecosystem? by The Institute for Environmental Research and Education notes that without bees, our world would be a drastically different place, with far less food, diminished biodiversity, and destabilized ecosystems.
Unfortunately, man-made threats are affecting the lives of bees as they go about their pollination jobs. Throughout the world, air pollution, pesticides, artificial light pollution, and more affect the bee’s health and routines. Also, things like conflict zones and natural disasters make it harder for communities to grow diverse crops, which also reduces the bee’s sources of food, and widespread monocropping means that often food is only available in short windows of time each year.
If you want to know more about the role bees play, and how we can help them help us, you might like to watch Queen of the Sun.
What can you do to help bees?
To keep the bees (and our local environment) running smoothly, there’s a few important things you can do in your garden, backyard, or bush to help out pollinators.
Plant bee-friendly flowers
Plants that are helpful to bees are ones that are pollen-rich and nectar-rich to provide food for bees. These include lavender, sage, basil, sunflowers, and native species like pōhutukawa, rewarewa, and harakeke to provide essential pollen and nectar.
If you can plant clusters of the same flower varieties together this helps too, as volume attracts foraging bees. You can also stagger your plantings (so they flower at different times) to provide your local bees with food across different seasons.
Your lawns can help too! You can mow your lawn less frequently and let clover or dandelions flower as an early food source for bees.
Provide safe drinking water for bees
Have a shallow dish of fresh water in your garden for bees to stay hydrated. Include small rocks or pebbles in the dish so bees have a safe place to land.
Avoid harmful sprays that poison bees
Do not use toxic pesticides and herbicides, especially when plants are flowering. Synthetic pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, and neonicotinoids make pollen and nectar toxic as well as often killing bees directly. If you must spray, use a bee-safe product at sunset or dusk after bees have returned to their hives.
After all, by minimizing the use of pesticides, herbicides, and other agrochemicals, we help maintain healthy bee and other pollinator populations, AND contribute to biodiversity by helping rebalance ecosystems, AND reduce the flow-on health impact on wildlife and people. What's good for bees is good for us too.
Support local beekeepers
Buy pure, local honey and bee-related products to support your local beekeepers who care for their bees in an authentic and caring way. Good beekeepers means more happy healthy bees.
By creating bee-friendly spaces and choosing natural honey produced with care, we can help these essential pollinators continue to thrive. To learn more about our bees, our approach to beekeeping, and our range of pure New Zealand honey, explore our website www.taitokerauhoney.co.nz