20 May is World Bee Day, established by the United Nations on 20 December 2017 and celebrated for the first time on 20 May 2018.
Without bees the world would be profoundly different and we would have to rethink our diet. These insects, according to the FAO, are in fact decisive for the pollination of 71 of the 100 crops that represent 90% of the food consumed throughout the planet. For over thirty million years, bees have been helping flowers to expand their range and reproduce, ensuring the maintenance of biodiversity and even helping to restore areas close to desertification.
How the lockdown favoured the bees? The lockdown period due to Covid-19 was particularly favourable for bees, whose global populations are declining due to habitat loss and pesticides. The cessation of most activities has created a more bee-friendly environment. First, the obsessive cleaning of roadsides has been halted, allowing plants to grow and flourish, providing an additional and unexpected source of food for bees and other pollinators.
The reduction in vehicle traffic has had a twofold positive impact: on the one hand, the shortage of cars has inevitably led to a decrease in fatal collisions (according to a 2015 study, every year, in North America alone, cars kill 24 billion bees and wasps), on the other hand there has been a significant reduction in air pollution. According to a study published in 2016, pollutants, such as ozone, alter the chemical composition of flowers, confusing bees and making it more difficult and costly for them to find food.
These changes, from which bees and other organisms have benefited, are clearly the result of the exceptional situation we are experiencing and could disappear as soon as human activities resume. In some cases, however, it would take little to maintain the benefits we are seeing, while in others, more structural but necessary interventions would be needed. We have no more excuses, it is we, personally, individually, who, with our often unsustainable behaviour, create damage to the environment. It is in front of everyone's eyes that, beyond the bees, the air is cleaner, the sky is blue and you can smell the scent of flowers. The quarantine has shown us how it can be enough to take a step back to allow some ecological mechanisms to restart, now is the time to trust nature and its processes, let it find its own way, and resist the urge to control it.
What can you do to save bees? Use renewable energy, walk and use bicycle, use public transportation, buy local organic food, support local farmers and beekeepers buying honey and bees products.
Shop with us our beeswax food wraps.
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