Propelled by a real passion for beekeeping, we are actively involved in safeguarding the bees and turning the spotlight on the great work they accomplish. We explore the four corners of the Earth, eager to discover new flavours, mindful of making significant gestures in the fight for the bees’ survival and relentlessly acquiring new ways to improve.
Indifference
Despite all the energy expended, each one of us is aware that we cannot make a difference alone. Protecting the bees is a vision of society! As long as important changes in our agricultural models are not implemented, bees will continue to die. Indifference to the plight of the bees is explainable in part, by the fact that not enough is known about this amazing insect by most of us – even though it is responsible for bringing colour to our food plate and feeding us by pollinating more than a third of the food we eat!
Greater Collaboration
The other part comes from a lack of will in changing our eating habits towards eco-responsible choices which, in turn, will put pressure on governments and the agrochemical industry. Political authorities must absolutely get involved to set in motion a movement for the protection of bees, pollinators, and ecosystems. The urgency of reconfiguring agricultural models is required to harmonize the way things are done, to reassert the importance of crop diversity, to rehumanize agricultural work, to reduce the area dedicated to monoculture and to invest in a sustainable development benefitting pollinators. This approach must take form in a greater collaboration between farmers and beekeepers to make sure that realistic solutions are conceivable and applicable. We must urgently intervene and rethink the certification process and the use of pesticides by favouring, in particular, an agricultural approach less dependent on chemical inputs. Beekeepers have the potential of becoming important players, first line informants about how diverse pollution sources, direct and indirect, are affecting the bees.
Bees as Bio-Indicator
The bee is an incredible bio-indicator, a true barometer measuring the quality of our environment. While shuttling back and forth between the beehive and its natural surroundings, the bee takes stock of the health status of ecosystems by performing a biopsy of all it gathers. Plants, water, soil, air particles; everything that surrounds us is, in part, taken as a sample by the bees, which provides us with an imprint of the environment. The last twenty years have seen a decline in bee populations. This imprint is disturbing, symptomatic of the environment’s sick state, a diagnosis that reveals the repercussions and consequences this decline will have on human life and biodiversity on a planetary scale.
Wisdom
We hope to see the creation of a community that, as a bee colony, will get the job done together. The time has come to breathe life again around us, to make eco-responsible choices about what goes on our food plates, about the plant diversity that colours our fields and on the responsible development of our countryside. It is imperative that the choices we make protect and preserve our planet because we do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children and future generations. All of us should honour and respect this aboriginal wisdom.