• Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

the Imperfectly Happy home

the Imperfectly Happy home

  • Start Here
  • Country Store
    • Seeds for Your Garden & Homestead
    • Shirts & Mugs for Homesteaders
    • Herbal Academy
    • Preferred CBD Oil
    • Meal Planning
    • Chickens
    • Kitchen
  • Home
    • Frugality
    • Vintage Skills
    • Prepping
    • DIY
    • Health & Wellness
  • Recipes
  • Homesteading
    • Homesteading
    • Gardening
    • Backyard Livestock
    • Chickens
    • Meat Rabbits

How to Help Bees Today

March 2, 2015 by Tiffany Davis 1 Comment

How to help bees today:  You and I can make a difference in the dying and sick bee population.  The news has reported on our worldwide declining bee population but the problem persists.  But the problem is still fixable, if we all put in a little more effort to help these amazing pollinators.  So how can you help bees today?  I have 5 simple ways to do that.  Do them all, or at least 1.  Remember that without bees it is estimated that more than 2/3 of the world’s crops would be gone.  It isn’t just honey that these lovely bugs help to produce.

How You Can Help Bees Today! And you don't even have to start a hive. | by ImperfectlyHappy.com

How to Help Bees Today

You aren’t going to be required to start a hive or your own.  However if this appeals to you there are ways to start a small colony right in your own backyard.  Check out Backyard Beekeeper – An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Keeping Bees in Your Yard and Garden.

Top 5 Ways We Can Help Bees  Today

1.  Start planting flowers and flowering herbs and vegetables. We can help bees by providing safe environments for them. Make sure your garden and yard includes bee attracting flowers (native is best) as well as herbs and vegetables that flower.  These are safe havens in world of monoculture farms, concrete jungles and the pristine yards in the burbs soaked in pesticides.

If you’re unsure what to plant?  Check out this amazing map that can tell you the wild or native plants to include in your gardens to create your own bee sanctuary:  Pollinator Conservation Resource Center.  

2.  NEVER use chemicals or pesticides on your garden, grass or plants!  Don’t even spay those weeds in the cracks and groves of your sidewalk.  It just isn’t worth it.  There is so much damage to undo, the least is to stop creating a problem.  Some pesticides kill bees instantly, others do not.  Some of these chemicals lay dormant to give the bee enough time to get back to its colony, possibly infecting others.  Still some pesticides only affect young, developing bees; slowly killing a colony.

If offering help to the bees weren’t enough, the long term affects of pesticides on humans are still being studied.  Do we really need to be an experiment?

3. What you don’t grow, buy organic and local.  The best thing we can do is grow a garden full of organic veggies.  But if you aren’t growing something buy local and organic foods.  We help bees, our local bees, by helping the farmers that give them due respect. Visit farms, go to a farmer’s market, join your local CSA.  Not only will you help bees, you will send a strong message with your dollar! If you can’t get local, at least buy organic.  Organic farms are not using the very pesticides that are killing our bees.  Getting the official “seal” of organic is expensive so support organic but talk to your local farmers.  These local farmers may not be using pesticides but cannot afford to get the license required to be officially organic.

4.  Buy raw, LOCAL, honey.  If you like honey, buy locally.  Local, and especially raw, honey has amazing health benefits from allergies to digestion.  Supporting your local beekeepers will keep these colonies of healthy bees going.  Not to mention your local beekeeper is going to be a wealth of information on native plants that their bees are hungry for!!!

You can usually find local honey at your farmer’s market.  If not, ask around; someone knows a beekeeper!

5.  Give them a drink.  Another great way to help bees is to offer them a safe water source.  A shallow bowl or basin, with few rocks or marbles, in it will give them a place to drink without drowning.  I keep mine up high where my dogs won’t drink out of it!

BONUS! Educate yourself and pass on the knowledge. I’m not an expert, I’m just sharing what I’ve learned.  You can do this too, right in your own community.  Study up on bees, their nature and needs, especially locally.  I know there has been a lot of scares over Africanized bees but knowledge is power.  There are safe ways to have bees, even Africanized bees, removed without killing them.  I’ve been reading that some beekeepers are finding that the Africanized bees can “tamed” by introducing a European Queen bee into an Africanized colony.

Educate others with the knowledge you have.  This is the key to changing the outlook for bees, our food and our health.

     

photo credit: Fuzzy Wuzzy Nectar Vector via photopin (license)

  • Tweet

Filed Under: Backyard Homestead, Gardening, Health & Wellness, Local & Sustainable, On the Soap Box

« Homeschooling FAQs Answered
Return to a Frugal Life »

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Bees: More Than Honey ~ Pixie's Pocket says:
    February 2, 2016 at 7:06 am

    […] Happy blog gives 5 easy ways YOU can help bees (without starting your own […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recipe Rating




Primary Sidebar

Follow Imperfectly Happy

Topics

Imperfectly Happy is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.
Full Disclosures, Disclaimers & Compensation
Medical Disclaimer
Terms of Use

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Footer

Recent Posts

  • Instant Pot Baked Beans
  • Why You Need Food Storage
  • How to Grow Onions in Your Backyard
  • Slow Cooker Red Enchiladas
  • 8 Uses for Windex You Need to Know About

—————————————

Advertising

This Site is affiliated with CMI Marketing, Inc., d/b/a CafeMedia (“CafeMedia”) for the purposes of placing advertising on the Site, and CafeMedia will collect and use certain data for advertising purposes. To learn more about CafeMedia’s data usage, click here: www.cafemedia.com/publisher-advertising-privacy-policy

Amazon Associates Disclosure

The Imperfectly Happy Home is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com

Privacy, Disclaimers & Compensation

See Terms of Use

Convert Kit

The Secrets to Vegetable Gardening

My 5 Must Know Gardening Secrets!

    We won't send you spam. Unsubscribe at any time.
    Built with ConvertKit

    Copyright © 2022 · Midnight theme