teach the art of order to a peopled kingdom.”

William Shakespeare 1564-1616      Henry V Act 1 Scene 2

                                                Honeybees and humans  have been wildly-successful, well-organized, cooperating friends and business partners for thousands of years. 

We call ourselves beekeepers, but as a technical and pragmatic reality, they keep us.  Over the eons, Nature’s records indicate, that friendships and partnerships can confront a few hiccups or out-and-out disasters.   Some regroup and survive. Some don’t. Humanity is  in the midst of a slow-motion world-wide food catastrophe.

Finding win-win solutions during a crisis calls for collective higher-than-average levels of cooperation if the partnership – meaning humanity – is to survive.   Honey bees could survive without humans.  The reverse is no longer the case.   Friends of Honeybees  has created its Buzz for Bees program, working with merchants and shop operators to connect a benefit to your bottom line with customer awareness and support honeybee research and local beekeeping activities in your community .

Whether you own or help operate a local restaurant, cafe or neighborhood tavern, wine shop, bookstore, boutique, tattoo parlor, plant nursery, grocery, gallery, jewelry or gift shop … you can quietly educate your clientele about how much honeybees, honey bee researchers and you appreciate their concern and assistance.

Friends of Honeybees is committed to following the honeybees’ own business model, which is win-win.

Our staff will work with you to customize an educational handout or handbill insert that describes the Buzz for Bees program and your business’ commitment to preserving and protecting honeybees through education, local activities and research.

To learn more about becoming Buzz for Bees  Merchant Partner,  e-mail us a Friends of Honeybees@hotmail.com or click the Contact Us link on the home page.

To give you a snapshot of how differently researchers think about, respond to and approach the honeybee puzzle, we’ve asked two of them to answer several basic questions.  One is from a university research department, and the other who heads an independent facility whose sole focus is on chemical-free approaches to honeybee breeding and beekeeping.   Friends of Honeybees has committed to help support both of these research efforts during 2011-2012.

Question:  Why are Honeybees Important to Human Survival?

Answer 1.  Honey bees are generalist pollinators, thus they help to pollinate all sorts of flowering plants in our environment. Their importance to agriculture, however, is largely because they are so amenable to transport in and out of crops while in bloom. But of course all pollinators, including the 20,000 or so global bee species, are critical to all ecosystems.

Answer 2.  Honeybees are the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for our environment. They are telling us that our industrial agricultural practices are poisoning the earth. Unless we make changes to ensure a healthy and sustainable environment we are just as much at risk as they are – they’ll just go first.

Question:    Colony Collapse Disorder News Coverage Has Dropped. Has the Threat to Honeybees Changed?

Answer 1. Due to the fact that CCD has not yet been “solved,” the media hasn’t been focusing on the issue like it was when first described. Nonetheless, the threats facing honey bees have not changed in recent years, with almost one-third of the managed beehives in the US dying each year.

One thing that is critical to point out, is that not all bees are dying from CCD. In fact, only about 10% of the colonies that die every year do so with CCD-like symptoms. Thus it is important to take a more comprehensive view about bee health rather than only CCD. The alarming distinction of CCD is that the underlying mechanisms remain elusive.

Answer 2.  People are apathetic. If a threat is not imminent and in their face they look away. Short attention span. The truth is bees are being lost in the same numbers as 2007 and we’re no closer to isolating a single cause.

Question:  Why Have Imported Bees Been Blamed for CCD?

Answer 1. Honey bee populations in different parts of the world can carry different or unique parasites or pathogens, which might dramatically and negatively affect the US population. The recent closing of imports from Australia has been in response to their bees being so proximate to other honey bee species that might pass along some of their unwanted disease agents.

Answer 2.  In the absence of a proven cause it’s reassuring to blame something, even if it’s wrong. Globalization has no doubt brought myriad evils to lands once isolated from each other – but to expect there’s any going back would be naive. If not for the importation of honeybees we wouldn’t have them in the US today. CCD was not a problem in the country of origin and it’s time to realize that we’re all in this together – there’s no hiding anywhere on the face of this planet.

Question: What Can the Average Person Do to Help Honeybees?

Answer 1:

• First, appreciate their vital role in our food supply through their pollination of about one-third of everything we eat. One welcomed upside to the media coverage about CCD has been the remarkable public-education campaign about the importance of pollination in general and honey bees in particular.
• Second, with dwindling resources and grant monies, concerned citizens can make vital financial contributions to various foundations that help fund honey bee research, such as the Friends of Honey Bees, the EAS Foundation for Honey Bee Research, or even directly to individual University apiculture programs.
• Third, much of the ill-will towards honey bees actually stems from cases of mistaken identity with various wasp species, particularly yellow jackets. Thus knowing the difference between bees and wasps can go a long way in understanding that honey bees are much less likely to sting than what is commonly perceived.
• Finally, one of the most powerful ways to help the honey bee population is to become a beekeeper! Given their recent plight, there have been many “citizen scientists” who have found both pleasure and satisfaction in joining with existing beekeeping clubs all across the nation to help start their own hives. This may have had a real impact in recent years, as the managed bee population is now higher than it has been in the last 12 years.

Answer 2:

• Stop using toxins like they have no ill effects.
• Plant trees and flowers and don’t spray them.
• Support those who try to help the bees.
• Buy local honey, pollen, and beeswax.
• Consider keeping bees.

Answer 1 Replies From:
Dr. David Tarpy, Associate Professor and Extension Apiculturist Department of Entomology, North Carolina State University

Answer 2 Replies From:
Carl Chesick, Director of the Center for Honeybee Research, Asheville, North Carolina

The report was released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA), which conduct the annual survey.  Over 15% of the nation’s commercial beekeepers, which collectively manage 2.68 million colonies responded to the survey.

According to Jeff Pettis, an entomologist with USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) who helped conduct the study, “…continued losses of this size put tremendous pressure on the economic sustainability of commercial beekeeping.”

Average colony loss for an individual beekeeper’s operation was 38.4%. This compares to an average loss of 42.2% for individual beekeepers’ operations in 2009-2010.

CCD Still Going Strong
Over 31% of beekeepers with colonies that died over the winter, also reported losing at least some of their colonies without finding dead bee bodies—one of the primary symptoms defining Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Beekeepers who reported colony losses with no dead bee bodies present also reported higher average colony losses of 61%.

A complete analysis of the USDA survey data will be published later this year.

It can happen here.  It is happening here.

“I was a budding beekeeper, an enthusiastic honey package designer and marketer during the mid-90’s after moving to Asheville, in the mountains of Western North Carolina from my Pentagon neighborhood outside of Washington, D.C.  I’d left D.C. at the urging of my then boyfriend who said, ‘You don’t have to live right ON the bullseye, do you?’

I didn’t realize I was relocating onto a whole new kind of bullseye.”

‘Keeping bees in the carefully-cared-for-but-romanticized-way we were going about it was engrossing, often-challenging but also a highly-hypnotic fantasy.  A luxury.’

Seeing that first lost colony was like waking up out of a dream, Harp remembers. It set in motion a long series of realizations culminating in a personal epiphany:
“I could do more to help avert a slowly advancing global food disaster by not continuing to have the idyllic pleasure of beekeeping as a time-consuming hobby, and instead apply my experience as a community organizer, designer, media consultant and national-level consumer advocate -  to educate and engage the non-beekeeping public in support of research and local beekeeping – everywhere.”

Side-by-side incorporation of the cause-driven for-profit (Friends of Honeybees, Inc.) and a sister non-profit (Friends of Honeybees Foundation) gave Harp the clean, arm’s-length combination of legal structures from which to create both traditional non-profit fund-raising jobs, as well as social-capital-based investment and employment opportunities, especially as they relate to human’s most relied-upon cross-species friend – the honey bee.

“I had to give up the fantasy of there being one-dimensional answers,” Harp says, “and instead help build a global colony, whose collective-brain-matrix can connect and can cooperatively tease out imaginative, sustainable ways to survive … and thrive.”

A healthy colony is typically made up of between 30,000 and 60, 000 female worker bees.

Friends of Honeybees and the Symbio fund are working together to build a global network of  cooperating human colonies to restore symbiotic thinking and reunify with the wisdom of our most ancient allies in health-giving, delicious and bountiful agriculture -  the tiny honey bees.

We’re creating jobs, raising funds for honey bee research and local beekeeping programs, AND, thanks to the Symbio fund, delivering matching funds for other local and international causes that are revitalizing our soil, water and agricultural practices,  assisting human rights and environmental initiatives and encouraging the cooperative spirit of balance and well-being in all of us.

Honeybees are offering humans a gift of shared intelligence.  We decline that gift at our own peril.  

Symbio, Friends of Honeybees  and networked colonies of cooperating humans can literally use a drop of honey to change the world.  

To learn how your favorite cause or charity can receive matching funds through the Symbio project,  please contact us.

                                                      Symbio, an innovative  matching-fund initiative is being established in partnership with Friends of Honeybees.

The sole purpose of the Symbio foundation will be to provide matching funds for other causes, in the identical amounts that support honey bees, including:  research, agricultural habitat  enhancement, regionally-adapted queens and colony development in addition to myriad local beekeeping programs through Friends of Honeybees.

To learn more about  establishing a Symbio matching funds

partnership with Friends of Honeybee, please  Contact Us.

Yes, it will be amazing to learn how much the lives of an inconspicuous insect and our species are intertwined and interdependent.  But, more importantly, it will be amazing to learn how each of us are already participating in those inter-dependencies and … as we do one-thing-different, observe how that small difference affects life in our lives and communities.    You, your family and your friends can help solve the riddles that honeybees are posing to humans across our increasingly hungry planet.

The amazement starts here.  Join us in solving the riddle.

http://news.discovery.com/earth/bees-colony-collapse-honey.html

Other links

www.Discoverynews.com
www.Howstuffworks.com
www.Treehugger.com
http://www.facebook.com/DiscoveryNews
http://www.facebook.com/DiscoveryChannel
http://www.facebook.com/TreeHugger
http://www.facebook.com/ScienceChannel

Who knew tattoos could support honey bee preservation through research and community-based beekeeping?  Well, it’s about to.

Honey bees and the planet need all the friends they can get, and if you care about the survival and well-being of the world’s top food pollinator, and love tattoo art, you can do a bee a favor … get involved.

Friends of Honeybees is reaching out to the best-of-the-best artists and their studios to become internationally-recognized by designing art that features bees, and becoming part of a network of Tattoos Buzz for Bees spots where folks can drop in and Summon the Bee.

Three way to get involved:
Become a Buzz foro Bees Friend ($25).  If you’re the next 100th Friend you can win a tatt at your favorite Buzz for Bees studio.

Become a Plan Bee Tattoo Studio.    In addition to international recognition for design contributions and web/social media PR of support of honey bee preservation, you’ll get studio-exclusive limited-time window rotations in your town that will feature free tatts with Tattoos Buzz for Bees events and raffles that will expand and attract whole new dimensions of fans.

State Sponsorships are available.  If you’ve got any questions  or for would like more info on these programs, please contact us.

Thanks for your interest in tattoos and support of honeybee preservation activities in your community.