is bee on ground? is bee not moving much?? is bee tired??? help sick bee!!!
use paper to pick up bee! slide slowly under little bumbly legs and little bumbly body until bee is fully on paper
bring bee inside to open window or open door!!! when bee is better, bee will fly out!
make sugar water for bee! mix two (2) to three (3) tablespoons of sugar (can be normal sugar or organic sugar! no artificial, no diet sweetener, no sweetener, just sugar!!!!! no honey either!!!!!!) with one (1) tablespoon of water! stir until sugar dissolves!!!!
put sugar water on plate or spoon for bee! give to bee! put bee on clean parts of plate or hold spoon near bee! if bee gets stuck in sugar water, use paper to help them get unstuck!
let bee drink and rest!!!!!
can put a bowl / plate / container of sugar water outside for other bees!!!!! use same two to one (2:1) or three to one (3:1) ratio for mix!!!!!
I tried this but the bee wouldn’t drink the sugarwater. Then I had the brilliant idea “Flowers” so I went out and picked some wildflowers and placed them near it. It didn’t have much energy, but it was able to crawl into one and start drinking the nectar. After sitting on the flower and chilling for a bit, it had the energy from the nectar to fly away.
That will not help save the bees at all. They need the excess honey removed from their hives. That’s the beekeepers entire livelihood.
Seriously refusing to eat honey is one of those well-meaning but ultimately terrible ideas. The bees make way too much honey and need it out in order to thrive (not being funny but that was literally a side effect in Bee Movie). Plus that’s the only way for the beekeepers to make the money they need to keep the bees healthy. Do not stop eating honey because somebody on Tumblr told you too.
excess honey, if not removed, can ferment and poison the bees. even if it doesn’t, it attracts animals and other insects which can hurt the bees or even damage the hive. why vegans think letting bees stew in their own drippings is ‘cruelty-free’ is beyond me. >:[
the fact that we find honey yummy and nutritious is part of why we keep bees, true, but the truth is we mostly keep them to pollinate our crops. the vegetable crops you seem to imagine would still magically sustain us if we stopped cultivating bees.
and when you get right down to it… domestic bees aren’t confined in any way. if they wanted to fly away, they could, and would. they come back to the wood frame hives humans build because those are nice places to nest.
so pretending domestic bees have it worse than wild bees is just the most childish kind of anthropomorphizing.
If anything, man-made hives are MORE suitable for bees to live in because we have mathematically determined their optimal living space and conditions, and can control them better in our hives. We also can treat them for diseases and pests much easier than we could if they were living in, say, a tree.
Tl;dr for all of this: eating honey saves the bees from themselves, and keeping them in man-made hives is good for them.
✌️✌️✌️
Plus, buying honey supports bee owners, which helps them maintain the hives, and if they get more money they can buy more hives, which means more bees!
I tell people this. About the honey and what to do to save bees. I also have two large bottles of honey in my cabinet currently. Trying to get some flowers for them to thrive on. Support your bees guys
… uh guys… the whole “Save the Bees!” thing is not about honeybees. It’s about the decline of native bees almost to the point of extinction. Native bees do not make honey. Honeybees are domesticated. Taking measures to protect honeybees is as irrelevant to helping the environment as protecting Farmer John’s chickens.
To help save native bees, yes, plant NATIVE flowers (what naturally grows where you live? That’s what your bees eat!), set up “bee hotels,” which can be something as simple as a partially buried jar or flower pot for carpenter bees, and don’t use pesticides. Having a source of water (like a bird bath or “puddles” you frequently refresh) is also good for a variety of wildlife.
Want to know more about bees that are not honeybees?
Every place has different types of bees. Every place has different types of plants/flowers. Those hyped-up “save the bees” seed packets that are distributed across North America are garbage because none of those flowers are native in every habitat. Don’t look up “how to make a bee hotel” and make something that only bees from the great plains areas would use if you live on the west coast.
This is every bee that has been observed and uploaded to the citizen science network of iNaturalist. You can filter by location (anywhere in the world! This is not restricted to the US!), and you can view photos of every species people have added. Here’s the page for all bees, sorted by taxonomy, not filtered to any specific location [link]. Have you seen a bee and want to know more about it, but you don’t know what kind of bee it is? Take a picture, upload it to iNat, and people like me will help you identify it–and it will also become part of the database other people will use to learn about nature!
Some native Texan bees I’ve met!
A sweat bee! [link to iNat]. These flowers are tiny, no larger than a dime.
A longhorn bee! [link to iNat] I don’t know where they nest, but I often find them sleeping on the tips of flowers at night (so cute!)
Meet your local bees! Befriend them! Feed them! Make them homes! Love them!
This is one of the native bees I met in Arizona! This handsome man is a male Melissodes sp., AKA a type of long-horned bee. I saved him when he was drowning in a puddle.
I love him
This is a great post all in all but I’d just like to note that colony collapse syndrome is definitely a thing, so domestic honeybees are absolutely in danger as well
Europen Honey Bees are an invasive species in the US and compete with native bees.
Native bee populations are specifically evolved to pollinate certain native plants. Most are unlikely to have a significant effect on the pollination of the non-native crops that people need to grow to survive. It’s true that honeybees will compete with native bees as well, and can be classified as an invasive species, but so long as native bees are supported and native flora is maintained, there is no reason why they shouldn’t be able to coexist. And while there’s a whole different argument to be had about the negative effects of growing nonnative crops at all, if they fail, as they likely would without the honeybees that a large percentage of farmers keep to pollinate their and other local crops, the effects on humanity will be catastrophic
Lest people think I am anti-honeybee (no? I love honeybees?? They are precious??), the above is correct. Like it or not, the way we grow our food (much of which is not native to where it’s farmed) absolutely requires pollinators like honeybees. We would have a hugely massive food crisis on our hands without honeybees.
But, because so much $$$ is tied into the continued production of food, governments and food production companies will do whatever they can to mitigate the effects of colony collapse and other honeybee health issues. What can you do to help honeybees? Buy and eat food. Easy, right?
What is being done to protect native bees? Well,
1) Scientists and researchers are feverishly trying to get them listed as protected species and absolutely failing (see @thelepidopteragirl’s post about colleagues of hers: [link]).
2) Scientists and researchers are trying to get pesticides known to have devastating effects on bees and other pollinators banned and absolutely failing ([link]).
3) Scientists and science communicators (like me now, apparently) are trying to spread this information about native bees and their importance so more people can do little things like plant native flowers (lookup North American species for your zip code here: [link]), change how often they mow their lawns ([link]), and vote out the assholes who are profiting by destroying our environment ([link]). Success on this one: TBD, and by people like us.
As a gift to the honeybee lovers out there, please accept this photo of one making out with a stinkhorn mushroom:
^An excellent post on the complexities of the “Save the Bees” movement
To add, honeybees are also having problems in, you know, Europe and Asia, where they are native!
I feel like that gets forgotten by many, as Tumblr is very USA centered.
Ban neonicotinoids now. We know the problem, but we are slacking on acting on it.
Everyone who’s ever thought insects are gross, ugly or scary should see this bee and know that almost basically all arthropods will feel dirty and clean themselves this way.
I went to the farmer’s market yesterday and at the honey guy’s booth and there were all these bees just hangin out. Checking out the beeswax tabs, floating around the honey jars, not being aggressive, just really gentle and investigating or something
and as he was giving me a sample of the wildflower honey one of them landed on his hand and he just took a drop from the jar and dabbed it on his hand for the bee, and when I asked if they were his bees he said “No, but they show up every time I come out, I think they just know my truck” and this guy is well-known among the local bees and lets them sit on his hand and eat his honey and I just really like the bee guy
So, you’ve come across a bumble bee on the ground. It’s moving lethargically, or not at all (a small, very gentle poke will determine if she’s dead or not). So how do you save her, and make sure she lives to pollinate another day?
First of all, make sure you get her off the ground. I used an index card, but any old piece of paper will do! Next, in a spoon, mix some warm water with sugar, making sure it dissolves a little bit. Put the water near the bees mouth, or, if you screw up like I did, spill a bit on the paper in front of them. She will hopefully use her proboscis and start drinking it up! After she drinks her fill, she will hopefully perk up a bit. At this point, take her outside and plop her on a flower. She will hopefully recover here and fly back to join her sisters in the hive for the night!
And that is how you help save a bee! This little lady is doing well, and will hopefully keep doing her part in making the flowers bloom! This has been a PSA from your local bees rights activist 🐝
imagine we make contact with an alien species that’s like, vastly technologically superior, they could fucking kill us in a single shot if they really wanted to
and this species has never eaten salad before. and we show them salad and they eat it and they’re like holy living fuck this is tasty. and suddenly they’re offering us huge houses with all kind of advanced technological shit and incredible medical care and all the amenities and everything, with the only condition that we keep making salad for them.
and like, salad isn’t even hard to make. grab some plants, dump em in a bowl. it doesn’t have to be fancy salad, they’ll fall all over themselves for the most mediocre salad in the world. we can make so much salad that we’re practically drowning in it, even if we eat some of the salad ourselves. and in exchange we’re protected from danger, we have great living conditions, it’s basically paradise compared to life on earth
imagine
now realize that this is what bees have done to us
imagine we make contact with an alien species that’s like, vastly technologically superior, they could fucking kill us in a single shot if they really wanted to
and this species has never eaten salad before. and we show them salad and they eat it and they’re like holy living fuck this is tasty. and suddenly they’re offering us huge houses with all kind of advanced technological shit and incredible medical care and all the amenities and everything, with the only condition that we keep making salad for them.
and like, salad isn’t even hard to make. grab some plants, dump em in a bowl. it doesn’t have to be fancy salad, they’ll fall all over themselves for the most mediocre salad in the world. we can make so much salad that we’re practically drowning in it, even if we eat some of the salad ourselves. and in exchange we’re protected from danger, we have great living conditions, it’s basically paradise compared to life on earth
imagine
now realize that this is what bees have done to us
willowfoot 