Today: How things stand

Our bees die, because their habitats are destroyed and poisoned. Industrial agriculture has changed our blossoming landscape into a green desert. Pastures, where bees could find their natural food sources, a requirement for their very survival, are almost gone.

Meadows are now mowed 4 to 6 times a season, usually just before flowering, and flowering arable weeds are rare. Every July thousands of beekeepers are forced to feed their bees with a sugar solution, otherwise the bees would starve!

But it is not only intensive conventional agricultural practices, that harm the bees, land consolidation, genetic engineering, pesticides and insecticides, also leave their mark, then add to these factors some of the current practices used by professional beekeepers in maximizing their profits. Today’s modern beekeeper is using the bee to his full advantage but, unfortunately for the bee, modern beekeeping is neglecting the health and wellbeing of its product, the bee.   

The bee is now being used only as livestock for its honey yield and modified to this cause, add to this a total disregard for the bees own evolution, encompassing  millions of years of natural development, and the bees own natural cycles. Then acid treatments of colonies against pathogens, which weaken the bee’s immune system, which in turn leads to greater susceptibility of sickness - creating a fatal vicious circle.

We owe a large part of our livelihood to bees. Bees pollinate up to 70% of the flower-bearing plants on our planet, one third of global food production depends on them!

Many other pollinators are already extinct which means that forests, meadows and wild hedges are dependent on pollination by bees.

Bees protect the genetic diversity of plants and animals, and thus obtaining a biological balance for our world.