Dear All,
The White House wants to save the bees. The Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators produced by the Pollinator Health Task Force is an important guide to what the country needs to discover to support our pollinators and you can help it succeed. The Great Sunflower Project data that you are gathering will play an important role in answering these questions. The task force identified “investigating large-scale (transnational and nationwide) and small-scale (landscape-level) relations between plant and pollinator distributions will help determine where specific plant species are appropriate, and elucidate which species are “broad-spectrum” (appropriate in many locations and contexts and for many pollinators) and “specialist” (appropriate to support one or a few obligate pollinators)” as a critical research need. This is exactly what we are doing with our Pollinator Friendly Plants Program. This year, we are focusing our converting our Great Pollinator Count Day to coincide with Pollinator Week and calling it the Great Pollinator Count week. This year, we need you to do a pollinator count on as many different kinds of plants as possible. Five minutes per plant is all that you need to do. Identify the plant to the best of your ability, the more specific the better. This information will help us determine where different plant species are appropriate and which pollinators they support.
So, mark your calendars to count June 15 - 21, 2015 for Great Pollinator Count Week! We will be sending our top ten contributors a pack of bumble bee cards as a thank you!
Next week, I am going to send another newsletter with updates on Colony Collapse Disorder, neonicotinoid pesticides and honey bees from a conference I just attended. It is important stuff!
Bee Well,
Gretchen
The Queen Bee